BARAKOS AT ACES SA BACOLOD

DAMASCUS (AFP) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stands on Sunday in a no-contest poll which will give him another seven years leading a regional heavyweight under immense international pressure.

With parliament unanimously approving the candidature of the 41-year-old president for a second term, and with vocal opponents of the regime locked up, the referendum will inevitably annoint Assad as president until the year 2014.

Earlier in the week, the ruling Baath party called on voters to give a resounding "yes" to a new mandate for Assad who, it said "will express the hopes of the people and the expectations of the Nation".

Sunday's vote, in which Syria's nearly 12 million voters are urged to rally behind the sole candidate, is the second involving Bashar al-Assad. In July 2000, he was the sole candidate to succeed his father Hafez who had died the previous month.

The official result then showed that Bashar received 97.29 percent of voter support.

With Syria under emergency law since 1963 and with opposition parties banned, the authorities have recently clamped down harshly on its intellectual opponents and pro-democracy militants, drawing criticism from the United States and the European Union.

Kamal Labwani, accused of contacts with the United States, was sentenced to 12 years jail, the harshest sentence since Bashar Assad took power.

Writer Michel Kilo was jailed for three years, and lawyer Anwar Bunni for five years, after both signed a petition favouring radical reform in relations between Syria and its tiny neighbour Lebanon, where Damascus was power broker for some three decades.

From their prison in Adra, near Damascus, militants and human rights advocates Bunni, Kilo, Labwani, Mahmud Issa, Faek al-Mir and Aref Dalila in a statement published in Lebanon's An-Nahar newspaper all condemned the "climate of repression in Syria which has reached its zenith".

After Hafez al-Assad's three decades of iron rule, the arrival in power of the Western-educated, eye-doctor Bashar raised hopes that the inflexible political system might be liberalised.

But the brief period of relative freedom of expression, known as the Damascus Spring, was rapidly quashed with the arrest of 10 opposition activists in 2001, among them the economist Aref Dalila.

The new president accused the disappointed activists of having misunderstood the sort of democracy he had promised during his investiture in 2000.

The latter years of his seven-year term were marked by deteriorating relations with the United States which in 2004 imposed economic sanctions on Damascus.

Syria fiercely opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq while Washington accuses Damascus of trying to destabilise Iraq and Lebanon.

Assad had faced additional, heavy international pressure after the February 2005 murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in Beirut, which was then under Syria control.

That pressure, backed by fierce Lebanese opposition which accused Syria of the killing, despite its denials, led to Damascus pulling its troops out of Lebanon in April 2005 after a 29-year presence.

Domestically, anticipated political reforms a law allowing different political parties, liberalisation of the press, and electoral reform remain stillborn.

The authorities argue that given the tense regional situation, marked by the "Israeli-American occupations" in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, the time is not right.

Economic reforms have made progress, with the opening of private banks, development of the private sector, and monetary and fiscal
reforms.

Syrian economic analysts term the measures as miniscule, and urge the establishment of a policy of economic transparency, and a real battle against corruption, unemployment and inflation.

Sunday's vote comes a month after legislative elections boycotted by the opposition. The parliamentary poll was won, as expected, by the coalition of legal parties directed by the Baath party. Other parties are banned.

Bashar, born on September 11 1965, was studying opthalmology in London but was pushed into politics by the death of his elder brother Bassel who was killed in a car crash in 1994.