Secretary Clinton delcares herself as leader for “Free Syria” Movement

Clinton: Syria Constitution vote a ‘ploy’
27 February, 2012 – UPI

DAMASCUS, Syria, Feb. 27 (UPI) — Results from a Syrian vote on a new constitution, roundly criticized in the West, will be available Monday, the Assad regime said as dozens died in fighting.

The results will be announced Monday evening, the official Syrian Arab News Agency said.

Interior Minister Mohammed Shaar was quoted by the state-run agency as saying the voting at more than 14,000 polling stations for multiparty elections and presidential term limits began at 7 a.m. local time and ran “normally” in most provinces, with turnout “huge … except in some areas.”

But The New York Times reported no voters appeared in the southern Damascus district of Ma’adamiah until about 1 p.m., and most of them were municipal workers.

Other polling places appeared deserted, the newspaper said.

Videos posted online by opposition groups purported to show people demonstrating against the vote throughout the country. One showed a poster saying, “We step on the new constitution.”

President Bashar Assad and his British-born wife Asma smiled and waved to cheering public employees as they voted at a polling station in the state-run broadcast center in Damascus, the capital, government TV images showed.

A 36-year-old woman who said she was from the same Alawite clan as Assad told the Times her vote meant a “new Syria.”

“This new constitution will shift Syria into the ranks of the democratic countries,” she said.

The new constitution, made public a couple of weeks ago despite Assad’s promises of constitutional reforms since at least June 2011, ends the ruling Baath Party’s political monopoly and introduces presidential term limits.

But the term limits — two terms of seven years each — would start only after Assad’s current term expires in 2014, the draft constitution says.
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