The Presidential Referendum was described by Syrian opposition as " a Sham built on a farce".
The opposition said it is boycotting the referendum and urged its supporters to vote "no to Bashar " if they had to participate.

Since there is no freedom of expression in Syria, many Syrians protested in front of their embassies in many countries around the world .

The referendum will keep Assad 41 as president of Syria until the year 2014.

The ruling Baath party has 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 referendum, in which about 12 million Syrians are eligible to vote, is the second involving Bashar al-Assad. Polling stations opened at 0400 GMT and are due to shut at 1600 GMT.

"Turnout is very weak this morning, but we expect many more people later," said Ossama Bseinni, 28, an official at one ballot station in Damascus.

Lawyer Hassan Abdel-Azim, spokesman for six banned parties operating under the umbrella National Democratic Rally (NDR), said that "for there to be real elections", there should be other candidates standing.

"The NDR will boycott the referendum because no one has asked the opposition for its opinion. Our claims for an amendment to the electoral law have not been taken into account," he said.

In July 2000, Assad was also 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.

In Syria people always discount the 99 % when it comes to referendums and judge the results by the fraction that follows it. If it is 0.29 it means 29 % approval.

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

Kamal Labwani, accused of contacts with the United States, was sentenced to 12 years in 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 favoring radical reform in ties between Syria and Lebanon, where Damascus was power-broker for three decades.

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 liberalized.

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.

The new president accused the 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 destabilize Iraq and Lebanon.

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

That pressure, backed by fierce Lebanese opposition which accused Syria of the assassination , 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, liberalization of the press, and electoral reform never materialized.

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.


Sunday's vote comes a month after the heavily criticized legislative elections which were also boycotted by the opposition. The parliamentary poll was won, as expected, by the coalition of legal parties directed by the Baath party.

Picture: As the posters in downtown Damascus indicate there was no choice given to the Syrians. The one and only candidate is Bashar el Assad ...the referendum was called 'a Sham'.