In Syria, Tension and Grief After Protests and Retaliation

In Syria, Tension and Grief After Protests and Retaliation by Government Forces

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and LIAM STACK

CAIRO — Syria was tense and angry on Saturday as protesters set fire to a ruling party office, mourners buried the dead and the president announced the release of political prisoners, one day after government forces opened fire, again, on unarmed demonstrators.

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After more than a week of protests and 61 confirmed killed by government forces, there appeared no certain path forward for the demonstrators, who erupted in angry demonstrations around the country on Friday, or for the government, which has offered words of compromise while simultaneously unleashing lethal force.

President Bashar al-Assad tried to promote calm by ordering the release of as many of 200 political prisoners, but there were new reports of gunfire.

“People are afraid,” said a prominent religious leader from a community at the center of the conflicts, who is not being identified to protect him from reprisal. “People are afraid that the events might get bigger. They are afraid there might be more protests.”

The sun rose over a landscape of grief as mourners set out for funerals in the southern cities of Samanein and Dara’a, the epicenter of the public revolt; in the coastal town of Latakia; in the central city of Homs; and in the suburbs of Damascus. In each place, demonstrators had been killed hours earlier, shot by government forces in the most violent government oppression since 1982, when the leadership killed at least 10,000 people in Hama, a city in the north.

Exact numbers of the dead are hard to determine, as the official government news service denied the authorities’ culpability in new reports blaming criminal gangs.

“In some villages there were 10 or 15; in some villages there were around 20 or more than 20,” the religious leader said.

The protesters, he said, want “freedom and their rights; they were making demands from the government for things to get better here and for an end to the state of emergency.”

A large protest was under way in the coastal city of Latakia, where demonstrators had set fire to the local headquarters of the ruling Ba’ath Party, said Ammar Qurabi, the chairman of the National Association for Human Rights in Syria quoting two witnesses, including one who was not participating in the protest. Special forces opened fire into the crowd, causing protesters to scatter and an unknown number of injuries.

There have been protests around Syria since the start of the tumultuous movement for change that has shaken the Arab world with peaceful protest and conflicts approaching civil war. But the political crisis blew wide open about a week ago when demonstrators took to the streets in Dara’a after the police arrested a group of young people for scrawling antigovernment graffiti, hauling them away without notifying their parents.

Syria is a resource-poor nation with great strategic regional influence because of its alliances with Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, and its location bordering Israel, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. But it also struggles with a fragile sense of national unity amid deep sectarian tensions between its rulers, all members of the minority Alawite religious sect, and a Sunni majority. It also still clings to a pan-Arab Baathist ideology.

On Saturday, human rights groups in Syria said President Assad had announced the release of political prisoners. They were not among those arrested in recent days, but longtime detainees. At the same time, there was talk in Syria of a pending cabinet shake-up, part of an effort to calm the most serious challenge to Assad family rule in 40 years.

“The events are developing and succeeding each other rapidly all over Syria,” Abdel Majid Manjouni, assistant chairman of the Socialist Democratic Arab Union Party in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, said in a telephone interview. “They are going from city to city, and the ruling party is not being successful in its attempt to block the protests or the demands for democratic change in the country.”

The Syrian crisis has in many ways followed the same playbook as events that unfolded in Tunisia and Egypt, which ended with the resignation of the presidents.

All across the Arab world, authoritarian leaders provided little, to no, room for citizens to air their grievances. In states led by presidents for life, emirs and kings, there was no room for promoting change, except for protest.

In Syria, there have not yet been widespread calls for the president’s departure, though as the anger mounts in the wake of the deaths, that view has started to emerge.

“I am calling him to go to the television,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, a childhood friend of the president now living in the United Arab Emirates. “The people still respect him; first he must deliver his condolences face to face to the people. No. 2, he must say there will be a multiple party system, a free parliamentary election in two months from now.”

Mr. Qurabi, the chairman of the human-rights group, said that in all, more than two dozen were killed on Friday, including 20 in the tiny southern village of Samanein, 4 in Latakia, 3 in Homs and 3 in the greater Damascus area. Mr. Qurabi blamed live ammunition for all of the deaths on Friday, although details for much of the violence in Syria remain unclear.

“The protest in Samanein was very, very, very big,” said Mr. Qurabi in a phone call in Cairo, where he is now attending a conference. “They killed them in the streets because there is not even really a square for the people to protest in.”