Excerpt
Rejecting the Syrian president’s latest effort to mollify them, thousands of protesters took to the streets in cities and towns across Syria on Sunday, using a national holiday commemorating the end of French colonialism to widen their challenge to his family’s iron-fisted autocracy. Security officers responded with deadly force, witnesses reported, including live ammunition fired at a funeral and the seizure of critically wounded demonstrators from a hospital.
The protests on Sunday amounted to a brazen dismissal of the steps outlined by the president, Bashar al-Assad, only a day earlier in a televised address, notably the lifting of the country’s 48-year-old state of emergency before the end of this week. The protests have posed an unprecedented challenge to the rule of Mr. Assad, who has clearly been shaken by the upheavals that have felled longstanding governments in Tunisia and Egypt and are threatening those in Yemen, Bahrain and Libya.
The Syrian protests coincided with new disclosures that the United States began in 2005 to secretly finance some Syrian opposition groups intent on toppling Mr. Assad. The disclosures, in diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, showed State Department funding for Barada TV, an anti-Assad satellite broadcaster run by Syrian exiles in London, as well as concern by American diplomats in Syria that Syrian intelligence agents began to suspect the American financing two years ago.
It was unclear whether the secret financing has since been ended, but an April 2009 cable said a State Department program called the Middle East Partnership Intiative was to have distributed $12 million to an array of Syrian projects by September 2010. The existence of the cables was first reported Sunday night on The Washington Post’s Web site.
A September 2009 cable reported on a Syrian crackdown against groups and individuals that had received American funding.
"Over the past six months, SARG security agents have increasingly questioned civil society and human rights activists about U.S. programming in Syria and the region," said the cable, using the acronym for Syrian Arab Republic government. It said some media figures had been interrogated about funding and that an imprisoned human rights lawyer, Muhanad al-Hasani, faced new charges for illegally receiving United States government funding.
“It is unclear to what extent SARG intelligence services understand how USG money enters Syria and through which proxy organizations," the cable said, using an acronym for United States government. “What is clear, however, is that security agents are increasingly focused on this issue when they interrogate human rights and civil society activists.”
American funding for political training and other pro-democracy initiatives has been the longtime subject of complaints from several Arab governments in the past, notably including that of Hosni Mubarak, the ousted Egyptian president.
Mr. Assad has sought to suppress outside reporting on the protests in Syria, while his response to the protests themselves has oscillated between dry proposals for reform and deadly violence, and on Sunday it appeared violence was the choice. Clashes between security forces and protesters left at least five dead and dozens injured on the holiday, meant to celebrate the removal of the last French troops from Syria in 1946.
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