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Syrian opposition meet in Turkey to discuss increasing pressure on Assad

Thomas Seibert

May 31, 2011

ISTANBUL // Members of the Syrian opposition in exile gathered for a conference in southern Turkey yesterday to discuss ways of raising the pressure on the regime of President Bashar al Assad.

The meeting comes at a time when the government in Ankara is showing increasing signs of impatience with Damascus after weeks of fruitless efforts to push the Assad government to implement political reforms. The Assad regime has been trying to crush a popular uprising against the government.

Rights activists say more than 1,000 people have been killed in the crackdown that started in March and has been condemned by the United Nations and triggered western sanctions against the Assad government.

Ammar Qurabi, the president of the Egypt-based National Organisation for Human Rights in Syria, or Nohr, one of the groups behind the two-day meeting in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya, said he expected about 300 participants at the “Syrian Conference for Change”.

In a first reaction to the general amnesty declared by the Assad regime yesterday, Mr Qurabi stressed that important details about the scope of the amnesty were not known.

“As a start, we welcome any step that gets people out of jail,” he said. But he added it was unclear if people that were still in police custody after their arrest by Syrian security forces would also be released.

Mr Qurabi and other opposition representatives said one aim of the meeting was to create a body that could represent the Syrian opposition internationally, but not to form some kind of government in exile.

“Maybe we will establish a small committee” to coordinate communication between exile groups and to support the resistance to the Assad regime within Syria,” Mr Qurabi said.
As for political demands, Mr Qurabi pointed to the so-called Damascus Declaration of 2005, a five-page document calling for democracy in Syria and supported by a broad range of opposition groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful Sunni group banned in Syria.

Mr Qurabi said yesterday that the Muslim Brotherhood would also be represented in Antalya. The opposition should “unite under the roof of a revolution of freedom and dignity for the construction of the new Syria”, he said earlier in a Nohr statement released in the run-up to the conference.

“This regime cannot be reformed,” Anas Abda, secretary of the Damascus Declaration General Council, another opposition group, told the semi-official Turkish news agency Anadolu in Antalya. “The main demand of the conference is this: We want real change in Syria.”

But even before the meeting got under way, cracks appeared between opposition groups. Some reports said Kurdish organisations had not been invited to the meeting.
In London, Ribal al Assad, the director of the Organisation for Democracy and Freedom in Syria and a cousin of the Syrian president, said in a statement it was “very clear that some of these individuals [in Antalya] are not genuine representatives of the Syrian people. Moreover they are individuals who promote extremism or sectarianism, which has no place in the path to freedom and democracy.”

The Turkish government did not embrace the Antalya meeting officially. Mr Qurabi said the organisers had had no contact with Turkish government representatives. “We sent them the files about the conference, and they allowed it to go ahead,” he said, adding there had been no other Turkish involvement in the event.

A visit to Istanbul in April by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood triggered an angry statement by Nidal Kabalan, the Syrian ambassador in Ankara. “For us, the Muslim Brotherhood is like the PKK is for Turkey,” Mr Kabalan told a Turkish newspaper at the time, in reference to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a rebel group fighting for Kurdish self-rule and regarded as a terrorist organisation by Ankara.

The fact that Turkey, one of the closest international partners of the Assad regime in recent years, is once again playing host to a meeting of the Syrian opposition despite reservations in Damascus is no coincidence, said Oytun Orhan, an expert on Syria at the Centre for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies, a think tank in Ankara.

“Turkey is disappointed by Assad,” Mr Orhan said. The government in Ankara has been calling on Mr Assad to implement what Turkish officials have described as “shock reforms” for more democracy, but Ankara’s pleas have been ignored by Damascus. “So Turkey is keeping up the pressure for reform on one hand and trying to sharpen the profile on the opposition on the other.”

According to Turkish news reports, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, renewed his demands for reforms when he spoke to Mr Assad by telephone last Friday. “Radical steps that stun everyone are needed now,” Mr Erdogan reportedly told the Syrian leader.

Mr Orhan said Turkey had invested a considerable amount of international credibility by telling the increasingly sceptical West that the Assad regime was willing to reform the country. But as Syria keeps ignoring Ankara’s advice and moves closer to Iran, Turkey has started to change tack, Mr Orhan said.

“This is not the first meeting of the Syrian opposition in Turkey,” he said about the conference in Antalya. “It can be read as a message to Syria.”

Mr Orhan said Turkey was also concerned about a perceived increase of Iranian influence in Syria. “I think there is a Turkish-Iranian competition in Syria, just like in Lebanon and in Iraq,” he said.
In a recent analysis posted on the website of the Centre for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies, Mr Orhan argued that Iran saw a potential regime change in Syria as a threat. “Right now, the Syrian government does not trust any player, including Turkey, as much as it trusts Iran,” he wrote.

In Antalya, the conference triggered a short confrontation between Syrians opposed to the Assad regime and supporters of the government in Damascus.

Government opponents and supporters arrived in Antalya on the same flight from Istanbul, Turkish media reported. The government supporters protested when the opposition representatives unveiled signs with anti-Assad slogans after their arrival, the report said. Turkish police intervened to prevent the situation from escalating. The Assad supporters were gathering for a counter-conference in another hotel in Antalya, the reports said.

tseibert@thenational.ae

June 1, 2011
Should Syrian Christians be afraid?

A protester burns a picture of President Bashar al-Assad in Istanbul. According to one Syrian activist, fear is slowly dying as similar scenes are being witnessed inside Syria. (AFP/Bulent Kilic)

“Christians to Beirut and the Alawites to the coffin.”

This chant, which some Syrians say they’ve heard during demonstrations in their country, alludes to what many Syrian minorities fear might happen should the 40-year rule of the Baath regime come to an end.

Many experts agree that President Bashar al-Assad, an Alawite ruling a majority-Sunni country, has managed to keep his grip on power in part thanks to mutual backing between his regime and the country’s other minorities, a number of which is made up of educated, middle-class Christians. As a result, it comes as no surprise that a number of them voice worry about the regime’s possible downfall.

At the same time, “The regime has an active interest in frightening the Christians. And if you want to frighten someone, it’s always good if you have some evidence,” argues Professor Volker Perthes, director of SWP, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, referring to the abovementioned chants.

The regime, some experts say, is making it seem that fanatical Muslims are prepared to take over should the president and his cronies be pushed out.

But should Syria’s Christian community, which is around 10 percent of the population, actually be afraid?

A number of upper-middle-class Christians are still undecided, Ahed Al Hendi, a Syrian political refugee currently working for CyberDissidents.org in Washington, DC, told NOW Lebanon.

Many who have their own businesses fear the instability, said Al Hendi, who describes himself as a non-practicing Christian. They are pro-Assad and scared of the ascent to power of the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafists should Assad fall. “But I think it’s paranoia – I don’t think it is possible to have an Islamic dominance. For many reasons,” he said, starting with the fact that the population in Syria is much more diverse than in the rest of the region.

Compared to Egypt’s estimated 94-6 Muslim-to-Christian ratio, “Syria has Kurds, Alawites, Christians, and an overall more secular vibe, so it’s different,” he said.

“Christians seem to avoid strife and tend to their own business,” said one Lebanese woman, who is married to a Syrian Christian and just returned from Damascus. “But if you scratch a bit beneath the surface, you know that in their hearts, they feel the regime is wrong, [that it is] a dictatorship,” she said. The woman, who asked that her name not be printed to protect her in-laws in Syria, also said that the number of Christians engaged in the demonstrations is beginning to climb.

According to Professor Perthes, Christians and Alawites have been taking part in the demonstrations all along.

“The opposition has always made it very clear that confessional belonging doesn’t count for them,” he said during a phone interview with NOW Lebanon, noting longtime Christian and Alawite opposition activists Michel Kilo and Aref Dalila, respectively.

Unlike traditional sectarian or class battles, “The uprising in Syria… is rather a question of marginalization in a country where wealth is very much concentrated in Damascus,” stressed Perthes, noting that outlying areas, such as Homs and Hama, were always a “revolutionary hotspot.”

“It’s true, people are seeing it as a Muslim thing, because people are coming out of the mosque, but it’s known about Syria that there is no place to gather people without looking suspicious except in the mosques, or in football matches,” noted Al Hendi.

A video titled “Christians are with the Syrian revolution” that was uploaded onto YouTube on May 16 features Mar Agnathious Joseph the Third, Patriarch of Antioch for Syrian Catholics, stressing that Christians in Syria seek civil rights for everyone and have long been united with all the Syrian people to make the country prosper.

“One thing I would say is that the Christian community in Syria are very much citizens of Syria. They are very well grounded, a substantial minority, that has played a role in history,” said Harry Hagopian, an international lawyer in London and Middle East advisor of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in England and Wales. But he stressed that there are tensions across all communities in Syria today, and that people should be wary of speculating too much on the situation from outside.

“My understanding is that many of those Christian communities would be happy and open to the sense of reform being requested for the past weeks,” he said, though he added it is hard to tell what the future holds, referring to the difficult plight of the Christians in Iraq and recent sectarian clashes in Egypt.

“But let me say another thing before we jump to conclusions: I have also been informed by many people that what is happening in Egypt,” Hagopian said in a reference to recent Muslim-Christian violence there, “has a lot to do with a sense of incitement that is being promoted, propagated and fed in by people from the former regime.”

Al Hendi stresses that the fear of sectarian strife in Syria is not realistic and stems from paranoia.

What’s more, things seem to be changing. “People are tearing photos of Assad out on the street,” he said. “We would have never even imagined this a few weeks ago. I think the fear is slowly starting to go.”

via Lebanon news – NOW Lebanon -Should Syrian Christians be afraid?.

May 30, 2011
President al-Assad Receives Call from Erdogan Expressing Turkey’s Keenness on Strategic Relationship with Syria

DAMASCUS, (SANA)- President Bashar al-Assad on Friday received a phone call from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey expressing Turkey’s keenness on the strategic relationship between the two friendly countries and people and preserving the level of this relationship and developing it in the future.

President al-Assad and Erdogan discussed the situation in the region and in Syria, with Premier Erdogan stressing Turkey’s standing by Syria and keenness on its security, stability and unity.

Both sides reiterated determination to continue the warm and transparent relationship between their countries and upgrading it in the interest of both countries and people and the region as a whole.

Last March, President al-Assad received a phone call from Erdogan.

During the call, Erdogan affirmed the solid Syrian-Turkish relations, lauding the reformative decisions taken by the Syrian leadership and stressing Turkey’s support to Syria.

H. Said / Ghossoun

via President al-Assad Receives Call from Erdogan Expressing Turkey’s Keenness on Strategic Relationship with Syria- SANA, Syria.

May 29, 2011
Why Syria and Turkey Are Suddenly Far Apart on Arab Spring Protests

On Oct. 13, 2009, the Oncupinar border gate between Turkey and Syria played a starring role in a diplomatic photo op. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moualem, shook hands, smiled for the cameras and — en route to signing an agreement to end visa requirements between the two countries later that day — lifted the border barrier. The symbolism was lost on no one. Only 11 years earlier, thousands of Turkish troops had massed along the same border, awaiting orders to deploy. Throughout the 1990s, the Syrian government had sheltered Turkey’s public enemy No. 1, Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK, the Kurdish terrorist group. If Syria refused to expel him, the Turkish leadership made clear in 1998, then the Turks would march on Damascus. The Syrians flinched. Ocalan was sent packing.

Syrian President Bashar Assad, right, listens as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a joint press conference in Damascus on Oct. 11, 2010 Read more:

In the years that followed the standoff, Syria and Turkey became close allies. Long-running land and water disputes were either settled or shelved. Trade boomed, from $773 million in 2002 to $2.5 billion in 2010. In April 2009, the two countries held joint military exercises. Just last year, together with Jordan and Lebanon, they signed a free-trade agreement that many Turkish commentators hailed as the dawn of a Middle East Union. (See pictures of the protests in Syria.)

In reaching out to the Syrian regime, Turkey managed to inspire its confidence, says Khaled Khoja, a Turkish-based member of the Damascus Declaration committee, a Syrian opposition group. In 2005, Khoja recalls, Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose government had been accused of orchestrating the assassination of Lebanese President Rafiq Hariri, found himself in a major bind. But Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused calls by the U.S. and others to isolate the Syrian regime. Instead, says Khoja, he helped bring Assad’s regime in from the cold: “He made Turkey a bridge to Syria.” What Turkey got out of all this, more than anything else, says Khoja, was Syria’s trust — the kind of trust that allowed it to mediate between Syria and Israel in 2008. This, says Khoja, “was a very good approach.”

But, he adds, it was not enough. “Turkey should have pushed Bashar to make reforms in past years,” says Khoja. “You cannot have an attitude, an active role, unless you are brave enough to step behind the reforms. You have to say this strongly.” Turkey did not. Over the past few years, in the face of Syria’s dismal human-rights record and its legacy of authoritarian rule, the government in Ankara has remained silent. If autocrats like Assad were to be prodded into changing course, Turkish officials argued, it would be through diplomacy, not pressure. “We tell our counterparts the importance of being respectful of human rights,” Davutoglu once said. “But we don’t do it in public.” (See “How Syria and Libya Got to Be Turkey’s Headaches.”)

Turkish officials were wrong to assume that a policy of behind-the-scenes prodding could yield tangible results in Syria, says Walid Saffour, president of the London-based Syrian Human Rights Committee. “All the time they were hearing that the Syrians were going to do so and so,” he says. “The Turkish government believed what Bashar and his advisers told [them]. That was a game of deception on the part of the Syrian government.”

In recent weeks, with the turmoil across its southern border showing no signs of coming to an end — threatening not only its rapprochement with Syria but also the stability of the entire region — Turkey has gone into emergency mode, with Erdogan regularly on the phone with Assad and top officials, including Davutoglu and an intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, who was dispatched to Damascus. As a senior Western diplomat in Damascus tells TIME, Turkey’s backdoor diplomacy might now be the outside world’s last remaining chance to persuade Assad to introduce new reforms and avoid more bloodshed. “The Turkish approach allows the Syrians to listen to the outside world’s concerns without feeling as if they are being lectured,” the diplomat tells TIME, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It allows them to make changes without giving the impression that someone is forcing their hand.” (See pictures of tempers flaring across the Middle East.)

Oppositionists like Saffour would prefer for the Turks to align themselves squarely with the demonstrators. “Today Erdogan condemns the killing, the detentions and the repeated massacres,” says Saffour, “but he is not blaming Bashar for this.” As much as the Turkish leader might want to ensure Assad’s survival, he adds, he will soon have to choose between the leadership and the protesters. “The people inside Syria are now calling for a change of regime altogether,” says Saffour. “The Turkish stand shouldn’t be [opposed to] the stand of the people. If they want to do something, they should support the people, not the regime.”

Reached by phone during a visit to Turkey, Riad al-Shaqfa, secretary general of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, says he believes Assad can step back from the brink. “The doors of reform always remain open if Bashar is serious in this matter and if the people feel that he is serious about it,” al-Shaqfa says through a translator. “To make the reforms does not take much. It took them 15 minutes to amend the constitution so that Bashar could inherit the country from his father. They can issue orders to withdraw the security forces and the tanks from the streets and to the stop bombardment of the people in a matter of hours.” However, the outlook is getting bleaker by the day, says al-Shaqfa, who adds, “There can be many initiatives and the Turks are demanding this, but nobody is listening.” Khoja sees no room for optimism. “If Bashar is not listening to Turkey,” he says, “then he is not listening to anyone.”

Piotr Zalewski is the Turkey correspondent for the Polish newsmagazine Polityka. He has contributed to Foreign Policy, the Atlantic.com and the National.

Read more:

May 27, 2011
Syria opposition to meet in Turkey

NICOSIA — Syrian opposition leaders are to hold a conference in Turkey next week in support of two-month-old protests against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, one of the organisers told AFP on Tuesday.

“The Syrian opposition will organise a conference in Antalya from May 31 to June 2 in support of the revolt in Syria and claims of the Syrian people,” Ammar Qurabi, president of the Egypt-based National Organisation of Human Rights, told AFP.

The conference will be open to all supporters of the opposition, independent personalities and representatives of all faiths, he said, referring to a group of reformers who called for democratic changes in 2005 under a statement known as the Damascus Declaration.

Since the outbreak of anti-government protests in mid-March, at least 1,062 people have been killed by Syrian security forces, according to Qurabi.

“We have a list of names of 1,062 people killed, along with information about the places where they died.”

He said 10,000 people were arrested during the protests against the autocratic regime of Assad, who succeeded his father Hafez in 2000.

In April, the president lifted the state of emergency in force for decades — one of the main demands of protesters — but he also regulated the right to demonstrate.

His opponents are demanding an end to the domination of the ruling Baath party, free elections and the release of political prisoners.

via Syria opposition to meet in Turkey – The Egyptian Gazette.

May 27, 2011
Turkey Calls for Syrian Reforms on Order of ‘Shock Therapy’ – NYTimes.com

By ANTHONY SHADID

KONYA, Turkey — The foreign minister of Turkey said Wednesday that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria must deliver reforms that would constitute “shock therapy” to his country if he had any hope of ending a nine-week crisis that was roiling the region.

The comments by the foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, amounted to a plea by Turkey, which views Syria as its main foreign policy concern and the fulcrum in its ambitious strategy to integrate parts of the Middle East with its booming economy.

Just months ago, Mr. Davutoglu and other Turkish officials had described the warming ties with Syria, a country Turkey almost went to war with in 1998, as perhaps the government’s greatest foreign policy success. Turkish officials now express growing concerns that strife in Syria may inundate their 550-mile border with refugees, and some officials privately worry that Syria may try to exacerbate tensions with Kurds inside Turkey.

Like others, Turkish officials remain unsure whether Mr. Assad is willing — or able — to carry out the reforms that would effectively end the grip of a ruling elite knit by clan, sectarian and personal ties. After speaking with Mr. Assad, some Turkish and Arab officials have questioned whether he even truly appreciates the extent and nature of the determined protests that have posed the gravest challenge to his 11 years in power.

“Now what he needs is shock therapy to gain the heart of his people,” Mr. Davutoglu said in an interview as he campaigned in his hometown, Konya, for a Parliament seat in next month’s elections. “As early as possible.”

via Turkey Calls for Syrian Reforms on Order of ‘Shock Therapy’ – NYTimes.com.

May 26, 2011