International
SANA / Handout / Reuters
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad announced a wide-ranging amnesty on Monday, less than a week after he was re-elected to another seven-year term in the midst of the country’s years-old civil war, but experts quickly dismissed the move as little more than “propaganda.”
In a decree published by state media, Assad commuted some death sentences to life imprisonment, reduced jail terms for many offenses and canceled some others altogether.
It was not clear how many prisoners, if any, would be freed after the decree. The official SANA news agency did not say if the amnesty would apply to the tens of thousands of opposition supporters and their relatives activists say are held in the country. However, SANA's report suggested it would reduce prisoners' sentences without freeing them.
“He’s doing this in the wake of his presidential election. That was a farce and again [this is] a propaganda effort,” Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of the blog Informed Comment, said.
Foreigners who entered the country "to join a terrorist group or perpetrate a terrorist act" would receive an amnesty if they surrender to authorities within a month, the decree said. Kidnappers who free their hostages and army deserters would also be covered.
Syria's pro-government Al Ikhbariya television station quoted the justice minister as saying that the presidential decree was issued in the "context of social tolerance and national unity." But Cole suggested that sentiment is not rooted in any earnestness.
“I just don’t see signs of seriousness in this regime of seeking any sort of reconciliation or peaceful way forward,” he said. “I think this is the kind of thing in the medieval period sometimes kings would do to get good PR. That’s how it should be seen.”
Assad has issued several amnesties since protests against his rule erupted in March 2011. The demonstrations triggered a crackdown by his security forces and the conflict descended into a civil war that has killed more than 160,000 people.
Opponents say only a fraction of detainees were released in previous amnesties, leaving many thousands of people – including political opponents and activists as well as ordinary criminals – in prison, where they say many are subjected to abuse. The same could hold true this time as well.
“[Assad] will let out some prisoners, but will try to be careful not to let out those who will go straight to the opposition and fight,” Joshua Landis, a Syria expert who authors the blog Syria Comment, said. “He did that during the beginning of the uprising. Many militia leaders come straight from his prisons.”
Former peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who stepped down at the end of May after the failure of peace talks in Geneva, said he had presented Assad with a list of prisoners whose release the opposition had demanded.
"He knows that there are 50,000 to 100,000 people in his jails and that some of them are tortured every day," Brahimi told the German magazine Der Spiegel in an interview published over the weekend.
Monday's decree set out several exemptions to the amnesty, without specifying which offenses were covered. However, it did say prisoners aged over 70 or suffering from incurable diseases would be freed. Drug and weapons smugglers would have their jail term reduced, as would prisoners convicted of economic crimes.
But ultimately, as Rami Khouri, columnist and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, put it, the move is not a sincere one.
"It is not a serious move in substantive political terms because most of Assad's troops and supporters and militias should be in jail for war crimes themselves," he said.
Philip J. Victor contributed to this report with wire services
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