Activists In Douma Say The Free Syrian Army Is Keeping State Troops At Bay

Activists in Syria say security forces have launched an offensive against anti-regime fighters in the Damascus suburb of Douma. Hours beforehand, the BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen assessed the situation in the area. Getting into Douma took a nervous drive down a muddy lane on a dark and wet night. Big farmhouses sat silent behind high walls and locked steel gates. Then the car headlights picked out half a dozen men wearing masks and carrying weapons. They said they were members of the Free Syrian Army, the loose alliance of fighters - mainly defectors from the regime's army - who have picked up guns to try to overturn more than 40 years of rule by the Assad family. Their weapons were no match for the armoured military vehicles and heavy weapons that the regime can deploy. The Free Army fighters in Douma were armed with shotguns, pistols and an assortment of rifles. But the men were upbeat. Their commander, his beard poking out from under his mask, insisted they were winning. We're in control here. Douma is ours, Syria is ours and we'll win. The army and the security forces keep trying to get into here but we defeat them," he said Another masked man joined in. "Pass this on to the world. Our revolution is peaceful. We don't attack the regime. They attack us," he said. Douma was forbidding and dark, with power cuts and fuel shortages. Death notices for people killed in the uprising were pasted on top of each other next to the door of a mosque which is punctured by bullet holes. Slowly, people were emerging from the evening prayer. Too often for them the nights have belonged to President Bashar al-Assad's arrest squads.
Strength in numbers . In the gloom, like nervous shadows, they headed to a square near the mosque where a mourning tent was set up to commemorate Douma's dead. It was better lit, numbers make them feel stronger, and they chanted and clapped and some of them demanded the president's execution. Activists in Douma said the Free Syrian Army had been strong enough to keep the regime's forces out of the centre of the suburb since just after the beginning of the year. Incursions still happen. Twelve protesters were killed last weekend. Douma is about a 15-minute drive from the centre of Damascus. What has been happening there amounts to a blow for President Assad. Losing control of part of your capital city, for however short a time, is not a sign of strength.

But the president still has a powerful military.

Estimates of its strength vary. Some suggest that the security forces are overstretched. Others believe that elite units that could be committed to suppressing the uprising have been held back. President Assad also has a core of supporters who agree with his view that he is fighting terrorists inspired by foreigners. His powerbase since the uprising started has been based on Syria's minorities - his own ruling Allawites, Christians, and parts of Syria's Druze and Kurd communities. The way the country is splitting along sectarian lines - most of the protesters are Sunnis - reinforces fears of a sectarian civil war. Around the middle of the evening, activists in Douma warned us that it was getting dangerous. They had heard the security forces were coming their way. They hustled the BBC team away and we were able to get back to the centre of Damascus. Regime forces re-entered Douma a few hours after we left, according to sources there. The question is whether the Free Syrian Army can make it tough enough to force them out again.
NEws Source : BBC

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Indonesian Farmers: Common Crisis 2012

Ask a small farmer in Indonesia about the impact of the global financial crisis on his daily life and he will answer, "Crisis? What crisis?" As farmers, we know what a big crisis is. In 1997, we saw the collapse of the whole economy, driving thousands of unemployed construction and industry workers back to the villages, where their families already had difficulties making ends meet.

But the current situation is different and raises some worrying alarm bells. Although national industry keeps hiring workers and new infrastructure projects continue to pop up, our daily life has worsened on several fronts.
The most noticeable change is the increased pressure on agricultural land. Thousands of small farmers have been evicted from the fields they have cultivated for generations, because local or national authorities are giving concessions to large companies to exploit the land. Many Indonesian farmers do not have any clear land titles, as it is estimated that only 40% of ownership can be proven by formal certificates. Moreover, some territories on the national mapping appear as "empty", even if they have been inhabited for generations. In principle, most of the farmers' communities are covered by customary laws that are also recognized by the state. However, land deals are extremely profitable both for the authorities and for the companies who negotiate them. The lack of respect for people's rights to land makes it extremely easy for companies to brutally evict farmers. They are replaced by large plantations, including palm oil and rubber plantations, food estates, mines, roads and other infrastructure projects. This results in increasingly violent land conflicts as local communities resist eviction. The Indonesian Peasant Union (SPI) calculated that the number of land conflicts increased five-fold, from 22 in 2010 to 120 in 2011. A case involving the alleged killing of nine farmers in South Sumatra and Lampung Provinces is now being investigated by the Indonesian Parliament. Similar human rights violations are taking place on a daily basis in the archipelago. In 2011 alone, the farmer's union counted 20 deaths due to land conflicts in Indonesia.
The government routinely prioritizes large-scale, export-oriented production over the needs of local growers and consumers. The financial crisis has accelerated this dramatic land grab as farmland is now seen by the finance industry as a considerable source of returns.

Indonesia's fast rate of deforestation

Instead of protecting local farmers from massive evictions, the Indonesian government is further opening the doors to foreign investors. In the framework of the East Asia World Economic Forum that took place in 2011 in Jakarta, the chairman of the Indonesian chamber of commerce Suryo Bambang Sulisto announced that 14 transnational companies including Cargill, Monsanto, Syngenta, Bunge and ADM, had signed a partnership agreement with the government to increase food productivity in Indonesia. We are facing other problems. Uncertainty about commodity prices has increased tremendously since 2007. Whether we are producing for export or for the local market, prices have become unpredictable. Prices of inputs -- such as seeds, fertilizers and energy -- have become very volatile, making it impossible for us to assess our production costs. For farmers, price instability and volatility are worse than simply low prices: It makes it virtually impossible to plan what to grow in the coming season, what products we can buy, and so forth. There are a number of causes of this volatility, including a lack of food reserves and the arrival of global financial speculators in agricultural markets following the sub-prime crisis. We are also dealing with a surge of cheap imported products into the domestic market. In village markets on Java island, we now see potatoes and chillies imported from China at a very low price. The minimum production cost of potatoes in those villages is 7,000 rupiah a kilo, but Chinese potatoes are sold at 2,500 rupiah. This discourages farmers from producing, ultimately raising unemployment, encouraging more people to migrate away from rural areas and putting pressure elsewhere in the system, especially in our already stressed urban areas. For these reasons, we feel that even though farmers constitute almost half the Indonesian workforce, our economic sector is the most neglected in the country. We have the capacity and natural resources to feed the whole country yet we are deprived of our land, and our government has failed to pursue agricultural policies to enable us to continue our vital role. According to the Indonesian government's own figures, 2.16 million farmers had to leave farming in 2011 due to a lack of land and incentives.

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