BEIRUT, Lebanon —Syria tried to placate protesters with declarations of sweeping reform on Tuesday while also issuing harsh threats of reprisals if demonstrations do not come to an end, as one of the Arab world’s most repressive countries struggled to blunt the most serious challenge to the 40-year rule of the Assad family.'
The mix of concession and coercion came hours after the police, army and the other forces of an authoritarian state were marshaled to crush one of the biggest gatherings yet by protesters bent on staging an Egyptian-style sit-in in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city. At least two people died, protesters said, as the government cleared the square by dawn on Tuesday.
The events punctuated a tumultuous day in an monthlong uprising that, like Egypt’s, has the potential to rework the arithmetic of a Middle East shaken with dissent. While Syria lacks Egypt’s population or even Libya’s wealth, its influence has long outstripped its power, given its location, its alliance with Iran and its status as kingmaker in Lebanon.
The complexity of its standing means that Syria finds advocates in the most divergent of places — from the Shiite Muslim movement of Hezbollah in Lebanon to some quarters in Israel.
The reforms were promised Saturday by President Bashar al-Assad, but had yet to be articulated until Tuesday, when the government announced the repeal of an emergency law in place since the Baath Party seized power in 1963. The repeal must still be approved by Parliament or Mr. Assad, but that amounts to a formality. So does its true impact: The government has yet to show any real sign of easing its relentless grip.
Since the uprising began, the government has vacillated between crackdown and suggestions of compromise, a formula that proved disastrous for strongmen in Tunisia and Egypt. But the combination Tuesday was most remarkable for how divided it was.
Even as protesters buried those killed in Homs, the long-promised reforms ostensibly granted civil liberties, curbed the power of the police and abolished draconian courts. It legalized “peaceful protests” — coded language for those approved by the government — as the Interior Ministry warned in a statement, carried by the official news agency, that it would bring to bear the full breadth of the law against any other kind.
Echoing Egypt and Tunisia, the reforms, on paper at least, went far in meeting protesters’ original demands, which have only grown in depth and scope as the bloodshed has worsened.
“The street is in one world and the president and the regime are in another,” said Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group, who was reached by phone.
The announcements followed another government crackdown on protests, this time in Homs, an industrial city near the Lebanese border and location of a famous Crusader castle.
For days, organizers in Syria have sought to replicate the experience of Tahrir Square in Cairo, where hundreds of thousands gathered to demand the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade rule. The square became a symbol and an instrument of the demonstrations that eventually forced him to resign in February.
Organizers envisioned as its equivalent Abbassiyeen Square, a crucial artery in the capital, Damascus, but were thwarted by security forces. Some organizers said they turned instead to Homs, where funerals Monday for 14 demonstrators killed a day earlier drew thousands.
Some protesters said the security forces seemed taken aback by the crowds, which grew through the day in both numbers and anger. “A sit-in, a sit-in, until the government falls!” some shouted. “Please go,” a banner implored of Mr. Assad. Mr. Tarif cited witnesses who said protesters had served tea and sandwiches as a chilly night fell, and organizers said mattresses and tents were carted in so protesters could serve in shifts.
Security forces made some attempts to disperse the crowds, but relented until after midnight. Then, protesters said, a mix of soldiers, security forces and police officers surrounded the square and attacked the demonstrators with tear gas and live ammunition after the crowds had dwindled to about 2,000.
Videos posted to Facebook and YouTube showed scenes of chaos, as volleys of gunfire echoed over a square faintly lit by yellow streetlights. Mattresses and the canvas of tents were strewn across the square, where a portrait of Mr. Assad superimposed on a Syrian flag read, “Yes to living together, no to strife.”
“This is reform? This is reform?” asked a protester in one of the videos.
In another video, a protester tried to rally his compatriots.
“Come on back, guys!” he shouted. “Come on back, everyone!”
There were conflicting reports on the dead and wounded. From Lebanon, a resident of Homs, citing relatives’ accounts, said 4 people had been killed and more than 50 wounded. Razan Zeitouneh, of the Syrian Human Rights Information Link, put the number of dead at three. Videos posted by Ugarit News, an independent Syrian outlet that has tried to cover the protests, posted online footage of what it said were funerals for two people.
“Nobody was allowed to stay,” Ms. Zeitouneh said.
Protesters and organizers said the square was empty on Tuesday, and most shops in the city were closed. One resident reported that government loyalists had driven around the city in cars, occasionally firing into the air, to keep people off the streets. Another resident, a 26-year-old protester who gave his name as Abu Haydar, said security forces fired at a funeral on Tuesday, forcing mourners to leave the coffin in the street.
“They might have finished our sit-in this time, but we’ll keep up with our peaceful demonstrations until we get our rights,” vowed one protester in Homs, a 29-year-old engineer who only gave his first name, Ali. He called the city “very tense.”
Already, rights groups say, government forces have killed more than 200 people in demonstrations that have skipped from city to city since March, breaking a barrier of fear that long buttressed the rule of Mr. Assad.
As the violence has worsened, the implications have deepened. A deep current of anxiety over the uprising has pervaded Lebanon, where Syria’s ascendant allies worry about the consequences if Mr. Assad fell.. Likewise, Syria and Iran have long represented opposition to an American-backed order in the region, an alliance that would potentially not survive a change in government. Syria and Israel remain technically at war, though their border has remained basically quiet since a war in 1973.
Remarkably, Mr. Assad, who once boasted of Syria’s immunity to the so-called Arab Spring, finds himself increasingly in the situation of recently deposed rulers of Egypt and Tunisia. He has offered concrete reform only after his detractors seem to have won the initiative.
When he does, they say, his reforms fail to win the confidence of a skeptical population or pale before demands that have far outgrown their earlier iterations.
“We were asking for reforms, but after the killings and the massacres we want to change the regime. We want our freedom and they won’t give it to us,” Abu Haydar said.
He added, in another echo of other Arab revolts: “Our main problem right now is the lack of a leadership that can direct street protests. We are not organized.”
Some organizers say that poses a challenge as the uprising unfolds — how to dispel the age-old charge of authoritarian Arab rulers that only they stand between militant Islam and a measure of secularism. In a country where Mr. Assad and his father long conflated dissent with subversion, organized political life remains undeveloped, save for an embryonic civil society along with the Muslim Brotherhood and organized religion.
“What is the alternative regime in Syria?” asked Rafic Nasrallah, the head of the International Center for Media and Studies in Beirut, a research group sympathetic to Syria’s allies in Lebanon. “The Islamic fundamentalist groups? The West has no alternatives.”
No comments:
Post a Comment