Western Nations, Protesting Killings, Expel Syrian Envoys
مجزرة الحولة
Western Nations, Protesting Killings, Expel Syrian Envoys
A mass burial was
held Saturday in the Houla area of Syria, according to an activist network that
distributed this photograph.
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: May 29, 2012
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Several Western nations hardened their protest against
Syria on Tuesday, expelling senior diplomats over the massacre of more than 100
people there, many of them children, last weekend. Their coordinated action
came as the United Nations special envoy, Kofi Annan, was meeting with
President Bashar al-Assad in the capital, Damascus, to shore up an apparently
failing cease-fire.
The effort by countries including Britain, France, Germany, Australia,
Spain, Italy and Canada to expel the senior Syrian diplomatic officials
appeared timed to underscore the extreme isolation of the Syrian government and
pressure Mr. Assad into honoring the terms of a nearly two-month-old peace plan
negotiated by Mr. Annan. It followed comments by the chairman of the United
States Joint Chiefs of Staff warning that continued atrocities could make
military intervention more likely.
Mr. Annan in his meeting on Tuesday urged the Syrian government to hold
to its commitment in March to abide by the terms of the peace plan, which
included not only a cease-fire, but also political dialogue with the opposition
and freedom for Syrians to demonstrate.
"He conveyed in frank terms his view to President Assad that the
six-point plan cannot succeed without bold steps to stop the violence and
release detainees, and stressed the importance of full implementation of the
plan," a spokesman for Mr. Annan, Ahmad Fawzi, said in a statement.
Questions about the viability of the plan were thrown into sharp relief
by the massacre on Friday in the villages that constitute Houla, near Homs.
Victims included 49 children and 34 women, according to a United Nations count.
The Security Council on Sunday unanimously condemned the massacre and, while
not assigning blame, censured the Syrian government for using heavy artillery
against civilians.
But on Tuesday a spokesman for the United Nations high commissioner for
human rights said that fewer than 20 of the victims in Houla were killed by
artillery fire. "Most of the rest of the victims were summarily executed
in two separate incidents," the spokesman, Rupert Colville, told reporters
in Geneva, news agencies reported. "At this point it looks like entire
families were shot in their houses."
The statement appeared likely to add to the uncertainty surrounding a
massacre that opposition activists have blamed on the government and Syrian
officials have portrayed as the work of terrorists. Deaths from heavy artillery
can be pinned on government forces with relative certainty because such weapons
are not held by opposition fighters. But responsibility for deaths at close
quarters is harder to determine in a country where reporters have been
prevented from moving about freely.
Villagers had told the United Nations monitors who came to Houla
following the massacre that “shabiha,” or government thugs, had committed at
least some of the killings at close range, and that those combatants tend to be
Alawites, the minority sect that includes President Assad.
The aftermath of the killings continued to reverberate inside Syria.
Shops, including the famous Hamadiyah bazaar of Damascus, stayed shut as part
of an opposition-led call to observe three days of mourning, according to
opposition activists and residents. Damascus has been a bastion of government
support. The activists and residents said government agents forced some stores
to reopen, particularly in the nut and candy bazaar, by prying open their metal
shutters.
Mr. Annan, the envoy of both the United Nations and the Arab League and
a former United Nations secretary general, arrived with a new mandate from the
Security Council — including Russia, which had usually blocked action against
its ally in Damascus — to carry out his plan.
He was to hold a news conference later Tuesday after his meeting with
Mr. Assad and will also meet with a variety of other people, including
opposition figures, on the trip, which was scheduled before the massacre.
From the beginning, the peace plan has been given slim chances of
success. But it was seen as an acceptable means to try to bridge the
differences over Syria between the West and the Arab nations on one side and
Russia, China and Iran on the other.
As the United Nations
envoy Kofi Annan began talks in Syria on Monday, activists released a picture
of residents swarming a United Nations vehicle Saturday in Houla, the site of a
massacre.
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Topic: Syria
Some analysts have called it an international stalling measure, because
the Western appetite for military intervention in the conflict is low, even in
the absence of Russian opposition.
In Washington, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, called the massacre “horrific” and “atrocious” and said that he was
prepared with military options in Syria should they be requested by the White
House. But he otherwise spoke cautiously about American intervention by force.
“There is always a military
option, but that military option should always be wielded carefully,” General
Dempsey said on Fox News. “Because one thing we’ve learned about war, I have
learned personally about war, is that it has a dynamic all its own — it takes
on a life of its own.” Nonetheless, he said, “it may come to a point with Syria
because of the atrocities.”
White House officials said on Monday that General Dempsey’s television
appearances were not a coordinated administration response to Syria, but had
been previously planned as part of the commemoration of Memorial Day. In recent
days, the Obama administration has come under intensified criticism by some in
Congress and by the Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, who
accused President Obama of not doing enough to help the Syrian opposition.
In Moscow, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, was slightly
more expansive in holding the Syrian government responsible for the violence
during comments after a meeting about Syria with his British counterpart
William Hague. And both he and Mr. Hague agreed that the main priority was to
fully carry out the peace plan.
Mr. Lavrov repeated Russia’s position that it was tied not to Mr. Assad
staying in power, but to the Syrians piloting their own political transition.
“For us, the main thing is to put
an end to the violence among civilians and to provide for political dialogue
under which the Syrians themselves decide on the sovereignty of their country,”
he said.
Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights,
called for an “immediate and unfettered” international investigation of
atrocities, which she said “may amount to crimes against humanity or other forms
of international crime or violations of international law.”
Syria has suffered a number of major bomb attacks that could only be
described as terrorist acts, Ms. Pillay acknowledged. But “a defense against
terrorism does not in any way justify indiscriminate violence and killing of
the sort that government forces and their allies have just carried out” in
Houla, she said.
Despite the increased Russian public pressure on the Syrian government,
Mr. Lavrov did echo Syrian government claims that the violence was being
fomented by imported terrorists working at the behest of foreign governments —
“a clear hand of Al Qaeda, and the threat of terrorism is growing.”
Later, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that Russia’s
special representative to the Middle East, Mikhail Bogdanov, had told Riyad
Haddad, the Syrian ambassador, that violence against civilians was unacceptable
and that the six-point plan had to be implemented.
President François Hollande announced on Tuesday that France would expel
Lamia Chakkour, the Syrian ambassador, either Tuesday or Wednesday. Mr.
Hollande also said France would hold a “Friends of Syria” meeting of anti-Assad
governments in early July.
In an interview published in Le Monde on Tuesday, the French foreign
minister, Laurent Fabius, called Mr. Assad “the murderer of his people” and
said he had to relinquish power, “the sooner the better.” Mr. Fabius ruled out
any ground intervention in Syria, which he said would carry the risk of a
“regional extension” of the conflict.
“The Syrian Army is
powerful," Mr. Fabius said. "No state is ready to consider ground
intervention at the current time."
In Houla, where survivors buried their remaining dead in a mass grave on
Monday, new accounts of the killings emerged, adding to earlier statements that
some the attacks were by pro-government thugs who went house to house to find
victims.
Human Rights Watch quoted one elderly woman from the Abdul Razzak clan
as saying she survived by hiding in a back room while gunmen dressed in
fatigues killed most of her family.
“I heard several gunshots,” she
was quoted as saying, describing how she collapsed in terror until the soldiers
left. “I looked outside the room and saw all of my family members shot. They
were shot in their bodies and their head. I was terrified to approach to see if
they were alive. I kept crawling until I reached the back door. I went outside,
and I ran away.”
Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Elisabeth
Bumiller from Washington, Ellen Barry from Moscow, Nick Cummings-Bruce from
Geneva, Maïa de la Baume from Paris and J. David Goodman from New York.
Syrian ambassadors expelled from countries
including UK, France and US
Diplomatic action
follows massacre of more than 100 people in Houla
Ian Black and Chris McGreal
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 29 May 2012 12.58 BST
Britain, France, the United States and three other European countries
are expelling the ambassadors of Syria in protest at the massacre of more than
100 people, including scores of children, in Houla near Hama last weekend.
The co-ordinated international diplomatic action came as Kofi Annan,
representing the UN and the Arab League, met the Syrian president, Bashar
al-Assad, in Damascus "to convey the grave concern of the international
community about the violence in Syria" and the prospects for the
implementation of his apparently failing six-point plan.
Australia also said it was expelling the Syrian ambassador. Germany
announced it was expelling the Syrian envoy, and Spain and Italy are due to do
the same.
The US state department said that the Syrian charge d'affaires,
Zuheir Jabbour, the most senior Syrian diplomat in Washington, was being given
three days to leave the country.
"We hold the Syrian government responsible for this slaughter of
innocent lives," said the state department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.
"This massacre is the most unambiguous indictment to date of the Syrian
government's flagrant violations of its UN security council obligations."
Syria withdrew its ambassador from Washington in December after the
US closed its embassy in Damascus, along with Britain and France, over the
violent crackdown against opponents of the Assad regime.
The UN's human rights office said on Tuesday that most of the 108
victims of the Houla massacre week were shot at close range, some of them
women, children and entire families gunned down in their homes. Fewer than 20
people cut down by regime shelling.
Syria has flatly denied responsibility for the atrocity, calling it a
"terrorist massacre".
France's president, François Hollande, was the first European leader
to announce the expulsion of the ambassador, describing it as "not a
unilateral decision but in consultation with our partners".
William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said the expulsions
aimed to tell Assad and his ruling elite that time was running out for them to
comply with the peace plan.
"The world, the international community, is appalled by the violence that
has continued, by the behaviour of the regime, by the murder of so many
innocent people, including in the terrible massacre at Houla," Hague said.
It was not immediately clear why other members of the 27-strong EU
had not joined in.
The announcement in Washington came later than in other capitals
because diplomatic protocol required that the US state department first to call
in Jabbour before making the move public.
Britain withdrew its ambassador and in effect closed its embassy in Damascus
on security grounds earlier this year. That meant there was little to lose by
taking this punitive step. But its effect will be largely symbolic, as Syria's
ambassador, Sami Khiyami, left London some months ago. The charge d'affaires,
Ghassan Dalla, was given the news when he was called into the Foreign Office.
Two other Syrian diplomats have also been told to leave the UK.
Annan met Assad "to convey the grave concern of the
international community about the violence in Syria, including in particular
the recent events in Houla," reported his spokesman, Ahmed Fawzi. "He
conveyed in frank terms his view to President Assad that the six-point plan
cannot succeed without bold steps to stop the violence and release detainees,
and stressed the importance of full implementation of the plan." Annan is
to give a press conference later.
Survivors and witnesses cited by the UN blamed the house-to-house
killings on pro-government thugs known as shabiha. "What is very clear is
this was an absolutely abominable event that took place in Houla, and at least
a substantial part of it was summary executions of civilians, women and
children," said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN high commissioner
for Human Rights. "At this point, it looks like entire families were shot
in their houses."
29-5-2012
عمون - (رصد) - اعلنت (5) دول اوروبية هي فرنسا ايطاليا بريطانيا المانيا
واسبانيا الثلاثاء عن طرد ممثلي البعثات السورية لديها, فيما اعلنت استراليا وكندا
عن طرد سفراء سوريا المعتمدين لديها, بحسب ما نقلته شبكة (فرانس 24) .وبحسب شبكة (فرانس 24) فان الرئيس الفرنسي فرانسوا هولاند اعلن الثلاثاء
عن طرد سفير سوريا في باريس, فيما اعلن عن استضافة مؤتمر اصدقاء سورية في مطلع تموز
المقبل في باريس.وكان مسؤول فرنسي صرح اليوم إن الحكومات الاوروبية تنظر في طرد سفراء
سوريا من بلدانها ردا على حملة قمع الانتفاضة المناهضة للنظام في سوريا, بحسب ما نقلته
وكالة انباء "رويترز" .من جهته قال وزير الخارجية الفرنسي لوران
فابيو في تصريحات نشرت اليوم ان الرئيس السوري بشار الاسد يقتل شعبه ويجب تنحيه عن
السلطة بأسرع ما يمكن.وقال فابيو لصحيفة لوموند الفرنسية اليومية
ان"بشار الاسد قاتل شعبه. ويجب ان يتخلى عن السلطة.كلما كان اقرب كان افضل."طلبت الخارجية الاسترالية من القائم بالأعمال السوري لديها، جودت علي،
مغادرة البلاد رداً على "مجزرة الحولة" التي راح ضحيتها أكثر من مائة قتيل،
في وقت أعلنت فيه دمشق أن المبعوث العربي والدولي إليها، كوفي عنان، اجتمع مع الرئيس
السوري بشار الأسد، بعد لقاء سابق مع وزير الخارجية، وليد المعلم.
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