Protests in Syria

A cycle of violence may take hold

The people are holding their breath

FOR the third Friday in a row, protests on April 1st pockmarked the country, including the capital, Damascus. With the death toll rising to at least 120 since demonstrations began (some human-rights groups put the figure at well above 200), hostility to the regime of President Bashar Assad is growing. Although he is still more likely to opt for repression over rapid reform, as a cycle of protests, funerals and arrests take hold, nobody knows whether he will ride out the trouble or be swept away by it.

Earlier this month demonstrations in the southern city of Deraa, where the protests began, were followed by protests in Douma, a northern suburb of Damascus, in Banias, Homs, Latakia and a score of towns across the country. Demonstrators also spilled out of the al-Refai mosque in Kafer Souseh, a district of Damascus close to the city centre. Unrest has broken out in a string of villages around the capital. Members of Syria’s Kurdish minority have held rallies in the north-eastern town of Kamishli and several smaller places.

Use the interactive "Graphics Carousel" to browse our coverage of unrest in the Middle East

Since Mr Assad’s unyielding speech to his rubber-stamp parliament on March 30th, when he mentioned reform only in vague terms, he has cracked down harder. Mosques have been ringed with security men. Thugs brought in from the countryside in buses have beaten up protesters. Snipers and other gunmen have shot dead at least 13 people in Douma and Deraa in the past few days. Families of victims have been told they cannot take their bodies unless they are buried quietly at night. Scores of people have been arrested, with passwords for e-mail and Facebook extracted under duress. In the port city of Latakia, a stronghold of Mr Assad’s ruling Alawite minority, thugs belonging to the shabiha, an Alawite smuggling gang loyal to the Assad family, have sown confusion by playing on sectarian fear. Football matches have been banned.

With independent media blacked out or muzzled, the state media have repeatedly blamed outsiders for the trouble. Few believe this. Many Syrians have turned against Mr Assad since his speech in parliament. The unrest in Kafer Souseh is particularly worrying for him, since it is a prosperous Sunni district where he has generally been liked. Meanwhile, prominent opposition figures who signed the so-called Damascus declaration in 2005 have thrown in their lot with the young protesters, attending funerals and other gatherings.

The stakes are rising. Large demonstrations have yet to occur in Syria’s second city, Aleppo. Apart from Kafer Souseh, Damascus has been fairly quiet. But Mr Assad has so far limited his concessions to promises of undefined reform some time in the future, along with pay rises which his flagging economy cannot afford. He has offered mild concessions to Islamists and Kurds, freeing prisoners from both lots, promising to allow new religious institutions to be set up, and saying he would look into the question of granting nationality to some 300,000 stateless Kurds. It was also mooted that he might repeal a ban on the niqab (the veil that covers a woman’s face) in universities. In any event, few see the recent nomination of Adel Safar, a veteran of the ruling Baath party, to the post of prime minister as a break with the past, and fewer sense that genuine reform is in the offing. In a sign of rising anxiety, American dollars have become unavailable.

Much will depend on the silent majority of Syria’s 22m people, especially its leading businessmen and clerics. So far, governments in the region have sounded sympathetic towards Mr Assad. Qatar’s foreign minister, in the forefront of opposition to Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, visited Mr Assad as an apparent gesture of support. Al Jazeera, the influential Qatar-based satellite television channel, has infuriated Syria’s protesters by giving them less airtime or credence than demonstrators in other Arab countries. Western governments, for their part, are wary of what might fill the vacuum if Mr Assad’s regime fell. But if the protests persist, especially if they get bloodier, the momentum for radical change could quickly resume.

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