The Echoes of Incarceration: In Conversation with Mansour al-Omari
- Nour Kachi
- Jul 1, 2024
- 15 min read
Updated: Jun 27
Mansour al-Omari is a Syrian human rights defender and legal researcher. He holds an LLM in Transitional Justice and Conflict. Al-Omari works with international and Syrian human rights organisations to hold the perpetrators of international crimes in Syria accountable. In 2012, al-Omari was detained and tortured by the Syrian government for 356 days for documenting its atrocities while working with the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression as the supervisor of the Detainees Office.
CJLPA: Good afternoon, Mansour al-Omari. It is an honour to have the chance to interview you for The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art. You have been a polarising figure in your work defending the human rights of all Syrians around the world for the last few decades.
Mansour al-Omari: I appreciate your description of me as a polarising figure, as long as you mean that the two polarised divisions are the ones who support human rights and justice for all regardless of irrelevant considerations such as political, tribal, racial, or sectarian affiliations; and those who deny human rights and justice for all.
CJLPA: When you first began working as a journalist, can you please describe the challenges you faced having to adhere to censorship by the Syrian government?
MO: In 2011, the official Assad media, at its primitive level, was no longer able to confront the widespread citizen journalism. There were citizen journalists using social media accounts in every neighbourhood throughout Syria. The Assad regime realised the need to be present on social networking sites, which dominated the traditional media, so it had to enter this space. The regime’s organised presence on social media platforms began with the establishment of Internet centres affiliated with the security departments, in which people were employed, each with a large number of fake accounts on social networking sites. One of their tasks is to pursue posts and accounts related to the revolution, and to spread the regime’s narrative. This began in Internet cafés, including in Damascus, in the suburb of Harasta, in Latakia, and elsewhere. Then, centres dedicated to this activity arose, with each employee receiving a monthly salary of twenty thousand Syrian pounds (400 dollars) in 2011, a high income by Syrian standards. Subsequently, al-Assad supported the establishment of the so-called Syrian Electronic Army, whose mission was to spread the regime’s propaganda, and to hack newspapers, websites, and activists’ social media accounts.
In the same context, the Assad regime allowed the creation of orchestrated accounts on social networking sites of a news nature, under the supervision of intelligence, with the aim of confronting news accounts opposing the Assad regime narrative, including independent news websites and accounts of activists, in addition to publishing fabricated news and disinformation within the framework of psychological warfare during the war.
