Syria Arrests Spur Exiles to Act

MAY 10, 2011
By NOUR MALAS

New Raids, Attacks Crimp Activists' Movements; Expat Opponents of Regime Plan Expanded Role.

ABU DHABI—Syria pressed its military crackdown against protesters and arrested hundreds of people in a Damascus suburb Monday, spurring exiled Syrian opposition members to take new moves to help steer the antiregime movement.

Exiled opposition members are planning to gather regime opponents in Cairo this month, several of these people said Monday. Organizers said the conference, which is being planned with input from opposition and civil-society members inside Syria, will gather people from across the political spectrum, including activists affiliated with the country's banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The plan comes as Syria's countrywide detention campaign has sent activists who aren't in custody deep into hiding.

Hundreds of people were arrested in door-to-door raids across Syria, activists said. As many as 300 people were detained Sunday and Monday in Maadamiyeh, a town in the outskirts of Damascus, they said. Tanks were surrounding the town on Monday, residents said, with one reporting a plume of black smoke over the suburb Monday afternoon. Activists reported snipers on Maadamiyeh's rooftops and a constant sound of gunfire.

Tanks and troops also continued attacks around the central city of Homs and in Banias on the Mediterranean coast, activists said, while tanks were seen moving Monday toward restive towns around Deraa, the southern cradle of the protest movement. The military deployment has left some areas without electricity and communications, making it increasingly difficult for activists inside to organize. The flow of information out of Syria has significantly slowed over the past two days.

"Sources inside the country are very scared today," said Walid Saffour, head of the London-based Syrian Human Rights Committee. "They're not answering landlines when they connect, and other lines don't connect."

Rights group Amnesty International said Monday at least 48 people have been killed by security forces in the past four days. Amnesty said it has the names of 580 people killed since the uprising began in mid-March. Other rights groups have lists naming nearly 900 people.

The European Union imposed sanctions on 13 Syrian officials "responsible for the violent repression against the civilian population," its foreign-affairs representative, Catherine Ashton, said Monday.

A United Nations humanitarian team that was given permission to visit Deraa, subject to a military siege of at least 10 days, hadn't been able to enter the city, spokesman Farhan Haq said. The U.N. was "seeking to clarify" what had happened, he said.

Foreign-based Syrian activists and intellectuals say the latest moves against protesters have heightened the urgency for organized opposition action to come from outside the country.

But they face stiff challenges. For years, Syria's opposition has been a disjointed grouping of the Muslim Brotherhood, Kurdish parties, leftist groups and intellectuals, who have been stifled under decades of regime repression or driven into exile. They have struggled to find a common ground or enough influence to both pressure the regime and gain trust from Syrians.

Opposition members, in their individual capacities, have been meeting in small groups for weeks in European capitals including Geneva, Hamburg and Brussels. But in many cases, they failed to agree on a way forward, people familiar with the meetings said.

The Cairo conference, which still requires Egyptian authorities' approval, would be the first large-scale gathering of Syria's opposition in an Arab capital in more than a decade, said a person involved in the plan.

The organizers aim to bridge divides between the protest movement on Syria's street, which has given rise to a new class of young antiregime activists, and members of Syria's traditional opposition groups as well as opposition members abroad who have been helping coordinate protesters' movements. The three groupings, though they have worked together only sporadically, together pose the biggest challenge to President Bashar al-Assad's 11-year rule and the Assad family dynasty's four-decade-long grip on power in Syria.

But activists in Syria, mobilized by their government's increasing violence against protesters, have so far struggled to identify with those beyond their borders. Many Syrians worry whether political platforms decided abroad will reflect the range of their society's demands. "How can they represent our views when they are not even here?" asked a young woman in Damascus.

Opposition activists abroad, holding brief meetings via Skype with people inside Syria, plan to have them sign off on a preliminary platform ahead of the meeting or at least involve them in its agenda, they say. They see a unified voice as key to engaging the international community, they add.

Opposition figures have already announced key demands, including a new constitution, presidential and parliamentary elections and the release of political prisoners. They remain farther apart on others, including possible engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The main hurdle will be to win over the apparently large chunk of Syria's population that is antiregime but won't identify as opposition, or join the protests, out of fear of the unknown.

"Our challenge is to increase the pressure on this hesitant middle ground to impose itself on the internal dynamics," said Burhan Ghalioun, a 65-year-old scholar in contemporary oriental studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, who is increasingly seen among young people in Syria as a credible and calm antiregime voice.

Mr. Ghalioun, who has lived largely outside Syria since the 1970s, is among the intellectuals and activists who took part in Syria's short-lived Damascus Spring in 2000 and 2001, soon after President Assad took power.

His companion in the 2001 intellectual opening, a former parliamentarian-turned-political dissident Riad Seif, was detained last Friday with a group of men near a mosque, in protests around a central Damascus district, according to activists. Mr. Seif has been referred to court for taking part in illegal protests, the activists said.

Other activists rounded up in ramped-up detention drives by the regime's security apparatus include signatories of The National Initiative for Change. The proposal, signed by 150 Syrians inside the country, was coordinated by three opposition activists abroad and presented in late April.

"They are preventing the internal opposition from laying any foundations for an alternative on the ground. And those that are not detained are in hiding," said Radwan Ziadeh, the U.S.-based head of the Damascus Center for Human Rights, and one of the leaders of the National Initiative For Change. Mr. Ziadeh, 34 years old, has lived in exile since late 2007.

The attempt to organize exiled opposition members comes as those inside and beyond Syria attempt to discern the meaning of the Assad government's recent overtures to some within the opposition community.

Opposition members said Bouthaina Shaaban, an adviser to Mr. Assad, last week approached and met with one of Syria's leading opposition activists, Michel Kilo. Activists who spoke of the meeting say they didn't know what was discussed.

Mr. Kilo, a Christian who has been detained and jailed numerous times, is seen to have softened his antiregime stance in a newspaper piece he wrote last month calling for national dialogue as a solution to Syria's crisis.

Opposition members abroad say Ms. Shaaban hasn't tried to reach them. Some of these people say they believe the regime isn't extending an olive branch, but rather attempting to divide the opposition by wooing back into the fold those it sees as more moderate. These people say a similar outreach to Syria's Kurds—who they say have recently been promised more rights by Mr. Assad—makes them skeptical of the effort.

The Kurds, organized through at least 12 illegal political parties, make up the largest single antiregime group within Syria but have mixed pull over people on the ground.

Inside Syria, opposition members who aren't in jail or in hiding remain wary. They say decades of repression and the 1982 squashing of a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama—not far from where tanks shelled houses in Homs this week—remain reflective of the ease with which the regime can wipe out dissent and immobilize the movement.

No formal members of the Brotherhood remain inside Syria, with membership punishable by death. Abroad, the Syrian Brotherhood has so far stayed on the sidelines, and few expect it to be able to wield political power in any scenario. But the Brotherhood is the largest organized group of antiregime opponents, alongside the Kurds, and its activists say they expect to be engaged in broader opposition efforts.

Most Syrians view Islamist-affiliated opposition groups with distrust. They also don't trust opposition backed by the United States, either groups funded under the administration of George W. Bush or individuals who have lived in the U.S. for so long they're seen as having lost touch with their country.

Those are fault lines within the opposition abroad, too, where previous and current affiliations complicate efforts to organize into a new group inspired by the Arab Spring and nothing else.

At a conference in Istanbul on April 26, a group of Islamic societies, civil-society activists and other antiregime groups appealed to the international community to help pressure Mr. Assad to stop the crackdown on protesters. Since then, the U.S. and European Union have imposed sanctions on members of Mr. Assad's regime—but not the president himself—while the United Nations Human Rights Council has condemned the violence in Syria.

Most say Syrians aren't asking for international intervention as in Libya. Some say no effort will be spared to defend their human-rights, including pushing for international criminal prosecution of Mr. Assad.

"Foreign intervention in Syria would mean a civil war," said Mr. Ghalioun. "We are walking on eggshells to allay fears of our friends from all denominations in Syria that their rights are protected and their opinions respected," he said.

"The big joke right now is this scenario where the regime is toppled and yet the opposition still isn't united," an opposition member abroad said. "That's the case we're seeing in Tunisia and Egypt."

—A reporter in Damascus and Joe Lauria at the U.N. contributed to this article.

Source: The Wall Street Journal.
Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704681904576313063612002114.html.