Syria: Bashar al-Assad defends ‘surgery’ on opposition

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has denied his government had anything to do with last week’s Houla massacre, saying not even “monsters” would carry out such an ugly crime.

Mr Assad said his country is facing a “real war” and blamed terrorists and extremists for the bloodshed in a televised speech to parliament yesterday.

He defended his regime’s crackdown against the opposition, likening it to a surgeon performing an operation.

“When a surgeon in an operating room... cuts and cleans and amputates, and the wound bleeds, do we say to him, ‘Your hands are stained with blood?’ Or do we thank him for saving the patient?”

He expressed horror over last week’s massacre in the central Houla region, which killed more than 100 people, nearly half of them children.

“If we don’t feel the pain that squeezes our hearts, as I felt it, for the cruel scenes – especially the children – then we are not human beings,” Mr Assad said in his first comments on the massacre. His last public address was in January.

Mr Assad, 46, denies that there is a popular will behind the uprising, saying foreign extremists and terrorists are driving the revolt.

His remarks suggest he is still standing his ground, despite widespread international condemnation over his deadly crackdown on dissent. His words reflected many of the same general points of his previous speeches – blaming terrorists and extremists, vowing to protect national security – and his comments on Houla were widely anticipated.

“We have to fight terrorism for the country to heal,” Mr Assad said.

“We will not be lenient. We will be forgiving only for those who renounce terrorism.”

The opposition and the government have exchanged accusations over the Houla killings, each blaming the other. UN investigators have said there are strong suspicions that pro-regime gunmen are responsible for at least some of the killings.

In his speech yesterday, Mr Assad ridiculed protesters over their calls for freedom.

“This freedom that they called for has turned into the [human] remains of our sons and this democracy that they talked about is now drowning in our blood,” he said.

“Today we are defending a cause and a country. We do not do this because we like blood. A battle has been forced on us, and the result is this bloodshed that we are seeing,” he said.

“It is a desperate and silly speech that does not merit a response,” said Adib Shishakly, a Saudi-based member of the country’s main opposition group, the Syrian National Council.

The revolt began last March with mostly peaceful protests, but a ferocious government crackdown led many in the opposition to take up arms. The conflict has morphed into an armed insurgency.

Mr Assad, who inherited power from his father in 2000, still has a firm grip on power 15 months into a revolt that has torn at the country’s fabric and threatened to undermine stability in the Middle East.

Activists say as many as 13,000 people have died in the violence. One year after the revolt began, the UN put the toll at 9,000, but hundreds more have died since. A ceasefire plan brokered by international envoy Kofi Annan is violated by both sides every day.