July 7, 2011
American Ambassador to Syria Visits Focal Point in Uprising
By NADA BAKRI
BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Robert S. Ford, the American ambassador to Syria, made an unannounced visit on Thursday to Hama, a central Syrian city that has become a focal point for the four-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Ford's visit came as security forces rounded up what some activists described as hundreds of people in the city and a day ahead of what are expected to be mass protests there.
Hama, the site of a 1982 massacre, [1] has emerged as a sharp challenge to Mr. Assad's leadership in recent weeks. Last Friday, tens of thousands of people gathered in a downtown square there in what activists described as the biggest protests since demonstrations started in Syria in mid-March. Since last Friday, youths have tried to organize makeshift defenses on the city's outskirts to deter the feared security forces.
Activists in Hama are bracing for the worst on Friday. Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, said security forces killed at least 16 people in a span of 48 hours this week as the government signaled that a relatively lenient approach with protests for much of June had ended.
Residents in Hama said that at least 20 people were wounded overnight Thursday, when security forces opened fire on them. It was not clear how the episodes occurred, but residents added that some of those hurt were in critical condition.
The State Department's spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said Mr. Ford traveled to Hama on his own in what Ms. Nuland described as a show of solidarity with the residents there. Mr. Ford had previously participated in a government-organized tour of the town of Jisr al-Shoughour in northern Syria after murky reports of clashes between armed militants or defectors, on one side, and soldiers, on the other, that left dozens dead.
Mr. Ford "spent the day expressing our deep support for the right of the Syrian people to assemble peacefully and to express themselves," Ms. Nuland said.
She said that Mr. Ford passed through several checkpoints run by the Syrian military and others run by Hama residents before he reached the city, where he reported meeting nervous residents and encountering a number of closed shops. Activists said that they had declared a general strike on Thursday to protest shootings there a day earlier. Mr. Ford also visited Hourani Hospital, where he met with injured people, Ms. Nuland said.
Ms. Nuland said that Mr. Ford was planning to remain in Hama on Friday.
Hama, a conservative Sunni Muslim city on the main corridor that links the capital, Damascus, with Homs and Aleppo, carries enormous symbolic weight. In 1982, government forces stormed the city to crack down on an Islamic opposition movement, killing at least 10,000 people and flattening parts of the old quarter. Some estimates put the number of dead at 20,000.
At a prayer this week in Hama, a group of people pledged to defend their city against a repeat of any government onslaught. Residents recalled the prayer leader saying, "We are not going to retreat. What happened to us in 1982 is not going to be repeated. That is why we are all in the street today, for 1982 not to be repeated."
Deir el-Zour, Syria's fifth largest city, is also expecting large protests on Friday, activists and antigovernment protesters said.
The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, called on Syria to allow international aid workers and investigators to enter the country to assess the humanitarian situation and to verify accounts of unarmed civilians caught up in the crackdown on antigovernment protests.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/21/world/syria-said-to-raze-part-of-rebel-city.html