BEIRUT, Lebanon — President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, sounding defiant, confident, and, to critics, out of touch with the magnitude of his people’s grievances, proposed on Sunday what he called a plan to resolve the country’s 21-month uprising with a new constitution and cabinet.
Andoni Lubaki/Associated Press
Fuel was sold on a street in Aleppo, Syria, on Saturday. The country's largest city -- hobbled by shortages of oil, food, medicine, doctors and gas -- has been plunged into disaster by the war.
Reuters
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria spoke at the Opera House in Damascus on Sunday.
But he offered no new acknowledgment of the gains by the rebels fighting against him, the excesses of his government or the aspirations of the Syrian people. Mr. Assad also ruled out talks with the armed opposition and pointedly ignored its central demand that he step down, instead using much of a nearly hourlong speech to justify his harsh military crackdown.
Mr. Assad waved to a cheering, chanting crowd as he strode to the stage of the Damascus Opera House in the capital’s central Umayyad Square — where residents said security forces had deployed heavily the night before. In his first public speech since June 2012, he repeated his longstanding assertions that the movement against him was driven by “murderous criminals” and foreign-financed terrorists, and appeared to push back hard against recent international efforts to broker a compromise.
“Everyone who comes to Syria knows that Syria accepts advice but not orders,” he said. His speech came a week after the United Nations envoy on the Syrian crisis, the senior Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, visited Damascus in a push for a negotiated solution.
“Who should we negotiate with — terrorists?” Mr. Assad said. “We will negotiate with their masters.”
Mr. Assad’s speech was a disappointment for international mediators and many Syrians who believe that without a negotiated settlement Syria’s conflict will descend into an even bloodier stage. The United Nations estimates that more than 60,000 people have died in what began as a peaceful protest movement and transformed into armed struggle after security forces fired on demonstrators.
Rebels have made gains in the north and east of Syria and in the Damascus suburbs, but Mr. Assad’s government has pushed back with devastating air and artillery strikes and appears confident that it can hold the capital; neither side appears ready to give up the prospect of a military victory.
The tenor of Mr. Assad’s speech will likely raise the question of whether Mr. Brahimi’s mission serves any purpose; there was no immediate comment from him or his staff.
Mr. Assad’s opponents rejected the proposal as meaningless, sticking to their longstanding demand that the president resign as a precondition to negotiations.
“We can’t deal with this murderous regime at all,” George Sabra, a member of the opposition Syrian National Coalition, said in a brief interview. “This regime has killed 60,000 people, so no one could possibly think that working with this regime is a possibility. It is out of the question.”
Mr. Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for 42 years, said Sunday that he was open to dialogue with “those who have not betrayed Syria,” a likely reference to tolerated opposition groups that reject armed revolution, such the National Coordinating Body for Democratic Change, whose members have been floated by Syria’s allies China and Russia as possible compromise brokers.
Yet Mr. Assad’s speech appeared unlikely to satisfy even those among his opponents who reject the armed rebellion, since it made no apology for the arrests of peaceful activists or for airstrikes that have destroyed neighborhoods. Mr. Assad gave no sign of acknowledging that the movement against him was anything more than a foreign plot or had any goals other than to inflict suffering and destroy the country.
“They killed the intellectuals in order to afflict ignorance on us,” Mr. Assad said. “They attacked the infrastructure in order to make our life difficult, they deprived children from school in order to bring the country backward.”
He added: “The enemies of the people are the enemies of God, and the enemies of God will burn in hell.”
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Assad, in Speech, Says Syria ‘Accepts Advice but Not Orders’
