EU urges Syria to end violence against protesters

EUROPEAN governments have urged Syria to end violence against demonstrators after President Bashar al-Assad sent tanks to crush opposition in the city of Deraa where an uprising against his rule first erupted.

“We send a strong call to Damascus authorities to stop the violent repression of what are peaceful demonstrations,” Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said at a joint news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Rome.

International criticism of Assad’s crackdown, now in its sixth week, was initially muted but escalated after the death of 100 protesters on Friday and Assad’s decision to storm Deraa, echoing his father’s 1982 suppression of Islamists in Hama.

Washington said it was studying targeted sanctions against Syria and Dutch foreign minister Uri Rosenthal yesterday proposed the European Union suspend aid to Damascus and impose an arms embargo and sanctions against its leaders.

Security forces have shot dead 400 civilians in a campaign to crush the uprising against Assad’s 11-year rule, Syrian human rights organisation Sawasiah said yesterday. Another 500 people had been arrested in the last two days, it said.

“The murderers in the Syrian regime must be held accountable. The rivers of blood spilled by of this oppressive regime for the past four decades are enough,” Sawasiah said, referring to the authoritarian 41-year dynasty of Bashar and his father Hafez al-Assad.

“The regime has chosen to use excessive violence. It worked in 1982, but there is no guarantee it will work again in the age of the internet and phone cameras,” said a diplomat referring to Hafez’s Hama crackdown which killed up to 30,000.

Ali Al Atassi, an activist whose father was jailed for 22 years under Hafez, said “another Hama” was impossible. “This regime doesn’t understand that the world has changed, that the Arab region has changed and that the Syrian people has changed. They are still locked in the past and those who don’t change at the right moment, they will be forced to change.”

Last week Assad lifted Syria’s 48-year state of emergency and abolished a hated state security court. But the next day 100 people were killed during protests across the country.

Despite deepening his father’s alliance with Iran, clawing back influence in Lebanon and backing militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas, Assad has kept Syria’s front line with Israel quiet and held indirect peace talks with the Jewish state.

Criticism was restrained at first, partly because of fears that a collapse of Assad’s minority Alawite rule might lead to sectarian conflict in the majority Sunni state, and because the US hoped to loosen Syria’s alliance with Iran and promote a peace deal with Israel.

The Arab League said yesterday that pro-democracy demonstrators across the region “deserve support, not bullets”.

Amnesty international said at least 23 people were killed when tanks shelled Deraa on Monday.