The government said its soldiers moved into the city in response to an appeal by residents to prevent violence by “radical terrorists.” Assad has said foreign-led conspirators are seeking to exploit legitimate expressions of popular demands. Protest power balance organizers say the demonstrators were unarmed.Demonstrations were held yesterday in Banias and the port city of Latakia, Razan Zaitouneh, a Damascus-based human rights lawyer and activist, said on her Facebook page. Security forces were deployed around the cities of Jableh, Homs, Moadamya and Hama and the Damascus suburb of Douma, according to Rami Nakhle, a Syrian dissident who lives in Lebanon. The latest Syrian crackdown on demonstrations, mostly in the southern region of Daraa, in the past five days has brought the nationwide death toll since mid-March to at least 400, according to Syria’s National Organization for Human Rights. Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, called yesterday for the possible prosecution of Syrian leaders for crimes against humanity.The Syrian protests are part of a wave of Middle Eastern popular movements that have unseated rulers in Egypt and Tunisia this year, forced violent crackdowns in Libya and Bahrain, and helped push oil prices up more than 20 percent this year. President Bashar al-Assad’s decision to end the emergency rule in place for half a century, and his pledges of future political and economic measures, have failed to halt the unrest. “The regime is very worried,” Joshua Landis, a Syria specialist who directs the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “This opposition protest movement has been snowballing, and clearly the military element is saying we have to get control of the situation.”Tanks in DaraaAssad’s government sent tanks and armored carriers to storm Daraa on April 25, and activists and witnesses say at least 25 people were killed as security forces fired on protesters. Yesterday, the troops were strafing the streets with machine guns, and water, electricity and telephone lines were cut. DSyria’s increasingly violent suppression of anti-government shop online 2011 protests prompted United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to call for an external inquiry as the U.S. and European Union consider sanctions.“There should be an independent, transparent and effective investigation,” Ban told reporters in New York, where the UN Security Council failed to agree on a European proposal to condemn the Syrian attacks. The debate is due to resume today.
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online le mercredi 27 avril 2011
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