Time To Come Down Hard On The Assad Regime

It is high time for the international community to come down hard on the Assad regime in Syria. Bashar Assad does not show any signs or inclination to back off or relent from continuing to brutally crack down on his people, sending tanks and men to squash the Syrian uprising.

Nobody knows for sure how many Syrians have died, but the number of people who were said to have been killed at one time was something like 2000 plus. Obviously their numbers must have risen. During the recent Ramadan itself, some 450 plus Syrians were said to have been killed. And during the Eid itself several people were also said to have been killed.

Now, Amnesty International has claimed that there is documented proof of the mass torture and the deaths of some 88 Syrians including several children some as young as 13 years old!

When you kill one person, it is called murder. When a government kills thousands of its own citizens, what do you call it? Genocide?

Whatever you call it, in these days and age, the international community cannot just sit by and do nothing about the situation in Syria.

For the Assad regime to blame terrorists, foreign agents and local thugs for the Syrian people's uprising is a most dishonest, disingenious and desperate move, especially when it is so patently false, of a regime that has lost all legitimacy to rule. However, it appears to be the favourite excuse of dictators and oppressors.

And the really sad thing is that it appears that some influential people in the West  may not be too shy, for whatever despicable reason, to advocate this despicable lie to help dictators and oppressors to stay in power if the aljazeera discovery turns out to be true.

It is not enough to just impose sanctions, travel bans and freezing the assets of the Assad regime members. These people have all the resources and money to live for several lives as long as they remain in power.

Dictators and oppressors who have a lot of blood in their hands know that they cannot escape international justice these day, so their only option is to do whatever it takes to remain in power and won't give it up easily.

It is sad that the limited resources of the world have to be diverted for otherwise unnecessary use like the NATO campaign in Libya, but sometimes military option may be the only alternative.