Assad keeps maneuvering

The president of Syria, Bashir al-Assad, has announced an offer to hold a referendum in March on reform of the Constitution, and legislative elections before the summer. And last weekend he decreed an amnesty for the "crimes," as the regime calls them, committed by the demonstrators arrested during the riots against Assad's rule.

These promises seem to be aimed at conveying the impression that the Syrian president is in fact complying with the agreement reached with the Arab League in December, aimed at pacifying the country and facilitating a political transition. The fact is, however, that these promises amount to no more than a new package of maneuvers to deactivate an opposition movement that has so far not been cowed by the regime's brutality.

The Syrian regime's repression has by no means abated in intensity, suggesting that Assad has found himself obliged to invent a plausible line of supposedly reformist rhetoric in which to wrap his invariable strategy of resorting to the army and to weapons of war to force the demonstrators to desist.

After several thousand deaths, and long months of protest, President Assad ought to have understood by now that he will never manage to restore an appearance of normality to the country by force. But he ought to have understood something more, which affects his regime's future and his own: at this stage of the game he is entirely lacking in legitimacy to lead the reforms he promises, even in the more than doubtful case that he has any intention of keeping his promises.

The opposition is still sticking to peaceful means, and if any shadow is beginning to take shape, it is that of the growing number of soldiers who are deserting from the ranks of the army, and who are stepping forward as partisans of armed resistance.

Catastrophe

Certainly no international organization has a moral right to demand of the demonstrators that they go on letting themselves be killed; but if Syria were to spiral downward into a civil war, this would be an immediate tragedy for the Syrians, and surely, in the longer term, a catastrophe for the country's democratization. A catastrophe if Assad were to win, because this would postpone such democratization indefinitely; and if he were to be defeated, because the massive suffering that has already been inflicted would make any positive political evolution conditional upon a very difficult reconciliation.

The situation of stagnation, indecision and stalemate in the bloody political tug-of-war Syria now stands may well degenerate into open civil war, if the international community does not manage to overcome its paralysis and force Assad to comply with what has been demanded by the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon: "Stop killing your country's people."