Is it me… or are these becoming more frequent?

Hundreds of demonstrators have rallied outside Syria’s feared state security court, chanting for freedom and demanding an end to the 42-year-old state of emergency.

“Long live liberty,” the protestors on Sunday chanted in Arabic and Kurdish as the trials of three Kurdish activists got under way. “We want democracy ??????? End the emergency laws”.

The authorities dispatched 15 riot police to the courthouse, but they did not intervene.

Placards brandished by the demonstrators demanded the release of political prisoners, many of them members of Syria’s 1.5 million-strong Kurdish minority.

Pictures of Kurdish cleric Shaikh Mohammed Mashuq al-Jaznawi figured prominently. The shaikh has not been seen since he left the Islamic Studies Centre in Damascus on Tuesday, said rights lawyer Anwar Bunni.
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Kurdish activists say they have been hit by a fresh wave of arrests in recent weeks after the major crackdown of last year.

“This new wave of arrests … flies in the face of the amnesty for 312 Kurdish prisoners announced by President (Bashar al-Assad) on March 30,” the leader of the Kurdish Yakiti party, Hassen Saleh, told Al-Arabiya television on Thursday.

“Despite the amnesty, more than 100 Kurds detained in last year’s crackdown remain in jail,” Saleh said.

The Kurds, who make up about 9% of Syria’s largely Arab population, have been campaigning for recognition of their language and respect for their civil rights.

Condi Rice has had some choice words for Assad’s regime as well.

Rice suggested she will try to capitalize on momentum from Syria’s withdrawal of its troops from Lebanon this spring.

“The Syrians are under a lot of international pressure now because of Lebanon,” Rice said. “And the reason that the Syrians are under pressure is they are really out of step with the rest of the region.”

Beyond undermining Iraq’s political progress, Syria supports opponents of a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians and is trying to keep a hand in Lebanon as that country moves toward contested elections this month, Rice said.

“So the Syrians have managed to get themselves in the situation of standing in the way of progress of people in the Middle East, and I would think that wouldn’t be a very comfortable place for a Syrian regime to be.”

Is that a threat of the diplomatic kind? Oh, I think it is!