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depend on the willingness of the military to allow an open political process to take place.
The Syrian government’s response to the Arab world’s turbulent spring, by contrast, has been both violent and vacillating. Its initial response was to characterize the protests across the country as the result of a global conspiracy fomented by a clutch of unlikely allies, including the US, Israel, and Arab enemies in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, working with former regime officials and homegrown Salafists, or fundamentalists. Then President Assad tried to defuse the opposition by receiving protest delegations and announcing the lifting of long-standing emergency laws, apparently acknowledging the existence of legitimate grievances. But this proved no more than a gesture. In effect the government’s response has been contradictory to the point of incoherence: as the Brussels-based International Crisis Group points out in a report released on May 3:
The regime has lifted the emergency law but has since allowed the security services to conduct business as usual, thereby illustrating just how meaningless the concept of legality was in the first place. It authorises demonstrations even as it claims they no longer are justified and then labels them as treasonous. It speaks of reforming the media and, in the same breath, dismisses those who stray from the official line. It insists on ignoring the most outrageous symbols of corruption. Finally, and although it has engaged in numerous bilateral talks with local representatives, it resists convening a national dialogue, which might represent the last, slim chance for a peaceful way forward.
Over seven hundred people have been killed so far, more than a hundred of them in the southwestern city of Deraa, near the Jordanian border, where the Omari mosque—a center of resistance—has been closed to worshipers after being shelled by tanks and taken over by snipers. Some ten thousand people are now said to have been
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