A checkpoint run by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) at Baba Amr, a poor district in the southwestern part of Homs. Photo from Der Spiegel.

Say the words, “Free Syrian Army” in nearly any gathering of Syrian expatriates lately, and their faces break into wide smiles of appreciation. Say the same words to people in Syria, and they say, “They will liberate us.” This sentiment is growing all over Syria, as the defected soldiers that make up the FSA wage battle against their pro-regime counterparts. But will such optimism last?

Nearly 11 months into the Syrian uprising, ordinary civilians, once certain of the effectiveness of civil resistance, are losing hope. They turn to the FSA for protection. The world has been in awe of the Syrian revolution and its peaceful activists (“How brave!” “Such tenacity!”), who vow to oust the Assad regime once and for all, and the peaceful protests continue daily. However, many of these demonstrations are protected from Assad’s army and snipers by the FSA, where and when possible. The presence of the FSA at protest sites has re-energized protesters, who are coming out in increasing numbers even as the regime escalates its violence against them.

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• About 20 people gathered on Thursday outside the Ritz-Carlton in New York City—where the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was said to be staying—to protest his trip to the United States for medical treatment and a deal he received that granted him immunity from prosecution for  crimes against protesters during uprisings last year.

• Thousands of Bahrainis held a peaceful anti-government protest in a suburb of the capital on Friday, demanding the release of political prisoners and political reforms in the troubled Gulf Arab state.

• Protesters defied a heavy security presence across Syria on Friday to commemorate the 30th anniversary of a deadly crackdown on Islamist opposition in the city of Hama, but were effectively prevented from turning out in the capital, Damascus.

• Several thousand people rallied in Bratislava and seven other Slovakian cities Friday to demand that early elections planned in March be postponed to allow a thorough investigation.

• Poland’s prime minister says he is suspending the ratification process for an international copyright treaty after widespread protests and attacks on government websites.

• Members of an Indian tribe in Panama are blocking roads in two provinces on the border with Costa Rica in a dispute over mineral exploitation on their lands.

• Cambodian police violently dispersed a group of around 150 women protesting forced evictions in the capital Phnom Penh on Thursday.

• Around 300 people gathered outside Budapest’s New Theater on Wednesday to protest its new director, an actor with links to far-right parties.

• Hackers associated with the activist group Anonymous posted a protest against Greece’s EU and IMF-inspired austerity policies on the website of the country’s justice ministry Friday

• In the largest protests Syria has seen in months, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets Friday in a display of defiance to show an Arab League observer mission the strength of the opposition movement. Despite the monitors’ presence, forces loyal to President Bashar Assad still killed at least 22 people.

• Thousands of Hungarians took to the streets yesterday to protest a new constitution which critics say increases the power of the government over previously independent institutions, ranging from the church and media to the courts and even the central bank.

• Russian police arrested at least 60 people in the capital of Moscow on Saturday during anti-government protests.

• Thousands of protesters converged on a train station in central China, angered over collapsing illegal investment schemes that residents said the government had failed to staunch.

• As part of an action called Occupy the Caucus, 12 protesters, including a 14-year-old girl, were arrested for blocking the doors to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters on Thursday. Eighteen more arrests followed on Saturday and one on Sunday.

• A dozen anti-Wall Street protesters who had taken over a foreclosed home in Oakland to house formerly homeless individuals were arrested on Thursday.

• More than a dozen Muslim community leaders boycotted an interfaith breakfast organized by Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday to protest reported police surveillance of Muslim areas since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

• Large crowds of Yemenis rallied in major cities Sunday, demanding the outgoing president be put on trial for the deaths of protesters.

• Dozens of activists against gender segregation boarded buses serving Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Jews on Sunday to protest the unwritten rule that women sit at the back.

• Thousands of angry Shia protesters staged a sit-in outside the Sindh Governor House in Karachi, Pakistan on Sunday night to protest the targeted assassination of their community leader.

If 2011 was the year of the protester, 2012 may prove to be the year of nonviolence. What’s the difference? It’s as great as between yes and no. A crucial awakening that envelopes humanity’s collective struggle for justice, peace and democracy is happening; it is an awakening that clarifies the circumstances we embrace with a yes and those by which we respond with a vehement no. Like many I know, I often teeter between despair and hope–stuck in a kind of uncomfortable tension resembling Wendell Berry’s poetic instruction to “be joyful though you have considered all the facts” –grasping for some measure of sanity to make sense of all that is happening.

It is tempting to succumb to despair, what with the onslaught of major media coverage telling us all the bad news, dismissing the promising news, and ignoring the good news. Consider the challenges: the unraveling violence of the Egyptian revolution, the 5,000 killed in Syria, climate change and the instability and disasters brought by extreme weather patterns and an ill-equipped global populace with inadequate leadership, the threat of random violence and terrorist activity–Norway, Belgium, India, the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq–and state and cultural violence against immigrants, women, refugees, the poor, GLBTQ persons, and people of color. So where is the hope? Well, in 2011, the fires of our hope were stoked by the global protest movements–the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street–of millions of people rising up to say: كفاية …Basta…Enough!
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In her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 32-year Yemeni Tawakkul Karman—the youngest and first Arab woman recipient—offered a vision for her country’s revolution:

These revolutions were ignited by young men and women who are yearning for freedom and dignity. They know that their revolutions pass through four stages which can’t be bypassed: toppling the dictator and his family, toppling his security and military services and his nepotism networks, establishing the institutions of the transitional state, and moving towards constitutional legitimacy and establishing the modern civil and democratic state.

But despite such lofty and inspiring words—even as a unity government is being formed—unrest remains in Yemen. On November 23, President Saleh of Yemen promised to step down within 90 days, ceding power to Vice President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi as the country geared up for presidential elections in February 2012. But the protests continue as some opposition groups have rejected the deal because of the immunity it contained for the president. Saleh has backed out of similar deals before and the current deal is criticized by protesters as as being “a game.”

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Crazy is a word ‘normal’ people throw around when they either don’t understand something, they’re totally disconnected, or wish to absolve themselves of responsibility. “We don’t kill our people… No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person,” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said this week in a recorded interview. Does Assad not understand, is he disconnected, or is he crazy? I don’t think it’s either one of those choices. And to even consider that his actions against the Syrian people can be explained by calling him crazy is an insult to the idea of what crazy really is.

Why did Assad himself use that word? I believe that it was a default response in order to buy time and to claim innocence. His audience was his supporters and the international community. How could an eloquent, educated, English-speaker dressed in a suit on international television be crazy, in the sense of being insane? Of course he’s not. Assad is deliberate, cruel, struggling to hold power, and he completely disregards the aspirations of his people. Calling him—or any other authoritarian leader trying to repress his own people with military force—crazy is a misuse of a complex and misused term.

The definition of crazy ranges from insanity to impractical to impatience to infatuated. It’s not surprising that the word ‘crazy’ is often used to describe protestors, civil movement leaders, and most recently, Occupy Wall Street activists.

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• Arab and Bedouin Israelis held a state-wide general strike on Sunday as several thousand demonstrators gathered at the Prime Ministry to express their outrage at a government plan that would relocate Negev Bedouins out of their homes into impoverished townships.

• In cities all across Russia, unauthorized demonstrations were ongoing Sunday after anti-Putin protesters escalated their dissent in Moscow at a massive rally on Saturday as tens of thousands marched for free elections.

• On Sunday, Syrians in some regions observed the opposition’s call for a general strike, despite reports that police in the capital forced shop owners to reopen.

• After leading scores of protesters inside of Durban climate talks on Friday, Greenpeace activists posed as representatives of wealthy corporations on Sunday to call attention to the beneficiaries of failed action at the ICC.

• Bangkok, Thailand saw a rare second rally in two days Saturday as a throng of marchers engaged in a ‘fearlessness walk’ reiterated their objections to laws that punish those who speak out against the monarchy.

• A flash mob erupted in a Pittsburgh Target on Saturday as Occupy organizers briefly flooded the store in protest of the company’s hiring policies.

• For the second day in a row, hundreds of Indian teachers in Bangalore boycotted classes on Friday in protest of low wages.

• Demonstrations condemning the NATO airstrike in Pakistan have been ongoing for two weeks across the country, and were sparked anew after prayers Friday.

• Tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets again Friday chanting ‘no partnership with the murderers’ after a new Cabinet—half filled with pro-regime politicians—was announced.

• In the Dominican Republic on Thursday, hundreds of activists rallied against the government’s practice of confiscating or annulling birth certificates for those of Haitian descent.

Political scientist Erica Chenoweth, at her blog Rational Insurgent, has a list of 13 ways that one can contribute to the popular movement in Syria that is standing up against a brutal ruler willing to crush it by any means necessary. Chenoweth, whose name we drop a lot on this site, is co-author of the important new book Why Civil Resistance Works. She introduces her post this way:

In light of the dire news out of Syria, international action is ever more urgent. In my judgment, Syria reflects one of the paradoxes of international politics: its strategic importance in the region renders international military action nearly impossible–or at least extremely unlikely. Regional and global powers are not willing to risk the potential regional  or global conflagration that would result from foreign military intervention in such a key state, even if inaction means that they will be witnesses to the senseless slaughter of thousands of civilians.

But when governments and international governmental organizations are unwilling or unable to act, civilians across the globe can still play a vital role. It’s time to demonstrate the power of “civilian diplomacy”—a concept that Hillary Clinton has been touting for a couple of years, and which has some real potential to change the course of the Syrian revolution.

This means you.

What follows are ideas of things that people both inside and outside Syria can do to help. Read more to find your inner civilian diplomat.

As chants of “Al-shaab urid iskat al-nizam” (“the people want to bring down the regime”) rise, so, too, does the hailstorm of bullets. As people come out into the streets to express themselves, so, too, do the tanks. Syria’s revolution is entering its ninth month, the Assad regime uses familiar tactics in its attempt to crush dissent. There is nothing creative about deploying tanks and snipers to villages. There is nothing creative about using rape as a tool of war, especially against an unarmed population. In contrast, however, the Free Syria movement has responded to these assaults with amazing creativity. Syrians continue to take to the streets in peaceful protest against the Assad regime—every day, in nearly every city, in nearly every village.

Being creative takes work. Nonviolent creativity, especially when faced with live ammunition, takes steely willpower and a fierce commitment. Syrians have demonstrated both as they slowly but surely rid themselves of a regime that thinks nothing of using rape as a tool of repression, dismemberment as a message, or kidnapping as a reminder. That the protests have remained largely peaceful is awe-inspiring; that Syrians are so creative under these circumstances is astonishing.

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Members of the Free Syrian Army at a safehouse on northern Lebanon's border with Syria.

Mass uprisings against oppressive governments put the regime’s soldiers in a precarious situation. When ordered to repress the rebelling populace, they can obey those orders to apply military action against largely peaceful demonstrators, wounding and killing many, as has been happening in Syria for months. The soldiers are then clearly tools of oppression and betrayers of their freedom-seeking countrymen.

Many soldiers with a deep sense of honor and love of their country or religion will decide they can no longer do that. Disobedience by soldiers requires great bravery. Disobeying Syrian soldiers have been summarily executed. Nevertheless, others continue to refuse to kill peaceful fellow citizens who seek only freedom.

On occasion, some brave soldiers have both disobeyed and survived. What are they to do in order to serve the cause of freedom?

Some defecting soldiers have turned their weapons against their former fellow soldiers, perhaps believing that is the most powerful action they can take against the oppressing regime. But, perhaps it is not.

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