Nervous Syrian regime pledging reforms

DARAA, Syria - The Syrian government pledged yesterday to consider lifting some of the Middle East's most repressive laws in an attempt to stop a weeklong uprising in a southern city from spreading and threatening its nearly 50-year rule.

The promises were immediately rejected by many activists who called for demonstrations around the country today in response to a crackdown that protesters say killed dozens of anti-government marchers in the city of Daraa.

"We will not forget the martyrs of Daraa," a resident told the Associated Press by telephone. "If they think this will silence us, they are wrong."

The coming days will be a crucial test of the surge of popular discontent that has unseated autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt and threatens to push several others from power.

On one side in Syria stands a regime unafraid of using extreme violence to quash internal unrest. In one infamous example, it leveled entire sections of the city of Hama with artillery and bulldozers to put down an uprising by the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in 1982.

Facing the regime is a loosely organized protest movement in the main city of southern Syria's drought-parched agricultural heartland.

Sheltering in Daraa's Roman-era old city, the protesters have persisted through seven days of increasing violence by security forces, but have not inspired significant unrest in other parts of the country.

"Even if the government can contain violence to Daraa for the time-being, protests will spread," Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, wrote in a recent blog posting. "The wall of fear has broken."

President Bashar Assad, a close ally of Iran and its regional proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, appears worried enough to promise increased freedoms for discontented citizens and increased pay and benefits for state workers - a familiar package of incentives offered by other nervous Arab regimes in recent weeks.

"To those who claim they want freedom and dignity for the [Syrian] people, I say to them we have seen the example of Iraq, the million martyrs there and the loss of security there," presidential adviser Buthaina Shaaban told reporters in the capital, Damascus, as she announced the promises of reform.