To Much Skepticism, Syria Issues Amnesty

State television and Syria’s official news agency reported that the amnesty would be broad and would include members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, but details issued late in the day by the government indicated that it amounted to sentence reductions for certain crimes.

The announcement appeared to be part of an emerging pattern in Syria, where Mr. Assad had several times issued decrees that appeared to answer protesters’ demands for greater freedom, while his security forces continued to kill and detain those who demonstrated. Human rights activists say security forces have killed more than 1,000 protesters and arrested more than 10,000 people since the demonstrations began in mid-March.

Syria’s official government news agency, SANA, announced the president’s amnesty offer in a red banner headline marked “urgent” at the top of its Web site. State television also announced the amnesty in an evening broadcast and, according to The Associated Press, reported that it would cover all crimes and members of all political parties, including the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Membership in the Muslim Brotherhood has been a capital offense in Syria since 1980, and it was not immediately clear what effect, if any, the new decree would have on the organization’s legal status.

Later in the evening, however, the Syrian government released more specific details about the nature of the amnesty, via SANA. Though the term “general amnesty” was still used on SANA’s English-language Web site, the pardon appeared to be limited to little more than sentence reductions for some crimes.

Mr. Assad’s offer came at a time of growing public outrage, fueled by a video of the tortured and battered body of a 13-year-old boy who had been arrested in April at a demonstration near his home in the southern village of Jiza.

The State Department, which called the boy’s death “appalling,” appeared to dismiss the amnesty. Syrian state television reported Tuesday evening that Mr. Assad had met with the boy’s family and that a committee headed by the deputy minister of the interior would investigate.

Many Syrian activists were skeptical of the amnesty. Razan Zeitouneh, the leader of the Syrian Human Rights Information Link who is based in Damascus, said the offer was unlikely to have much impact. Ms. Zeitouneh pointed out that Mr. Assad had issued pardons previously, most recently in April, and that few people had actually been released.

Abdulkader, a 26-year-old student and pro-democracy activist from Damascus who did not wish to give his full name because he feared reprisals, said that Syrians wanted “deeds not words.”

Joshua M. Landis, a professor of Middle East studies at the University of Oklahoma, said the amnesty was a gesture of appeasement by a government unlikely to be capable of changing quickly enough to satisfy its citizens. “Almost everyone believes reform is impossible,” Dr. Landis said. “But what they can do is let people out of the prisons. It’s an immediate concession that has an immediate effect on the opposition, but it’s not a structural change at all.”

The president’s announcement coincided with the start of a conference of Syrian opposition groups in the Turkish resort town of Antalya. According to Ammar Abdulhamid, a Maryland-based opposition figure who is attending the conference, about 300 opposition members from various parties and viewpoints have gathered, including more than 50 from inside Syria, who he said had traveled to Turkey at great personal risk.