Protests Across Syria Despite Military Presence (original) (raw)
Advertisement
Antigovernment protesters gathered Friday after noon prayer in the coastal town of Baniyas, Syria, in a cellphone photo provided by an onlooker.Credit...Associated Press
- May 6, 2011
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Security forces fired on demonstrators in six Syrian towns and cities in a day of protests that activists declared a “Friday of Defiance.” Twenty-six people died, but a withering crackdown subdued the most restive town and prevented many protesters from gathering in larger demonstrations, activists and human rights groups said.
The worst violence was reported in Homs, Syria’s third largest city, where activists described a chaotic, bloody day, as tanks entered the town. The government said 10 soldiers had been killed there by what it described as “terrorists,” while activists said at least 9 soldiers had defected to their side. Sixteen protesters were killed, they said.
“We answered the call to protest today, but the intelligence forces attacked us right away by opening fire on us,” said a resident in Homs, reached by telephone.
Another resident there said the security forces fired without provocation.
“They took us by surprise,” he said by phone, over the sound of gunfire.
Both sides in the seven-week struggle claimed victories of sorts on Friday. Thousands of demonstrators gathered again in dozens of towns and cities, despite the government’s deployment of security and military forces from the Mediterranean coast to the steppe in southern Syria. But the crackdown seemed to have slowed the force of the protests, and even some of the government’s opponents acknowledged that crowds may have been smaller than on past Fridays.
“The protests can’t get the momentum to increase the numbers on the ground, as we saw in Egypt and Tunisia,” said Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian human rights advocate and visiting scholar at George Washington University in Washington. “The collective punishment of cities, mass arrests and the tactics of snipers have created some fear.”
President Bashar al-Assad, who inherited power from his father, Hafez, in 2000, initially claimed that Syria was immune to the tumult sweeping the Arab world. When the uprising erupted in Dara’a, a poor town near the Jordanian border, he initially responded with a mix of crackdown and concessions that proved largely rhetorical. For the past two weeks, the government has relied almost entirely on force to crush dissent, and there appears to be a sense in official circles that the government has gained the upper hand.
Image
President Bashar al-Assad's official government news agency released photographs of the Syrian leader surrounded by supporters in Damascus. Syria has stepped up a campaign to portray protests as a plot fashioned abroad.Credit...SANA, via Associated Press
Over the past week, opposition figures said, Butheina Shaaban, an adviser to Mr. Assad, has reached out to some dissidents. One of them, Michel Kilo, said he met with Ms. Shaaban on Thursday and insisted that a dialogue could begin only after an end to the crackdown, recognition of the right to protest and agreement on a political solution to the crisis.
“I didn’t go to hold dialogue,” he said. “I went to express my opinion.”
Other opposition figures dismissed the tentative outreach and pointed to the arrests of two government opponents — Riad al-Seif, a former member of Parliament ailing with prostate cancer who was jailed twice in 2002, and Mouaz al-Khatib, a prominent Muslim cleric. Mr. Khatib was arrested Thursday, and Mr. Seif on Friday, after attending a small protest in the capital, Damascus, outside the Hassan Mosque that was quickly dispersed.
“These are maneuvers,” said Burhan Ghalioun, a Syrian scholar and director of the Center for Contemporary Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. “They are maneuvering, and they are playing with the opposition to try to break its ranks.”
Obama administration officials say that while some figures in the Syrian leadership, Ms. Shaaban and Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa among them, seem to favor at least some reform, hard-liners in the leadership are ascendant. In the past two weeks, the military has been deployed in force to Dara’a, Baniyas on the Mediterranean coast and Rastan, a town near Homs. Thousands have been arrested, particularly in Dara’a and towns on the capital’s outskirts.
But officials say the ire of France and, in particular, Turkey, which had emerged as one of Syria’s closest allies, has worried the Syrian leadership. So has the threat of international action. On Friday, the European Union decided to impose a travel ban and a freeze of assets of 14 Syrian officials, though Mr. Assad was excluded.
“The government has been saying this will be over in two to three weeks,” an administration official said in Washington. “They seem to think they have control over the situation, that it’s dying down, but we don’t really understand why they think that.”
The toll on Friday paled before that of past weeks, especially April 22, when more than 100 people were killed as security forces opened fire on demonstrations across the country.
Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group, said the biggest protests on Friday were reported in Baniyas and Jassem, a town near Dara’a, where protests last month over the arrest of high school students helped galvanize the nationwide demonstrations. The military moved into Dara’a on April 25, cutting phone lines and electricity and effectively occupying the city.
Video
May 6, 2011 - Protests across Syria on Friday, as the government's crackdown continues; remembering the 1982 massacre in Hama, Syria; and the op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman.
The government said Thursday that it was withdrawing troops from Dara’a, and state television broadcast images of armored columns leaving, but residents insisted the military remains there in force. The streets were largely subdued on Friday, activists said, with residents afraid to leave their homes.
A resident in Baniyas said by phone that protesters there had carried olive branches and red and white roses to hand to soldiers if the troops entered the city, but by evening they had not. He estimated that the crowd numbered at least 7,000, many of whom chanted for freedom, for the government’s fall and for the military to lift its siege of Dara’a. “Peaceful, peaceful,” he quoted them as chanting, “our demands are patriotic.”
As on past Fridays, protests were reported in nearly all of Syria’s regions, from the coast and eastern area populated by Syria’s Kurdish minority to towns on the outskirts of Damascus. But Mr. Tarif said checkpoints and military deployments had succeeded in preventing protesters from coalescing in bigger demonstrations in most towns and cities.
“I can’t understand how people are even going into the streets,” Mr. Tarif said. “Some of these places are like military bases.”
The government has stepped up a campaign to portray the protests as a plot fashioned abroad and carried out by militant Islamists and criminals inside Syria who are bent on dividing a country that could face anarchy and strife. Diplomats say that at least some of the protesters have carried arms and fired on security forces.
Three months after the Syrian government allowed people to begin openly using Facebook, regular updates about the protests with links to videos are being published on the Syrian Revolution Facebook page, which now counts more than 169,000 members.
But there are new fears the government may be cracking down on some Facebook users and looking for a way to see some of the private information people are sharing.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights and privacy group, warned that Facebook users in Syria should not log in to their accounts if they see an unsigned security certificate pop up in their browsers, signaling a possible effort to intercept their Facebook traffic.
Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad and an employee of The New York Times from Beirut, Stephen Castle from Brussels, and Jennifer Preston from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section
A
, Page
5
of the New York edition
with the headline:
On ‘Friday of Defiance,’ Syrian Forces Fire on Demonstrators. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Advertisement