Syrian President Bashar al-Assad issued a general amnesty on Tuesday, state television said, after ten weeks of protests against his 11-year rule and a military crackdown which has drawn international condemnation.
The amnesty covers “all members of political movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood”, it said. Membership of the Brotherhood, which led an armed uprising against Assad’s father in 1982, is punishable by death in Syria.
Assad’s move was the latest in a series of reforms — including lifting a 48-year state of emergency and granting citizenship to stateless Kurds in eastern Syria — aimed at addressing the grievances of protesters.
But those steps have been accompanied by a ruthless military crackdown in which rights campaigners say 1,000 civilians have been killed and more than 10,000 people arrested.
Khalaf Ali Khalaf, an organiser of a Syrian opposition conference taking place in Turkey, said the amnesty “comes too late to appease the street, like vague and halfhearted promises for reform that preceded it.”
Asked about the promised amnesty, the United States said Assad needed to take concrete action.
“He has talked reform but we have seen very little in the way of action… he needs to take steps — concrete steps, not rhetoric — to address what is going on in the country,” U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.
Activists said at least five people were killed on Tuesday when tanks shelled the central town of Rastan and security forces stormed Hirak, a town in the southern Hauran Plain where the uprising first broke out in mid-March.
Syria blames the violence on armed groups, Islamists and foreign agitators, saying more than 120 police and soldiers have been killed in the unrest nationwide.
The official SANA news agency said two soldiers were killed in an operation to arrest “armed terrorist groups” in Rastan. It quoted a military source saying army and security forces seized weapons and ammunition in Rastan and killed or injured “a number of armed terrorists”.
The United States, which has called Assad’s repression of protests “barbaric, and the European Union, have announced sanctions against the president and senior Syrian officials.
