BEIRUT — With his nation plunging toward civil war, Syrian President Bashar Assad said Wednesday that a nationwide referendum would be held this month on a new constitution that is the centerpiece of what he says is a plan to reform the country.
The opposition dismissed the announcement as an effort to buy time, and it was not clear how the a vote could be carried out in a country torn by violence. Large areas of Syria are no longer under government control.
The new constitution would enshrine freedom of speech and worship and end the current monopoly on power held by Assad’s Baath party, which has ruled for four decades. The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency said it could “turn Syria into an example to follow in terms of public freedoms and political plurality.”
Assad’s foes say the government regularly tramples rights guaranteed in the current constitution. They scoffed at the proposed changes as a sign of desperation.
“This shows Assad is living in an alternate reality,” said Rafif Jouejati, a U.S.-based spokeswoman for the Local Coordinating Committees, a Syrian opposition network. “It’s completely impractical.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney labeled the proposed referendum “laughable. … It makes a mockery of the Syrian revolution,” Carney said.
The referendum is probably meant in part to please Syria’s dwindling list of foreign allies, notably Russia, which along with China vetoed a Security Council resolution this month for Assad to give up power. Russia has pressed Assad to push ahead with reforms.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking in The Hague, Netherlands, called the plan for a referendum “a step forward.”
As Assad announced the referendum, a thick plume of smoke billowed from a fuel pipeline in the city of Homs, which has become a focus of the escalating conflict. The government and the opposition accused each other of attacking the pipeline in Syria’s third-largest city.
Opposition activists said the government had launched new assaults on Homs and other rebel strongholds. The opposition reported at least 32 people were killed across the country, reported Al-Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite network.
Syrians fleeing the violence have flooded into Lebanon, though not in the numbers the United Nations had expected. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has registered more than 6,000 Syrian refugees in Beirut and northern Lebanon and estimates 2,000 to 3,000 more are living in the Bekaa Valley, in eastern Lebanon.
Lebanese activists who have formed a coalition of groups to aid refugees estimated the number of Syrians that have fled since mass demonstrations against the Syrian government began nearly one year ago could be as high as 20,000. They said many of those don’t bother to register with the U.N. because they don’t need aid. Others avoid registering out of fear of being identified by the Syrian government.
At the U.N., diplomats were working on a General Assembly resolution condemning the Syrian government, which may come Thursday. General Assembly action carries less weight than a Security Council resolution, but cannot be vetoed.
