World Press on Iran, Turkey and the Caucasus (June 14, 2011)

The Washington Post reported that Syrian tanks pushed toward more towns and villages near the Turkish and Iraqi borders on Tuesday, expanding the crackdown against a 12-week uprising to the north and east as more Syrians flee their homes. Activists reported tanks in the northern town of Maaret al-Numan and other villages near Jisr al-Shughour — a town that was retaken on Sunday by Syrian elite forces backed by helicopters. Some analysts have said President Bashar Assad is trying to keep the opposition from establishing a base, which happened in Libya when the rebels trying to overthrow Moammar Gadhafi took over the coastal city of Benghazi.

“In Iran, ‘couch rebels’ prefer Facebook” is another article published by the same information agency. It says that, instead of marching in the streets, the Iranian activists who led the demonstrations in 2009 are playing internet games such as FarmVille, peeking at remarkably candid photographs posted online by friends and confining their political debates to social media sites such as Facebook, where dissent has proved less risky. In 2009, Iranians used social media to coordinate protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s contested election victory. Now, some activists say online tools are becoming a distraction from real-world dissent. Iranians now brazenly show parts of their lives that they used to keep secret from the state and others. Pictures of illegal underground parties, platinum blond girls without headscarves and couples frolicking on the holiday beaches of Turkey are all over Iranian social media.

The New York Times published an article headlined “Iran Without Nukes.” The author writes that Iran is weak now, its ideology as tired as Osama Bin Laden’s, as marginal to people's quest to reconcile their Muslim faith and modernity in new ways. Iran, epicenter of inefficiency, unable to produce a kilowatt of electricity through its Bushehr nuclear reactor despite decades of effort, is still doing its old brinkmanship number. So Iran, long at the top of the Washington agenda, has slid down.

The Guardian reported that Turkish police arrested 32 suspected local members of Anonymous, including eight minors, according to state news agency Anatolian. The arrests followed a complaint from Turkey's directorate of telecommunications, whose website was taken down on Thursday. Members of the Anonymous collective said that attack was carried out as a protest against internet censorship by the recently re-elected government of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of the moderate Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP). Turkey is due to introduce an obligatory nationwide internet filtering system in August that will see users forced to sign up to one of four filters.

“Iran discloses West's nukes plots” is an article published by the Iranian information agency Press TV. It says that a senior Iranian official has disclosed new plots hatched by certain Western powers to violate non-proliferation regulations and conduct illegal acts pertaining to weapons of mass destruction. He further disclosed a reality about the domestic situation in the US and stated, “The budget allocated by the US in 2011 for storage and development of nuclear weapons showed a more than 50 percent increase in comparison with 2001.” However, according to US statistics, 45,000 Americans die annually due to lack of social welfare insurance, Deputy Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Baqeri noted.