Tuesday, May 08, 2012


   (From THE WALL STREET JOURNAL) 
   By Nour Malas

Syrians voted in parliamentary elections cast by President Bashar al-Assad's government as a historic step toward opening the political system, but the opposition boycotted the vote and called it a sham, underscoring the deep divide in the 14-month conflict.

The vote for the 250-seat People's Assembly, long described by Syrians as a rubber-stamp parliament, is unlikely to affect the standoff between the government and opposition that has plunged much of the country into violent conflict, analysts said.

Monday's vote came a day ahead of a briefing by Kofi Annan on the United Nations Supervision Mission in Syria, a team of unarmed observers monitoring a three-week cease-fire that has been violated almost daily by both sides. Mr. Annan, a joint special envoy of the U.N. and the Arab League, is expected to brief the U.N. Security Council Tuesday, in a speech the French government said "will be critical in order to take stock of the efforts under way."

Both Syria's government and its opposition have said they expect the report to point to violence by the other side.

U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that for Syria "to hold a parliamentary election in that kind of atmosphere borders on ludicrous." He said "it's not really possible to hold credible elections in a climate where basic human rights are being denied to the citizens and the government is continuing to carry out daily assaults on its own citizens."

France called the Syrian parliamentary vote "a sinister farce." French foreign-ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said Damascus "is blatantly violating" its commitments to Mr. Annan's peace plan, which calls for a halt to the violence that starts with Syria pulling its forces from cities.

Syrian government officials said the vote, the first under a new constitution introduced two months ago as Mr. Assad's greatest political concession in the uprising, marked the start of democratic, multiparty politics in Syria, a country ruled by the Assad family since 1970 and by the secular, Arab-nationalist Baath Party since 1963. "The Syrians hope that the elections will chart the future of Syria," state-run news agency Sana said. "The Syrian streets, press, websites, and social media reflected the flurry of the electoral propaganda," it reported, as state television broadcast scenes of people at polling stations.

It wasn't clear how many Syrians were turning out to vote. In a national referendum on the new constitution in February, 57.4% of eligible Syrians voted, officials said at the time. The opposition also boycotted that vote.

On Monday, opposition groups reported that general strikes to protest the parliamentary vote closed schools and stores in towns and villages around Hama, Deraa, and the northern province of Idlib. Videos posted online by activists showed protesters mocking the vote.

In one village outside Aleppo, a crowd swarmed a fake ballot box to stuff in ballots marked with the names of residents of that village killed in the uprising.

"Four of my friends have been killed. Two in my family are detained, and my brother has been tortured three times," one activist with the Zabadani Local Council, from a restive town outside Damascus, said when asked about the elections. "We are used to this in Syria. Even if the population is wiped out and there are no eligible voters, there will somehow be elections, the turnout will be great, and it will be a win for Assad."

Still, support for the ruling Baath Party remains strong. Of Syria's estimated 23 million people, some three million are Baath Party members, according to party members. Government loyalists compare that with a protest movement that, at its peak, was estimated to have brought less than a million Syrians to the streets.

Among the more than 7,000 candidates running in the elections are candidates from seven new political parties, licensed under the reformed constitution. Critics say most candidates from outside the Baath Party -- for decades the only party allowed to run -- are regime loyalists or are unknown and unqualified, paving the way for an easy Baath victory.

Earlier this year, many Syrians had hoped the new constitution, with the possibility of a new government in which Mr. Assad was expected to bring in members of the opposition, would start a process of reform that would coax the opposition away from calls for the president's ouster and toward talks on a negotiated transition. Instead, Mr. Assad launched his harshest-yet crackdown on the opposition.

Political change in a "Syrian-led political process" is one of six points in the peace plan, spearheaded by Mr. Annan, which is first trying to secure an end to fighting between government and opposition forces by dispatching 300 monitors to supervise a cease-fire.

Forty U.N. monitors are on the ground, a number expected to triple by Thursday, according to Jihad Makdissi, spokesman for Syria's foreign ministry.

The full team is expected to be in place by the end of this month.

Both Syrian and U.N. officials have described the mission in positive terms, though opposition members have slammed it as an effort by Mr. Assad to buy time to crush them.

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Nadya Masidlover contributed to this article.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

08-05-12 0354GMT