DAMASCUS, July 25, (Agencies): Syria’s government, under massive pressure to reform or quit, has adopted a draft law allowing for new political parties to operate alongside the ruling Baath party.
However, the crackdown on dissent forges on, with security forces deploying in their hundreds in the Damascus neighbourhood of Rukneddin on Monday to carry out searches and arrests while more tanks moved into Homs, activists said.
The cabinet late on Sunday “adopted a draft law regarding political parties in Syria as part of a programme of reform aimed at enriching the political life,” the official SANA news agency reported.
The aim is to create a “new dynamic and allowing for a change in political power” in Syria, one of the Middle East’s most autocratic countries which has been under Baath rule for nearly five decades.
Protesters defying the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in almost daily demonstrations since March 15 have been demanding democratic changes, including an end to Baath hegemony.
The current constitution stipulates that the Baath party, in power since 1963, is “the leader of state and society.”

According to SANA, the draft law adopted by the government bans the creation of parties based on “religion, tribal affiliation, regional interests” as well as those that discriminate along racial lines or gender.
The draft law also stipulates that “party organs should not comprise any military or paramilitary elements, whether public or secret” and that objectives and funding must be clearly established.
Prime Minister Adel Safar, who formed his government in April less than a month after the former premier quit in the face of anti-regime protests, in June named a committee tasked with drafting a law on political parties.
Also in April, Assad signed a decree to lift almost five decades of draconian emergency rule and abolish feared state security courts.
But the efforts of Assad, in power since replacing his father Hafez as president in 2000, failed to garner popular support and protests have rocked Syria for more than four months, calling on him to quit.
Security forces have pursued campaigns of arrests despite the lifting of the state of emergency.
The authorities have used deadly force to quell dissent, with at least 1,486 civilians reported killed since mid-March, human rights groups say.

The violence has also claimed the lives of 365 members of the security forces and driven thousands to flee to safety outside Syria, and at least 12,000 have been detained.
On Monday, hundreds of armed members of the security forces deployed in the Damascus neighbourhood of Rukneddin, searching homes and making arrests, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.
Tanks also deployed in force on Monday in several districts of the central city of Homs, where more than 50 people were killed last week.
On Sunday, troops “arrested nine people in the district of Hajar al-Aswad and many others in Sahnaya,” a suburb south of Damascus, the head of the London-based Observatory, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP in Nicosia by phone.
“Protesters demanding the fall of the regime marched on Sunday night in Hajar al-Aswad... in response to a campaign of arrests carried out earlier by the army in the capital,” he said.
“More than 300 lawyers gathered at the courthouse in Damascus calling for the release of arrested lawyers and prisoners of conscience,” he added.
Meanwhile the head of the National Organisation for Human Rights, Ammar Qorabi, told AFP on Monday that the authorities arrested a seven-year-old boy three days ago in Daraa — southern hub of four months of anti-regime protests.

Qorabi said there has been no news about Naeem Fadl since his arrest.
He also voiced concern over the fate of Ahmed Abazid, 13, who was seized at the onset of the protests along with other boys for writing graffiti on walls calling for the fall of the regime.
Meanwhile, Germany said diplomats have met Syrian opposition figures in Damascus and Berlin in recent weeks as the European Union demands an end to the crackdown on protesters.
Berlin’s coordinator for Middle East policy, Boris Ruge, met both opposition members and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem on two occasions, foreign ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said.
Germany is one of the first Western countries to announce direct contacts with the Syrian opposition, which has held several meetings in Turkey.
At their July 18 meeting in Brussels, EU foreign ministers pressed Assad to implement reforms or stand aside as they threatened more sanctions.
Syrian activists said protesters will intensify demonstrations demanding the end of President Bashar al-Assad’s rule during Ramadan, taking advantage of more people gathering in mosques during the Islamic month of fasting.

“The protesters in Syria are planning on having much bigger demonstrations in Ramadan because people stay up late during the month and more people go to mosques,” Syrian human rights and political activist Ammar al-Qurabi told Reuters.
Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic calendar marked with fasting and prayer, will start on Aug 1. Large protests are expected nightly as Syrians filter into the streets after evening prayers.
The authorities have so far been silent about the prospect of more frequent protests during the fasting month. One Damascus resident told Reuters the police presence around mosques had increased recently and was expected to rise during Ramadan.
“Each day of Ramadan will be like a Friday. It will be like thirty Fridays, one after the other,” Mohamed, a 26-year-old law student who takes to the street every Friday, the Muslim day of rest and prayer, which has become the main opportunity for protesters to gather.
“Every day in Ramadan will see small protests during the day and huge sit-ins at night. We’re organising for a big push during Ramadan to get people out on the streets,” he added.
Activists and anti-Assad residents hope that Ramadan will act as a catalyst to embolden the pro-democracy movement, which started in March.
“Ramadan is a game changer,” a Western diplomat in Damascus told Reuters.

Egypt
A Cairo court on Monday decided to merge the trials of former president Hosni Mubarak and ex-interior minister Habib al-Adly, both accused of killing protesters during an uprising that toppled the regime.
The decision came as former prime minister Ahmed Nazif was charged in a corruption case by military prosecutors, in the first case of a former regime official facing military justice.
Judge Adel Gomaa told the Cairo criminal court that Adly and his six deputies would be tried on August 3, together with Mubarak and his two sons Alaa and Gamal, and businessman Hussein Salem who is currently abroad.
Adly, who has already been sentenced to 12 years for corruption, appeared in the dock in the first of his trials to be shown on state television.
Hundreds of protesters, including families of victims who died during the revolt, turned out for the trial of the once-feared minister, throwing stones at the convoy of vans driving him away.
Mubarak was thought to be likely tried in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, where he is in custody in hospital being treated for a heart condition.
But the merger of the two trials could well see the trial back in Cairo.
Activists say they will be pushing for an announcement on the venue.
Former prime minister Nazif meanwhile was charged and ordered detained for 15 days for squandering public money and seizing state-owned land, the official MENA news agency reported.
Nazif is being investigated along with the former governor of Luxor Samir Farag and businessman Mamduh Qoleib.
The public prosecutors decided to transfer the case to their military counterparts because Farag is a retired army general, the source said.
In July, Nazif was given a one-year suspended sentence for unlawful gains in a business deal worth 92 million Egyptian pounds (15 million dollars.)

Nazif is currently in prison, pending investigation into other corruption trials.
Several former ministers, officials and businessmen associated with the old regime are currently on trial, after the ruling military vowed it would bring to justice all those found guilty of abuse.
But the process has been slammed as slow and activists have been pushing for public trials.
After the spectacular fall of Mubarak, protesters are still demonstrating for an end to the military trial of civilians, the speedy trial of officials, and the redistribution of wealth.
Protesters who took to the streets to demand Mubarak’s resignation have increasingly turned their anger towards the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) which took power when Mubarak was toppled in February.
They have accused the military council of stifling dissent and slowing down the pace of reform.
Hundreds of protesters were still camped out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and vowed to continue pushing for change.
On Saturday, fierce battles erupted between protesters and army loyalists leaving 231 injured.
The clashes came hours after Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the head of SCAF and Mubarak’s long-time defence minister, pledged in a television address to work for a free system through fair elections and a constitution.
But the military rulers had also accused the April 6 movement, that helped launch the January 25 uprising, of “driving a wedge between the people and the army”.

Libya
Libya’s regime accused NATO of killing at least seven people Monday in an air raid on a medical clinic in Zliten, east of Tripoli, after rebels repulsed a counter-attack by loyalist troops south of the capital.
The strike on the small clinic for communicable diseases occurred between 8:00 and 8:30 am (0600-0630 GMT), a local official told an AFP correspondent among a group of foreign journalists on a guided tour of the western town.
The journalists saw a completely destroyed building with a crescent sign at its entrance and ground littered with surgical gloves, oxygen bottles, pharmaceuticals and stretchers, but no victims.
Five ambulances were on standby as rescue teams scoured the rubble for other possible victims.
The reporters were also taken to another part of Zliten where they were shown three damaged food storage buildings and another still on fire, which the government minders also blamed on NATO.
Strewn around the site were hundreds of smouldering bags of rice, tomatoes and vegetable oil, as firefighters tried to extinguish the flames.
Residents said the strike occurred at around 3:00 am (0100 GMT).
In the same compound, journalists saw a completely destroyed building bearing the name “Agricultural Security.”

The minders spoke of other air strikes that caused “civilian casualties” early Monday, but did not elaborate.
Zliten lies about 150 kms (100 miles) east of Tripoli, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s stronghold, and 60 kms (35 miles) from the rebel-held coastal enclave of Misrata, Libya’s third city.
The tour of Zliten came after rebel forces repulsed a counter-offensive by Gaddafi loyalists southwest of the capital.
Regime troops had attacked the western desert hamlet of Gualish on Sunday and shelled the region before pulling back under rebel rocket fire as NATO warplanes flew overhead, an AFP correspondent reported.
Rebels in Gualish said they had prevented regime forces from getting within at least a kms (less than a mile) of the hamlet, and that they had been reinforced from Zintan, their base in western Libya.
The insurgents, who have been fighting to oust Gaddafi since mid-February, recaptured Gualish this month and are planning to use it as a springboard for a western assault on Tripoli.
They said their campaign to attack the capital from the east has been slowed by efforts to remove an estimated 45,000 land mines from around the oil town of Brega.
“We have no choice. We have to clear the sand of mines,” Mohammed Zawawy, a spokesman for the Union of Revolutionary Forces in Ajdabiya, told AFP.
Rebels have captured up to 20 regime troops since they seized Brega on July 18, he said, adding one prisoner claimed loyalists had sown “over 45,000 mines” there.

“The front line is calm with no fighting yet because the focus is on demining,” said Zawawy, estimating the number of Gaddafi troops inside Brega at no more than 1,000 as “the fire from their side is a lot less.”
The rebels, he said, were demining an average of “200 mines per day” and would only be able to move faster if they received additional help, including equipment and expertise.
In the capital itself, Gaddafi’s compound came under NATO air attack on Sunday.
“British forces... helped to maintain the pressure on Colonel Gaddafi’s regime by bombing a key intelligence building in Tripoli and inflicting further losses on forces massed against the Libyan people at Zliten and Gharyan,” British military spokesman Nick Pope said.
Tornado and Typhoon warplanes on Sunday struck an engineering academy that has “long been a cover for the regime’s nefarious activities,” he said in the statement issued in London on Monday.
“Also on Sunday morning, other RAF jets successfully attacked two staging posts near Zliten being used to muster tanks, rocket artillery and ammunition.”
In its latest operational update on Monday, NATO said it struck one tank in Zintan, and another tank and a multiple rocket launcher in nearby Gharyan.

It also took out another tank, a surface-to-air missile launcher and a military storage facility in Tripoli, and another such facility in Brega.
The strikes came after rebels said they had infiltrated Tripoli and attacked a regime command post where a son of Gaddafi, Seif al-Islam, was among those targeted, seriously injuring a high-ranking security official.
Tripoli denied the attack, with spokesman Mussa Ibrahim saying the rebels were losing in the east and southwest, and were trying “to boost their morale with lies and small victories.”
Gaddafi said Saturday the unrest was a “colonial plot,” and denied accusations by rights groups of a brutal suppression of dissent and allegations his regime had killed thousands of protesters.
Meanwhile, Ibrahim al-Furis, a Libyan diplomat declared persona non grata in Bulgaria, refused on Monday to leave the country and with other staff organised a minor rebellion at the embassy in Sofia, denouncing Gaddafi’s regime.
Muammar Gaddafi and his family can stay in Libya as part of a political deal to end the five-month-old war provided they give up power, a senior rebel leader was on Monday quoted as saying.
Opposition leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil told the Wall Street Journal that the Libyan leader and his family could stay in the country as long as rebel leaders can decide where and under what conditions they remain.

Jalil’s offer appeared to be a significant reversal for the Libyan opposition leader, who is chairman of the rebels’ Transitional National Council, based in Benghazi. Until now, the rebels have insisted that Gaddafi must leave.
“Gaddafi can stay in Libya but it will have conditions,” Jalil said. “We will decide where he stays and who watches him. The same conditions will apply to his family.”
Jalil appeared to be backing up comments by US, Italian and French officials in recent days, the Journal said.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Wednesday that Gaddafi could remain in Libya as long as he gives up power.
The United States and Italy have said Gaddafi must be removed from power, but his fate is up to the Libyan people, leaving open the possibility that he remain in Libya.

Yemen
Yemen’s opposition dismissed on Monday a government plan for talks aimed at easing unrest after months of mass protests demanding President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s overthrow, saying it had not even heard of any such “roadmap” for peace.
Vice President Abd-Rabbu Hadi Mansour, who is acting president while Saleh remains in a Saudi Arabian hospital after an assassination attempt, said on Sunday that a road map would be launched within a week.

Government spokesman Tareq al-Shami told Reuters the plan would centre on talks with the opposition. “The roadmap is based on all sides gathering at the dialogue table and discussing all the issues,” he said.
But the opposition repeated its refusal to talk to the government until Saleh signs a transition plan brokered by Gulf Arab states which the 69-year-old president has backed out of signing three times.
“We knew nothing about the idea of a road map. There is no such thing, and we have decided not to enter any dialogue until the Gulf initiative is signed or power is transferred to the vice president,” said Mohammed Basindwa, a leader in Yemen’s political opposition coalition.
Saleh is trying to cling to power after 33 years in office despite a bomb attack in June that severely wounded him and forced him to seek treatment in Riyadh. He has frustrated opposition hopes that he would concede defeat, instead vowing to return to Yemen and lead a national dialogue.
The United States and Saudi Arabia, both targets of foiled attacks by al-Qaeda’s Yemen-based wing, have warily watched unrest rise as Yemen remains mired in political deadlock. They worry the turmoil gives more room to al-Qaeda to operate.

But Yemen’s wealthy Gulf Arab neighbours and Washington have so far been unwilling or unable to force Saleh into a transition plan. Some have welcomed the proposals for dialogue, but the political opposition and protesters in the street have vowed to resist, insisting on Saleh’s overthrow amid growing chaos.
In the south, tribesmen on Monday said they routed militants from parts of the capital of the flashpoint Abyan province. Zinjibar lies east of a key shipping channel where some 3 million barrels of oil pass daily, and is one of several areas in Abyan seized by militants in recent months.
The tribes began backing a military operation to recapture Zinjibar in recent weeks, after accusing the army of being ineffective.
A tribal source said fierce clashes on Monday sent many militants fleeing north to Lawdar, where they were repelled again. Six militants were wounded and four others captured, he said.
Some 90,000 civilians have fled Abyan to escape violence as the army and tribesmen confront militants the government says have links to al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, an army brigade in Abyan, whose base has been attacked by militants since neighbouring Zinjibar was seized in May, sent a plea to the military for more provisions.
The besieged 25th brigade had called on Sanaa earlier this month to send reinforcements, who have since broken part of a militants’ blockade around the base. An officer said despite the dwindling supplies, the troops had not given up their fight.
“Our food supplies are starting to run out. We need more provisions; we only have a small amount left,” said an officer. “But we are steadfast against the militants.”

Bahrain
Participants in a Bahraini national dialogue, set up to address grievances after protests earlier this year, have proposed expanding the powers of the Gulf kingdom’s elected parliament, the state news agency said.
The talks, which ended on Sunday, were designed to propose reforms after a four-month crackdown by Sunni rulers that began in March and crushed weeks of protests led by the Shi’ite majority demanding a greater role in government.
But critics say the results of the dialogue may carry little weight since the country’s largest Shi’ite opposition group, Wefaq, walked out of the dialogue last week.
Delegates at the dialogue’s final session agreed to give Bahrain’s elected lower council greater legislative and monitoring powers, the state news agency BNA said. The opposition has complained that the upper Shura council, which is appointed by the king, limits the influence of the elected parliament.
“Overall, these decisions reinforce the parliament’s powers of scrutiny over the activities of the government, strengthening the accountability of ministers to the elected representatives of the people,” BNA said.
No information was given on exactly how the parliament would extend monitoring authorities or wield greater legislative powers, but dialogue officials said the proposals would be submitted to the king this week.

Wefaq pulled out of the talks last Sunday, complaining that its views were not being taken seriously and that it was not fairly represented. It has criticised dialogue officials for only giving political opposition groups 35 out of 300 seats at the talks.
The government said it distributed seats in a way that fairly represented all of Bahraini society, including delegates from the government, opposition groups, unions, women’s societies and other professionals.
Bahrain has tried to address international criticism, including from its long-time US ally, for its handling of the crackdown.
s that hit the Gulf island kingdom earlier this year, activists said on Monday.
Mohammed Buflasa, a Sunni Muslim who joined the protests led mostly by the country’s Shi’ite majority, was arrested in February after he gave a speech at the Pearl Roundabout, the epicentre of the demonstrations until Bahrain’s Sunni rulers crushed them in March.

Buflasa returned home late on Sunday, and waved from the roof of his home to clapping crowds chanting his name, You Tube videos showed. Some of those present at the celebrations told Reuters the gathering had both Sunnis and Shi’ites present.
Reports that the fifth fleet of the US forces left Bahrain territorial waters are “false”, said Bahraini King Media Advisor Nabil Yagoub Al-Hamar on Monday.
The advisor made the remark during a meeting with Kuwaiti Ambassador to Bahrain Sheikh Azzam Mubarak Al-Sabah in Manama, and said US officials had themselves refuted these reports.
The official also stressed that the Kingdom of Bahrain had overcome the critical circumstances which surfaced recently.
Ambassador Azzam Al-Sabah for his part wished the kingdom and the Bahraini people prosperity and stability, and also noted there is constant development in the already strong relations between the two nations.