Dp-News September 30, 2011 —
SYRIA- Since mid-March, Syria has been shaken by an unprecedented pro-democracy protest movement that the Assad regime has sought to crush using deadly force. More than 2,700 people have been killed in the unrest, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.
On the political front, Anti-regime activists inside Syria oppose the Syrian National Council, an opposition body formed in Turkey last month, because it favours foreign intervention, prominent activist Michel Kilo said on Thursday.
A Prominent dissident Michel Kilo said anti-regime forces inside Syria oppose the Syrian National Council, an opposition body formed in Turkey last month, because it favours foreign intervention.
“The opposition within the national council are in favour of foreign intervention to resolve the crisis in Syria, while those at home are not,” Kilo claimed in remarks to AFP at his home in Damascus.
“If the idea of foreign intervention is accepted, we will head towards a pro-American Syria and not towards a free and sovereign state,” he said.
“A request for foreign intervention would aggravate the problem because Syria would descend into armed violence and confessionalism, while we at home are opposed to that.”
And diplomats in Damascus told AFP that Ankara asked Damascus this summer to offer the banned Muslim Brotherhood government posts in exchange for Turkey’s support in ending the unrest, an offer rejected by President al-Assad.
Michel Kilo, 71, a writer who has opposed the ruling Baath party since it came to power in 1963, was jailed from 1980 to 1983 and from 2006 to 2009.
He is a member of the National Committee for Democratic Change (NCDC), which was formed on September 17 and groups Arab nationalists, socialists, Marxists, members of the Kurdish minority and independents such as Kilo.
He said the NCDC has a central committee of 80 members, of whom 25 percent are from the “young revolutionaries” who spearheaded protests against President Bashar al-Assad that broke out in mid-March.
Kilo said the opposition figures in Turkey have not consulted the NCDC and offered it only three representatives among the 71 of its members coming from inside the country.
The Syrian National Council (SNC) was set up in August and consists of 140 people, half of whom live in Syria. The names of its members inside Syria have not been released for security reasons, the council said.
It is dominated by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood which is banned in Syria, but it includes liberals and Syrian notables.
The group is to meet this weekend in Istanbul in a bid to unify the fragmented opposition movement, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday.
“All our efforts now are not to appear as a movement that wants to eliminate others, we’re trying to offer a national framework,” Bassma Kodmani said.
Opposition movements behind the protests against Assad’s regime have been fragmented and difficult to measure. They are largely split along three lines: Arab nationalists, liberals, and Islamists.
Syrian opposition groups are calling for the first time for an international intervention to protect civilians from President al-Assad regime’s ongoing military onslaught, including the establishment of a United Nations-backed no-fly zone.
The opposition’s formal calls drew a tepid response Wednesday from the Obama administration and European governments, who said there is currently little appetite to reprise the type of air campaign that helped dislodge long-serving Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi last month.
The intervention call came Tuesday, when a coalition of leading Syrian opposition groups called on the U.N. and international community to play a greater role in protecting civilians from Syrian security forces.
They called for an internationally supervised arms embargo against Damascus, the establishment of a U.N. monitoring mission and the enforcement of a no-fly zone.
The groups, which presented their petition at a press conference in Washington, include the Syrian Revolution General Commission, a grassroots body working among activists inside Syria; the Damascus Declaration of leading Syrian dissidents; the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood; and the Syrian Emergency Task Force, made up of Syrian-American activists.
“The Syrian Revolution General Commission does seek international intervention in the form of a peacekeeping mission with the intention of monitoring the safety of the civilian population,” said the coalition in a statement released Tuesday.
The Syrian National Council, a body appointed earlier this month to try to lead the opposition, didn’t join Tuesday’s call. But it said civilian protection was a priority it would discuss on Oct. 2 in Istanbul, at its first general assembly meeting.
“In general, the SNC membership are on the same page as those on the ground in Syria and who have been asking for civilian protection for a while,” said council member Yaser Tabbara, a U.S.-based lawyer.
Radwan Ziadeh, another council member, said one proposed scenario for a no fly-zone would cover a 10-kilometer (six-mile) area inside Syria’s northern border with Turkey that would serve as a safe haven. It would be modeled on the U.N.-mandated safe haven in northern Iraq in 1991.
Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, opposes the idea of a no fly-zone because it would encourage the rise of an armed rebellion rather than peaceful resistance.
In Turn, Leaders of Syria’s large minority Kurdish population show signs of organizing against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Several young Kurds have been active in protests and are members of the alliance of young activists that organizes demonstrations, but the cities in predominantly Kurdish areas have been largely quiet.
Kurdish activists and analysts say that in the past three weeks, members of the 11 unofficial Kurdish political parties have met with Kurdish activists from the Local Coordination Committee, an alliance for young protest organizers.
These Kurdish parties plan to name a special committee and hold a conference in Syria within the next few weeks.
Such a Kurdish group would be unrelated to the recently formed Syrian National Council, the country’s largest opposition umbrella. While Kurds say they share the opposition’s overall goal of a democratic Syria, many Kurds have also expressed frustration at what they see as protesters’ Arab agenda, and also say they aspire to greater autonomy within Syria.
“Syrian Kurds are not looking to separate from Syria—though of course the idea of a Kurdistan is a dream,” said Meshal Tammo, the spokesman for the Kurdish Future Movement, a political grouping in northeastern Syria.
“The Kurds are no different from anyone else in Syria—they are scared of what will come afterwards,” said Mr. Tammo.
“It was a question of respect: Obviously there are greater issues than Kurdish grievances at stake, but Kurds need to be assured that they are an important part of a future Syria,” said Massoud Akko, a Kurdish author and activist exiled in Norway, who was among those who left.
In early September, about 50 Syrian Kurds held a solidarity conference in Stockholm and issued a statement that said, “The Syrian revolution will not be complete without a just solution to the Kurdish cause.”
Arab officials at UN said that just the possibility of establishing a no-fly zone over a stretch of Syrian territory could it turn into a “safe haven” that may spur more defections from the Syrian military amid growing indications that lower-ranking officers are deserting.
“There are more and more discussions of this scenario to encourage more and more soldiers’ defections, yet it sounds still difficult” without U.N. backing, said an Arab diplomat.