Eyes for the world

If it weren’t for people like Malath Aumran, the video showing Syrians mourning over the bloody corpses of demonstrators killed by state security forces in Sanamein would never have reached the outside world. Nor would detailed documentation of demonstrations, arrests, injuries and deaths end up on the breakfast table in morning newspapers around the globe. If the Internet is the information highway, Aumran and his ilk are the on-ramps. Anti-regime demonstrators are up against a litany of barriers, within and without: a brutal and pervasive secret police force, a stunted political culture and the international community’s near-universal dread of an unstable Syria were it freed from the iron grip of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. And for the most part the press, too, have abandoned those on Syria’s streets; most notably Al Jazeera, the ‘voice of the people’ during the Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan revolutions, has — when it gives Syria coverage