Syria Vows Crackdown as Human Rights Watch Decries Deadly Use of Force
Syria Vows Crackdown as Rights Group Decries Use of Force
Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images
Posters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad decorate a street as Syrians walk in the old city of Damascus.
Posters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad decorate a street as Syrians walk in the old city of Damascus. Photographer: Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images
Syrian authorities vowed to crush what they called a conspiracy against the regime as Human Rights Watch said at least 130 people have been killed in a crackdown against protests and urged authorities to stop using force.
The National Progressive Front said in a statement that it “distinguishes between the reform aspirations of citizens and their legitimate demands” and conspirators who are exploiting protests. “There is no room for complacency in dealing with these gangs,” it said.
The front is dominated by the Baath party of President Bashar al-Assad, which has run the country since 1963, and includes a number of small, mostly leftist and nationalist groups. It said Syria’s foreign enemies are taking advantage of the regional wave of unrest to undermine the regime and its support for anti-Israeli groups. Syria backs the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement in Lebanon and the Palestinian Hamas organization.
Protests have spread throughout Syria in recent weeks, following a wave of uprisings this year that have ousted longtime rulers in Egypt and Tunisia and are threatening the leaders of Yemen and Libya. Assad, facing the strongest challenge to his rule since he inherited power from his father in 2000, said last month he won’t be rushed into political changes, and his security forces have killed dozens of protesters and detained many more.
Near Banias
Security forces attacked the villages of Baida and Ajnad near the coastal city of Banias, which has one of Syria’s two oil refineries, said Haitham Maleh, 80, a former judge, human- rights activist and lawyer who was recently released from prison as part of an amnesty.
“The situation is bad,” Maleh said by telephone today. “After the Interior Ministry issued its statement a couple of days ago the security forces are out in force. The operation started at 10:30 a.m. today.”
“There are dead and wounded but I don’t have a precise tally yet,” he said. “The villages are under siege. Security forces prevented medical aid from coming into the towns.”
The Interior Ministry said it “will not allow the deliberate mixing between peaceful protests and vandalism to sow discord and destabilize the established national unity.”
Student Protest
Security forces cracked down yesterday on about 1,500 students protesting on a Damascus campus to demand wider freedoms in the country, rights activists said. They cited unconfirmed reports that one student was killed during the rally. The dean of the sciences faculty at Damascus University, Mohammad Said Mahasni, denied the reports, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported today.
Syrian security forces in at least two towns have prevented injured protesters from accessing hospitals and medical personnel and others from reaching them, Human Rights Watch said in an e-mailed statement today based on interviews with 20 witnesses from three towns.
The New York-based group said at least 28 people were killed in protests on April 8, bringing the death toll from almost four weeks of unrest to at least 130.
“The Syrian authorities are responding to protests against repression with more repression: killings, mass arbitrary arrests, beatings and torture,” Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at HRW, said in an e-mailed statement. “Syria’s security forces should free those arbitrarily detained for participating in public protests and put an end to torture and ill-treatment of detained protesters.”
Prisoners Freed
Assad ordered the release of 191 people detained amid unrest in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, Al Watan newspaper reported yesterday. The decision came after the president met with relatives of 12 people killed in the city, it said.
The Obama administration is “deeply concerned” about reports that Syrians injured in protests are being denied access to medical care and condemns continuing violence in the country, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said today.
“The escalating repression by the Syrian government is outrageous, and the United States strongly condemns the continued efforts to suppress peaceful protesters,” Carney said in a statement. “The Syrian government must respect the universal rights of the Syrian people, who are rightly demanding the basic freedoms that they have been denied.”
‘Alarming and Outrageous’
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Assad to “guarantee the right to free and peaceful speech and peaceful demonstration,” her spokesman Steffen Seibert said. Seibert called the violence against protesters “alarming and outrageous.”
SANA today published the names, ranks and some pictures of 15 soldiers and policemen killed and another 190 who were injured in unrest in Damascus, the central city of Homs, the port of Latakia and the southern town of Daraa, where protests first erupted in Syria last month.
Among them were nine members of the military, including two officers, who were killed along with 23 others who were injured in an ambush in Banias two days ago, the agency said. Army tanks have since been deployed in the town, whose oil terminal is the nation’s main export point, Al Arabiya television said today.
To contact the reporter on this story: Massoud A. Derhally in Beirut, Lebanon at mderhally@bloomberg.net; Nayla Razzouk in Amman at nrazzouk2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net
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