'Worldwide conspiracy' against Syria

Baath party says Syria victim of 'worldwide conspiracy'

Syria's long-dominant Baath party said the country was the victim of a "worldwide conspiracy" as it marked the 49th anniversary on Thursday of the coup that first brought it to power.

The Arab nationalist party's Syria regional command called for unity around President Bashar Al Assad to overcome the "significant challenges" the country faced.

"Syria will defeat the worldwide conspiracy which it is facing nowadays as it did other conspiracies in the past, through the will of the people, its national unity and the cohesion between its people, its leadership and the valiant Syrian army," it said in a statement.

"Syria now faces significant challenges and its strength lies in its unity and cohesion around... President Bashar al-Assad and in the fundamentals established by the new constitution," it added.

A February 26 referendum, which was boycotted by the opposition, approved changes to the constitution which ended the Baath party's half-century legal monopoly of power but left extensive powers in Assad's hands.

In a separate statement, the party's pan-Arab "national command" warned of a "foreign plot" by Arab and Western countries "seeking to exploit the peaceful, popular uprising demanding the just reforms endorsed by the party at its 10th Congress" in 2005.

The statement said those reforms would have been implemented far more swiftly had it not been for the upheavals sweeping the Middle East, notably "Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, as well as the hegemonic ambitions (of the United States) in the region which have affected Syria."

It accused "the United States, European countries and their Arab allies" of "stoking sectarian divisions" through the media and of distributing "weapons and money to encourage armed groups to sow chaos and destabilise Syria in order to divert attention from the (Arab-Israeli) conflict."
AFP