DAMASCUS - Syria's ruling Baath party is set to authorize new political parties and free local elections during its national congress this week although hefty restrictions are likely to accompany the reforms, a member said Sunday.
The first Baath party congress in five years comes as the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is under increasing pressure at home and abroad over allegations of supporting terror, missile tests over Turkey and a clampdown on dissidents.
Ayman Abdel Nur, a self-described "reformer" and Baath party member, told AFP the June 6-9 congress would propose free local elections in 2007 and a new law on political parties, allowing them to form as long as they are not "religion- or ethnic-based."
The two main opposition groups in Syria are Islamists and the minority Kurdish population but the Baath is the only legal movement.
Any new party would have to have branches in every region of Syria and collect a minimum of 10,000 to 15,000 member signatures, Nur said, a restriction that would likely prevent the formation of a Kurdish party because most of the country's 1.5 million Kurds live in the northeast.
Scores of Kurds and political dissidents were detained by Syrian security forces in recent weeks, including some opposition members of a political discussion forum who were arrested for reportedly spreading Islamist propaganda. Syria released them days later.
In April, the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group banned since an armed uprising in the 1980s that marked the biggest challenge to the Damascus regime to date, renewed its call for free elections and an end to the state of emergency.
Syria's emergency law has been in effect since 1963 and gives sweeping powers to state security forces.
Nur said the congress is to adopt a motion proposing "either the continuation or elimination of emergency laws and the state security court."
However, he said, the congress will not amend Article 8 of the Syrian constitution, which says the Baath party is "leader of society and the state," an article that serves as the government's economic and political power base.
Nur said the congress will call for "greater freedom and economic exchange, opening markets and encouraging foreign investments," in a country that suffers from 22 percent unemployment.
He said the congress may also pass a law allowing independent news web sites, television and radio stations to operate. Nur's website, "All For Syria," was shut down by authorities last May.
The Baath party, which means "resurrection" in Arabic, is founded on notions of Arab nationalism and unity and took power in Syria in 1963.
Its last congress was held in 2000, when it nominated Bashar al-Assad to lead the party following the death of his father, former president Hafez al-Assad.
Back then, the younger Assad presented himself as a reformer and his political message was viewed by the opposition as signaling much-anticipated democratic change.
But under pressure from the old guard, he soon toned down his promises of democracy and returned to a more traditional Syrian regime with a focus on economic reform.
This time round, there had been hopes the new congress would herald a more sweeping set of reforms but despite the changes on the agenda it appears a more softly-softly approach has won the day.
However the editor-in-chief of the official daily Ath-Thawra, Fayez Sayegh, said that "Syria was engaged for five years in a process of reforms, before pressures were put on it."
"The pressures will hold up reforms and the more they intensify the more they will be an obstacle to the process of reform," he said.

06/05/2005 15:58 GMT