Reforms are promised but soldiers patrol the streets

12 April 2012

Syria's key coastal city of Latakia has been in total lockdown overnight, with soldiers patrolling the streets and the port sealed off. The authorities say that 12 people were killed after shooting broke out during protests on Saturday.

About 200 have been injured in the weekend demonstrations there as protests spread across the country despite a heavy reaction by the authorities in the capital Damascus and the northern provincial centre, Aleppo.

I have been passing through Latakia on a cultural tour - my presence unknown as all international journalists have been banned and press visas refused. Two Reuters journalists from Lebanon are reported missing.

Shortly after nightfall the streets of the commercial centre were deserted, but for the odd army jeep and taxis ferrying plainclothes security police. Only shops selling food were open.

Soldiers were at every street corner and roundabout. Towards the edge of town one modern government building had been burned and its windows smashed. On Saturday the protesters burned the local headquarters of the ruling Ba'ath party.

Despite the crackdown the government in Syria has promised reform, a review of the emergency regulations that have put the country under martial law since 1963, largely on the pretext that the country is continuously at war with Israel. Since the Sixties it has been a one-party state run by the Ba'ath Party and the military.

In 1970 Hafez al Assad, an air force general, became president until his death in 2000. He was succeeded by his son Bashar, 45, an ophthalmologist trained in Britain, who was elected uncontested for a second seven-year term in 2007.

Syria was considered the most stable of the Middle East regimes hit by the "youthquake" - mainly because of its severe repression of any protest since independence in 1946. In 1982 an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama was put down by the army, leading to 20,000 dead and injured.

This time, there is a note of uncertainty in the government's response. The regime has promised to end martial law - yet has had to put troops on the street. It has offered to end corruption, review rules of the presidency, re-examine the constitution, and raise public salaries. Clearly the severity of the protest has worried the leadership.

Latakia is a cocktail of Sunni Muslims, Armenian and Greek Christians, and is close to the heartland of the Alawites, a splinter Muslim sect to which the Assad family and their supporting military clans belong.

"The real issue is whether we decide to follow the Egyptian route to reform or go down the same path as Libya," a street vendor told me quietly. He didn't think the protests would be over soon.

On the outskirts, a group of Mukhabarat secret police waved derisively at our bus, shouting "bye bye", and made gestures as if to shoo us out of their country for good.

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