Assad Acknowledges Threats Posed by Syrian Unrest
BEIRUT, Lebanon – In his first address in two months, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad vowed Monday not to bow to pressure from “saboteurs,” but offered a national dialogue that he said could bring change to a country where the ruling party and a single family have monopolized power for more than four decades.
“There are those who give them the impression that the state will exact revenge,” he said in a speech that lasted more than an hour. “I affirm that is not true.”
But the speech appeared to again fall short of activists’ demands as protests erupted around Syria, including in the suburbs of Damascus, the capital, shortly after his address, activists reported.
Since the start of the uprising, Mr. Assad has offered occasional reforms that his opponents have derided as either too little or too late. In April, he lifted draconian emergency law, but largely unaccountable security forces have persisted in a ferocious crackdown that activists say has killed more than 1,400 people and led to more than 10,000 arrests. The government says armed insurgents are to blame for much of the violence and says hundreds of its security forces have been killed in attacks.
Some of the reforms he offered Monday have been on the table since 2005 — including a new law that would make possible parties other than the Baath Party, the instrument of Mr. Assad’s power whose pre-eminence is enshrined in the constitution.
But the speech seemed to suggest a different inflection to the government’s long-standing message. For weeks, it has offered a mantra that has underlined its many years in power: either us or chaos, a compelling point in a county shadowed by sectarian tension. In his speech at Damascus University on Monday, Mr. Assad appeared to offer himself as the best means to bring about a change in one of the region’s most authoritarian states.
“We make a distinction between those” — the protesters with legitimate grievances — “and the saboteurs who represent a small group which has tried to exploit the goodwill of the Syrian people for its own ends,” said Mr. Assad, flanked by a row of six Syrian flags.
He added: “There can be no development without stability.”
The words were a play on the mantra of so many Arab strongmen, many of them long supported by the United States. “Security and stability,” it goes, and Mr. Assad went to great lengths to ensure that his government would not deal with insurgents, whom it blames for the deaths of 120 of its security forces in the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour. Though the events there are still murky, American officials have suggested that armed insurgents, with perhaps some defecting soldiers, were behind the attack there.morehttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/21/world/middleeast/21syria.html.
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