AMMAN (Reuters) - Syria's main human rights movement said the death toll from
pro-democracy protests against President Bashar Assad had reached 200 and urged the Arab League to impose sanctions on the ruling hierarchy.
Syria, the latest Arab country shaken by
mass uprisings
against authoritarian rulers, has witnessed unprecedented protests
across the tightly-controlled country for the last three weeks.
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has responded with force - witnesses say security forces have opened
fire on protesters - vague pledges of reform and attempts at appeasing
minority Kurds. Protests have shown no sign of abating but have not yet
reached the levels seen in
Tunisia and Egypt where
leaders were ultimately overthrown.
"Syria's uprising is screaming with 200 martyrs, hundreds of injured and
a similar number of arrests," the Damascus Declaration group said in a
letter sent on Monday to the secretary general of the Arab League.
The Damascus Declaration is named after a document signed in 2005 by
prominent civic, Islamist and liberal leaders calling for the end of 41
years of Assad family rule and its replacement with a democratic system.
"The regime unleashes its forces to besiege cities and terrorize
civilians, while protesters across Syria thunder with the same chant
'peaceful peaceful'," it added.
"We ask you to... impose political, diplomatic and economic sanctions on
the Syrian regime, which continues to be the faithful guardian of Hafez
al-Assad's legacy," the letter said, referring to the iron-fisted rule
of President Hafez Assad, who died in 2000 after 30 years in power.
'Responding with repression'
The protests, which erupted in the southern city of Deraa last month
before spreading, have demanded freedom of expression and assembly and
an end to corruption.
The authorities blame "armed groups" and "infiltrators" for the
violence, in which they said soldiers and police have also been killed.
On Tuesday, state news agency SANA named six security service personnel
it said had been killed and 168 wounded in Deraa, suburbs of Damascus,
Homs and Latakia.
"President Assad has been only giving promises for the last 11 years.
Instead of solutions he talks, as the regime usually does, about an
outside conspiracy," the letter said.
Last Friday was one of the deadliest since the
uprising began in Deraa,
an agricultural city near the border with Jordan where many Sunni Muslim
tribes resent the wealth and power amassed by minority Alawites, the
sect to which Assad belongs.
Human Rights Watch, which said 27 people were killed in Deraa, condemned
Syria's security forces for preventing wounded protesters reaching
hospitals and stopping medical teams from treating them in two towns.
'Slow-motion revolution'
Western governments who have been trying to coax Syria out of its
anti-Israeli alliance with Iran as well as to give up its support for
militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah, have denounced the violence against
the protesters and urged Assad to take more vigorous steps towards
reforms such as lifting emergency law.
"Time is running out as every new casualty makes the clock tick faster,"
said the International Crisis Group's Peter Harling on the Foreign
Policy blog.
"To open the space required for a radical reform agenda to take hold,
the regime's top priority must be to ensure a period of relative calm.
Prospects will look grim were the country to witness yet another bloody
Friday," he said, describing Syria as a "slow-motion revolution."