Davutoglu will meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s special representative Hasan Turkmani in Ankara on Wednesday evening.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will travel to southern province of Hatay on Wednesday to observe the living conditions of Syrians who fled to Turkey escaping violence in Syria.
Sources told the AA that Davutoglu would depart for Hatay in the next hour.
Davutoglu will meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s special representative Hasan Turkmani in Ankara on Wednesday evening.
Davutoglu’s meeting with the Turkish ambassadors commissioned in the Middle East to discuss the latest developments in the region and in Syria is expected to be postponed to Thursday.
Fearing a massacre, thousands of Syrians flock to Turkey as protesters in the US demand the UN take action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Lindsey Parietti reports..
via Video: Syrians flee violence to Turkey | Gamut News.
By A WALL STREET JOURNAL REPORTER in Damascus and NOUR MALAS in Antalya, Turkey
Syrian forces using tanks and machine guns pressed into towns outside Homs, the country’s third-largest city, in an apparent effort to shut down the area’s broad-based opposition movement, as activists meeting in Turkey drafted a road map for their effort to oust President Bashar al-Assad.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Activists chanted slogans against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after a meeting of opposition groups in Antalya, Turkey on Thursday.
At least 25 people were killed by security forces Thursday in Rastan, north of Homs, according to activists and Homs residents with family members in the town, continuing what has been one of the deadliest crackdowns by the regime since the start of the uprising three months ago.
Rastan and the nearby town of Talbiseh have been scenes of large and sustained protests in recent weeks, as powerful tribal and merchant clans in the region have thrown their weight behind the opposition movement.
Residents have also reported incidents in which protesters in the region have fought back against security forces and members of Mr. Assad’s ruling Alawite ethnic minority, which has been the subject of growing resentment from the Sunni majority around Homs.
Many residents in the area own guns, which are easily smuggled over the border from Lebanon. The area is also home to tribal families with codes that dictate that the spilling of blood must be avenged, raising the potential that opponents of the regime will take up arms.
Ethnic tensions in the area were stirred in late April, when tanks belonging to predominantly Alawite army brigades moved into Sunni neighborhoods of Homs.
Unrest in Syria
Despite the rising death toll from weeks of unrest, people across Syria continue to protest the government of President Bashar al-Assad. See events by day.
Residents said armed Alawite gangs backing the Assad regime set up checkpoints in their neighborhoods, helped crack down on protests and ransacked houses in restive areas.
In one incident, on May 20—a day of nationwide protests in which at least 11 people were killed in Homs—a fight broke out between adjacent Alawite and Sunni neighborhoods, a resident said.
A resident of Deir Baalbe, a poor area close to the Alawite-majority district of al-Zahara, said tensions between the two groups were rising.
“We look next door and see people with jobs and decent services, whilst in our area we have nothing,” he said.
Homs residents say armed clashes with supporters of the Assad regime have been limited, and have grown out of opposition to the government, not to the dominant sect.
“The people on the streets of Homs don’t have a problem with spilled blood anymore,” a resident said. “In some cases they’re instigating the security forces because they’re tired and they’re angry and they’re fed up.”
Syria’s government—echoed by many Syrians and supporters of the regime—has often pointed to neighboring Iraq as an example of what they say is the kind of violent, sectarian power struggle that could break out if the Assad regime were to fall.
Tanks moved to surround several towns around Homs Saturday night, activists and residents said, in what has become the Syrian regime’s standard procedure for dealing with towns with large protest movements.
Communications, electricity and water were cut, before soldiers and security forces carried out shootings and ransacked houses, residents said.
The death toll since security forces began a siege in the area Sunday has risen to more than 70, according to the Local Coordinating Committees, a nationwide activist network that tallies only victims who have been identified by name.
Meanwhile, Syrian opposition groups meeting in Turkey drafted a statement calling on President Assad to step down and hand over power temporarily to the vice president until a transitional council is formed and a new constitution drafted.
They also laid the groundwork for a plan to support protesters working toward that goal.
At the conference, in the Turkish coastal town of Antalya, some 300 activists elected representatives who would name a nine-member committee to implement a support strategy for the protesters.
Attendees also committed more than $200,000 to finance the protests and pay compensation to families of those killed during the uprising.
Of the more 300 activists attending, almost all were supporting the movement from outside the country. Only one or two dozen attendees were Syria-based organizers.
The group has yet to bridge the divide between younger, street protesters and older, exiled opposition activists trying to create a political alternative to Mr. Assad, observers said.
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?.
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.
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.
