Beleaguered Syrian president attacks ‘vandals and saboteurs’

The opposition immediately dismissed Bashar Assad’s plan, saying it lacked any clear move toward democracy while thousands of people took to the streets to protest in several cities.

Assad’s 70-minute, televised address was only his third public speech since the pro-democracy uprising began in March, inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.

Much of his message was not new, including his claim that the unrest was being driven by armed thugs and foreign conspirators.

“Saboteurs” were trying to exploit legitimate demands for reform, he said.

“What is happening today has nothing to do with reform. It has to do with vandalism,” Assad told supporters at Damascus University, where he stood before red, white and black Syrian flags. “There can be no development without stability, and no reform through vandalism.”

But he also announced a “national dialogue” would start soon and said a committee was being set up to study constitutional amendments, including one that would open the way for formation of political parties other than the ruling Baath Party.

He said he expects a package of reforms by September or the end of the year at the latest. The vague timetable and few specifics – and lack of any clear move toward ending the Assad family’s 40-year rule – left Syrian dissidents deeply dissatisfied.

“It did not give a vision about beginning a new period to start a transfer from a dictatorship into a national democratic regime with political pluralism,” Hassan Abdul-Azim, a prominent opposition figure, said.

Omar Idilbi, a spokesman for the Local Co-ordination Committees, which tracks the protest movement, said the speech drove thousands of opposition supporters into the streets, calling for the downfall of the regime.

The opposition estimates more than 1,400 Syrians have been killed and 10,000 detained as Assad unleashed his military, pro-regime gunmen and the country’s other security forces to crush the protest movement. The deadly crackdown has only fuelled the protests, in which tens of thousands have insisted they will accept nothing less than the regime’s downfall.

Assad, 45, who inherited power in 2000 after his father’s death, has made a series of overtures to try to ease the growing outrage, lifting the decades-old emergency laws that give the regime a free hand to arrest people without charge and granting Syrian nationality to thousands of Kurds, a long-ostracised minority.

But the overtures did nothing to sap the movement’s momentum. Protesters dismissed them as either symbolic or coming far too late.

Assad warned the country’s economy will take a beating unless the unrest ends – a message aimed at his supporters in the business community and prosperous merchant classes.

“The most dangerous thing we face in the coming period is the weakness or the collapse of the Syrian economy,” he said.

“We want the people to back to reforms but we must isolate true reformers from saboteurs,” he said.

International pressure on the regime has been mounting steadily and nearly 11,000 people have fled into neighbouring Turkey with others fleeing into Lebanon in an embarrassing spectacle for one of the most tightly controlled countries in the Middle East.

Assad urged the refugees to return home, saying there would be no retaliation against them.