regime rallies held Assad pledges to scrap emergency laws DAMASCUS: Facing an extraordinary wave of popular dissent, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad fired his Cabinet Tuesday and promised to end widely despised emergency laws. The overtures, while largely symbolic, are a moment of rare compromise in the Assad family's 40 years of rule. They came as the government mobilized hundreds of thousands of supporters in rallies in the capital and elsewhere, in an effort to show it has wide popular backing. But with the protests that erupted March 18, thousands of Syrians appear to have broken through a barrier of fear in this tightly controlled nation of 23 million. “Syria stands at a crossroads,” said Aktham Nuaisse, a leading human rights activist. “Either the president takes immediate, drastic reform measures, or the country descends into one of several ugly scenarios. If he is willing to lead Syria into a real democratic transformation, he will be met halfway by the Syrian people,” Nuaisse said. The coming days will be key to determining whether Assad's concessions will quiet the protest movement, which began after security forces arrested several teenagers who scrawled anti-government graffiti on a wall in the impoverished city of Daraa in the south. The protests spread to other provinces and the government launched a swift crackdown, killing more than 60 people since March 18, according to Human Rights Watch. However, the violence has eased in the past few days and some predict the demonstrations might quickly die out if the president's promises appear genuine. “People are tired from all this pressure and violence and I think if he (Assad) shows he's taken the people's demands seriously, they might stop,” said a protester in Daraa who gave only his first name, Ibrahim. “We're all waiting for his speech.” Still, tensions remained high in Daraa, where several hundred people were still staging a sit-in Tuesday, and in the port city of Latakia. So far, few in Syria have publicly called on Assad to step down. Most are calling for reforms, annulling emergency laws and other stringent security measures and an end to corruption.
