TODAY’S MESOP APPLAUSE : BRAVO ! / Syria: Italian cultural figures join appeal against silence / Dario Fo among signatories on 3rd year after revolt

Dario Fo : (Roma)  Finally, the appeal calls for supporting “free civil society and a democratic Syria,” and demands that the contested president, Bashar al-Assad, “be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity”.

(ANSAmed) – ROMA – 16-3-2014 – Signatories of an appeal for solidarity with “many Syrians” who three years ago “filled the square in 2011 demanding freedom, dignity and equal opportunity and for this reason massacred by the regime” includes Italian Nobel laureate for literature, Dario Fo, the bishop of Mazara del Vallo, Monsignor Domenico Mogavero, the writer Paolo Rumiz and the singer-songwriter Francesco Guccini”. Promoted by the Syrian-Italian writer Shady Hamadi and supported by the journalism association Articolo21, the appeal denounces the “deafening silence of the West” especially “in the first twelve months of the Syrian revolution, when fundamentalist militias had not yet erupted, (triggering) salvation for the regime from abroad”.

On the occasion of the third anniversary of the outbreak of uprising against the regime, violently repressed before degenerating into civil war, the signatories of the appeal – which also include the Islamologist Paolo Branca of the Catholic University of Milan, Antoine Courban of the Jesuit University of Beirut, and Brother Claudio Monge, a religious theologian in Istanbul – say they are “aware of religious fundamentalism which today is present in the country and rejected by free Syrians themselves, as it is as alien and enemy to them as much as the regime”.

“But we know even that even past complicity and connivance by the Syrian regime with Iraqi Qaedism have created this murky web of extremists on both sides crucial for saving the regime, feeding and foraging a counter-revolution”.

Finally, the appeal calls for supporting “free civil society and a democratic Syria,” and demands that the contested president, Bashar al-Assad, “be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity”.