FOR YOUR INFORMATION

6/27/2013|By Katrina Lantos Swett and Robert P. George

The following op-ed appeared on June 26, 2013 in US News and World Report .

While the highly-touted international meeting to negotiate a peace settlement in Syria has already been postponed until July, the world remains riveted on the Middle Eastern country's travails. Concerns are mounting over how to manage a crisis featuring the use of chemical weapons, the inflow of fighters from neighboring countries and from Hezbollah and al-Qaida, the tremendous cost in human lives and suffering, and the risk of hostilities expanding beyond Syria.

Missing from the radar, however, is a sober consideration of Syria's future, especially how to deal with an alarming sectarian divide among the country's religious groups.

One day, the war will cease and the task of rebuilding will begin. Syria will need to reconstruct not just its buildings and roads, but its entire governing framework.

To read the entire op-ed please visit US News and World Report, Opinion Section .

To interview a USCIRF Commissioner please contact USCIRF at (202) 523- 3258 or [email protected].

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

June 26, 2013 |By Katrina Lantos Swett

Editor"s note: Katrina Lantos Swett is the chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. The views expressed are the writer"s own.

The following op-ed appeared on CNN World/GPS on June 26, 2013.

Fifty years ago today, on June 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy stood in West Berlin and condemned the newly erected Berlin Wall. Twenty-four years later, President Ronald Reagan traveled to West Berlin and challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall.”

In the decades between these speeches, human rights and religious freedom advocates behind the Iron Curtain defied the walls of tyranny by relying on the samizdat, a clandestine system to printand distribute government-suppressed material. Today, many use the internet in much the same way, raising both challenges and opportunities as the forces of repression and freedom clash in the virtual and physical worlds.

To read the entire op-ed please visit CNN World/ GPS.