“If wars can be started with lies, peace can be started with truth,” Julian Assange:

Petition EN5846 to the House of Representatives calls on the Australian government to suspend Australia’s ‘autonomous sanctions’ on Syria. A considered, conscientious response to the petition could have major implications for Australia’s foreign and defence policies.

The US-led unilateral coercive sanctions on Syria are causing enormous suffering to the people of Syria. Furthermore, they prevent the country from rebuilding after more than a decade of war and its resultant destruction.

A UN Human Rights Council report indicates that unilateral sanctions on Syria violate the Syrian people’s human rights and are, thus, illegal.

When Australia was on the Human Rights Council from 2018 to 2020, a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) post noted: ‘Australia’s inaugural membership reflects … the Australian Government’s commitment to speak honestly and consistently for the advancement of human rights internationally.’

Despite this avowed commitment to the advancement of human rights, Australia’s sanctions on Syria could be interpreted as an act of war on a country and a people that do not threaten us.

In justifying government sanctions on Syria, DFAT states: ‘Since 2011, Australia has imposed autonomous sanctions in relation to Syria to reflect Australia’s grave concern at the Syrian regime’s deeply disturbing and unacceptable use of violence against its people’

However, events in Syria in 2011 – the first year of the so-called Arab Spring – remain deeply contested. An objective analysis, I contend, points to DFAT’s response being, at best, credulous and ill-informed, and, at worst, ideologically motivated.

Firstly, casualty figures for 2011 point to Syrian security forces coming under deadly attack that year. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a group supportive of the militarised opposition, reported that 3,138 ‘pro-government forces’ were killed in 2011 compared with 619 ‘anti-government forces’ (Ref: Casualties of the Syrian civil war, Wikipedia).

Secondly, credible testimonies – including those of Syrian Australians; the late Dutch Jesuit priest Rev. Fr. Frans van der Lugt, then living in Syria; and US academic Joshua Landis – indicate that acts of terror and sectarian violence were being perpetrated by anti-government ‘armed gangs’ and snipers from the start of the ‘Arab Spring’.

I was in Damascus a month after violence erupted there and saw Syrian TV reports showing grieving widows and children at the funerals of police and soldiers. Locals told me about the random violence that sowed fear in people’s hearts. I heard women at the hairdressers accuse Lebanese politicians of smuggling weapons into Syria.

Back in Australia, I interviewed Samir, a Syrian Australian who told me about the murder of three farmers, one of them his uncle, on their way to a market in Damascus. This was barely a month into the ‘Arab Spring’. Similar acts of terror, mostly against people from minority religions, were recounted by other Syrian Australians I spoke to.

The Rev van der Lugt, based in the Syrian city of Homs,........

© Pearls and Irritations