How
Syrian Boy With Burnt Face Became Propaganda Icon
Saeed Naqvi
The four year old Syrian boy with a
burnt face found his way to the final debate between Republican candidate for
President, Donald Trump and the Democratic Party’s Hillary Clinton at Las Vegas
earlier this week.
Clinton simulated a lump in her throat describing
the child with burns as evidence of indiscriminate Russian bombing of
Civilians.
The pro and anti Russian strand has
consistently run through the debates. Clinton has dwelt on Russian perfidy in
the West Asian mess while Trump distanced himself from the Cold War rhetoric. According
to him, Russian cooperation should be welcome to fight terrorism.
Earlier, Christiane Amanpour of the CNN,
thrust the very same photograph of the Syrian boy under Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov’s nose during her high profile interview in Moscow.
This, she said menacingly, is a “crime against humanity”. Lavrov contemplated
the photograph with some emotion. “This is a tragedy”, he said without a change
of expression.
Lavrov is too suave a diplomat to get
into an argument with reporters. I am sure he knew that the painful picture has
gone viral on the social media. A multi million dollar propaganda machine has
been placed at the disposal of the so called Syrian opposition by an alliance
led by the US and which includes Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
Propaganda these days will always invite
counter propaganda. It turns out that a video of how the “Syrian boy”
photograph was manufactured has gone viral too. I have acquired a clip of this
video.
A “fixer” lifts the boy on his shoulder
and brings him into a trailer which has been set up as a field studio. The boy
looking more weary than in pain, is made to sit on a chair. Media is then ushered
in for an extended photo session. A hapless toddler is thus brought into focus
as an iconic symbol of Russian brutality. As the photo session progresses, the
“fixers” and the “minders”, all wearing white helmets, are laughing – they are
thrilled at the success of their enterprise.
This sleight of hands is the latest I
have noticed in my line of duty for decades as a foreign correspondent.
The uses of the media to advance
strategic foreign policy ends can be traced, in recent decades to, say, Radio
Free Europe to soften up communist states. This was during the cold war.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the use of the media in foreign interventions reached new heights because of
lightening advances in technology. But let us abide by the Syria story for our
purposes. When I visited the country in August 2011, an imitation of the colour
revolutions (Orange “revolution” in Ukraine) was on evidence. In other words,
images of slogan shouting crowds were amplified by the media, creating an
illusion of a popular, nationwide insurrection.
It is true, there was restiveness in Hama,
halfway between Damascus and Aleppo. This was not new. The district has always
been a centre for the Muslim Brotherhood. A major uprising in 1982 was so brutally
crushed by Hafez al Assad, Bashar Assad’s father, that nearly 10,000
Brotherhood members and sympathizers were killed. But on this occasion when the
restiveness in Hama erupted into a demonstration, US ambassador, Robert Stephen
Ford and French Ambassador, Eric Chevallier played a role novel in global
diplomacy: they joined the demonstration against the government they were accredited
to.
Indeed, the duet made appearances in
Homs, on the Lebanese border and Dera, near Jordan. When I asked why western
ambassadors were being allowed to stoke a revolution, one of Bashar al Assad’s
senior advisers threw up her hands:
“This shows how far we have been
penetrated.”
The ambassadors did not just provide
moral support to the opposition by making a personal appearance in the trouble
spots, they also provided the insurrection with state of the art communications
technology.
According to James Glanz and John
Markoff of the New York Times, “The Obama administration is (in 2011) leading
global effort to deploy “shadow” internet and mobile phone systems that
dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence
them by censoring or shutting down communications networks.”
The NYT reporters described “one
operation out of a spy novel in a fifth floor shop in L street, Washington,
where a group of young entrepreneurs, looking like a garage band, are fitting
deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype ‘internet in a suitcase’”.
It was all in preparation of an elaborate “Liberation Technology Movement”.
None of this technology has enabled the
US and its cohorts to cover themselves with glory in Syria. The so called
“moderate opposition” has been an illusion, a sort of cover for terrorist groups
like Al Nusra.
Pushed onto the back foot on this issue,
Amanpour screwed up her nose and asked with marked aggression:
“You are not suggesting the United
States is helping terror groups.”
Lavrov’s non reply was pithy:
“When it comes to the Al Nusra, I am not
sure.”
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