Dissidents in 'unprecedented' Damascus crisis meet

DAMASCUS: More than 100 dissidents held a public meeting in the Syrian capital on Monday they said was unprecedented in five decades of iron-fisted Baath party rule, after a deadly crackdown on street protests.

The opposition figures, all of them independent of any party affiliation, gathered in a Damascus hotel to discuss "how to solve the crisis" which has gripped Syria since mid-March.

They sang the national anthem and held a minute's silence for the "martyrs, both civilian and military" in the protests which have rocked the country since mid-March.

"We will talk so that we can formulate a national strategy on how to end Syria's current crisis," Abdel Karim Rihawi, president of the Syrian League for Human Rights, told AFP, stressing that the meeting was not intended to take the place of the "protesters in the street."

President Bashar al-Assad said the proposed dialogue could lead to a new constitution and even an end to his Baath party's monopoly of power.

But Assad said he refused to reform Syria under "chaos," drawing a pledge from the pro-democracy activists who have spearheaded the protests that their "revolution" would go on.

Demonstrators again took to the streets later the same day, meeting deadly violence from the security forces.

The Coordination Committee, an umbrella group of activists, said dialogue was pointless as long as Assad remained in power.

"We consider any dialogue useless that does not turn the page on the current regime," it said.

In the days since Assad's speech, the security forces have pressed their deadly sweep for dissidents towards Syria's borders sending around 11,000 refugees fleeing into Turkey and hundreds more in to Lebanon.

Some 300 students detained last week after a rare protest in Syria's second-largest city Aleppo have been charged with "sabotage" and "insulting the president," a human rights activist said Monday.

"The 304 students were brought before court yesterday (Sunday). They were arrested last week in Aleppo's University City," said Radif Mustafa, the chairman of the Kurdish Human Rights Committee.

"It is a new sign that the authorities are set on deepening the crisis rather than finding political solutions," he added.

Syrian military spokesman Major General Riad Haddad, said 1,300 members of the security forces had been killed in the revolt.

But foreign governments have refused to accept the contention that the protests are the work of armed gangs supported from abroad.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says 1,342 civilians have been killed in the government's crackdown and that 342 security force personnel have also died.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011