Time running out for Syria’s Assad: Clinton

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Time is running out for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said on Friday amid reports of anti-regime protests in the country’s second city Aleppo.

Clinton, who spoke on a visit to Lithuania, criticised the regime’s incoherence in authorising an opposition meeting and cracking down on political dissent.

“It doesn’t appear that there is a coherent and consistent message coming from Syria. Allowing one meeting of the Opposition in Damascus is not sufficient,” Clinton told reporters after meeting with Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite.

“I’m just hurt by recent reports of continuing violence on the border and in Aleppo, where demonstrators have been beaten, attacked with knives by government-organised groups and security forces,” Clinton said.

“It is absolutely clear that the Syrian Government is running out of time. There isn’t any question about that,” she added.

She said that unless Syrian authorities allow a “serious political process”, they would “continue to see increasingly organised resistance”.

“We regret the loss of life and we regret the violence but this choice is up to the Syrian Government,” she said.

“And right now we’re looking for actions not words, and we haven’t seen enough of that,” she added.

Clinton arrived in Vilnius on Thursday for a two-day meeting of the Community of Democracies, an informal grouping of more than a hundred nations created in 2000 to bolster democratic norms worldwide.