SYRIA - Assad Dismissive of Arab League

"Syria's Assad Dismisses Arab League's Peace Plan" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 1/23/2012

GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Ten months after it began, the conflict in Syria continues unabated. An anti-government group reported 23 more people were killed today.

Ray Suarez has more on developments in Syria and the Arab world's search for an end to the violence.

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): The Syrian government today four rejected a peace plan adopted at this Arab League meeting yesterday in Cairo. The plan called for forming a unity government in Syria within two months that would be followed by supervised parliamentary and presidential elections, and President Bashar al-Assad would hand over his powers to the country's vice president during the transition period. The European Union endorsed the plan today, and so did the U.S. State Department.

VICTORIA NULAND, State Department spokeswoman: They made a concrete proposal in line with the leadership that they have been showing on the Syria issue for many weeks now about how this could happen. Regrettably, Assad rejected it, almost before the ink was dry. And this just speaks again to the fact that he's thinking about himself and his cronies, not about his people.

RAY SUAREZ: The Arab League also agreed to extend its observer mission in Syria for another month. But the monitor's presence has been criticized for failing to stop the Syrian government's violent campaign against protesters.

Meanwhile in Syria, this amateur video showed a mass gathering today in Duma just outside Damascus. Thousands turned out to mourn nearly a dozen residents killed in clashes over the weekend.

"Syria's Assad: How Powerful, Dangerous Is He Now?" (Part-2)
PBS Newshour 1/23/2012


Excerpt

ANDREW TABLER, Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Government tries to reassert. The problem is, you have hundreds of thousands of people coming back out. Assad can't put this genie back in the bottle. He's been trying over and over again for over 10 months. And he simply can't do it. The security solution isn't working. He isn't able to reform his way out of it. He's in a real dictator's dilemma. And I don't think he knows how to get out of it.