In toughest anti-Assad remarks, Jumblatt calls Syrian referendum “heresy”

National Struggle Front leader MP Walid Jumblatt slammed on Monday Syrian President Bashar Assad’s initiative to hold a new constitutional referendum, describing it as a “heresy”.   

“What a new heresy amid the smell of death, the dust of debris and the buzzing of bullets in Homs and in the absence of information on the fate of tens of thousands of missing and detained people,” he said.      

In his weekly column for Al-Anbaa daily, the PSP leader said that the referendum reminds him of “the theoretical lifting of the state of emergency amid the continuation of emergency on the ground, with new forms of torture”.    
“The most tyrannical regimes, from Stalin and Ceausescu to Saddam Hussein and other Arab rulers who left, unlamented, at least had the decency not to launch public referendums over seas of blood,” he added.    

Jumblatt also criticized Assad’s reference to “a conspiracy to divide Syria” as well as his repeated declarations that “the regime is here to stay even if Syria is divided.”   

Jumblatt reiterated his rejection to the official Lebanese stance on the Syrian developments, describing it as “ridiculous and convoluted under the slogan of ‘self-distancing’”, adding that “the political alignment within the Lebanese cabinet vis-à-vis the Syrian crisis is now reality.”   

In his concluding remarks, Jumblatt said that the time has come for the alignment within the Druze sect in Lebanon and Syria, in particular between the Assad supporters and the popular revolution supporters.