PEACE ENVOY Kofi Annan deplored the killing of at least 108 people in the Syrian town of Houla as “an appalling crime” yesterday and urged President Bashar al-Assad to prove he wants a peaceful resolution to the crisis racking his country.
Mr Assad’s forces killed at least 41 people in an artillery assault on the city of Hama, activists said, shortly after the UN Security Council condemned Friday’s massacre in nearby Houla.
With international criticism growing of Mr Assad’s methods in trying to crush a 14-month-old uprising, now accompanied by a lightly armed insurgency, UN/Arab League envoy Mr Annan visited Damascus for talks on his faltering peace plan.
He explicitly urged the Syrian government to “take bold steps to signal that it is serious in its intention to resolve this crisis peacefully”, adding: “This message of peace is not only for the government, but for everyone with a gun.”
Russia and China, which had vetoed UN resolutions condemning Assad, approved a non-binding text in New York on Sunday that criticised the use of artillery and tank shells in Houla.
China said it was “deeply shocked by the large number of civilian casualties in Houla, and condemns in the strongest terms the cruel killings of ordinary citizens, especially women and children”. But by declining to blame the government alone, Russia and China kept their distance from western and Sunni-led Arab countries that say Mr Assad must step down. UN monitors say at least 108 people were killed in Houla, among them dozens of children.
But many of the victims were also hacked to death or shot at close range, as shown in graphic images distributed by activists, and UN monitors were unable to establish who killed these.
Russia and China have resisted joining western and Arab League sanctions against Mr Assad. Both reaffirmed yesterday that Mr Annan’s plan, accepted by both sides in the conflict, was the only way forward.
Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said support for the agreement, and a peaceful resolution, should be stepped up. The deal calls for heavy weapons to be pulled out of towns and cities, followed by an end to fighting, and dialogue. But the attack on Hama was a reminder that the plan, policed by just 300 monitors, has done little to stem the violence.
“The six-point plan has to be implemented comprehensively, and this is not happening,” said Mr Annan, who was to meet foreign minister Walid al-Moualem yesterday and Mr Assad today. Opposition sources said Syrian tanks and armoured vehicles opened fire on several neighbourhoods of Hama on Sunday after attacks by rebel Free Syrian Army fighters.
Fatalities in the course of 24 hours included five women and eight children, the Hama Revolution Leadership Council said. “Tank shelling brought down several buildings. Their inhabitants were pulled out from the rubble.”
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said in a letter to the security council he hoped Syria would use Mr Annan’s visit to “fundamentally change course and choose diplomacy over guns to ensure that the legitimate aspirations for freedom, dignity and prosperity of the Syrian people are met”.
Mr Ban said a cluster of villages in the Houla area had been outside government control until Friday. Houla is mostly populated by Sunni Muslims, while many of the surrounding villages are dominated by Alawites, the offshoot of Shia Islam that provides most of Mr Assad’s ruling cadre.
A video distributed by activists showed an injured woman, who said she had survived the Houla massacre, blaming members of Mr Assad’s shabbiha militia for the carnage. “They entered our homes . . . men wearing fatigues herding us like sheep in the room, and started spraying bullets at us,” said the woman, lying next to another injured woman and near a baby with a chest wound.
“My father died and my brother, my mother’s only son. Seven sisters were killed.”
Sunni Muslim businesses closed in Old Damascus yesterday in the biggest act of civil disobedience by the capital’s merchant class, a backbone of support for Mr Assad, activists said, in a show of defiance against the massacre in Houla.
Syria’s UN ambassador Bashar Ja’afari reiterated his government’s assertion that the massacre was the work of “armed terrorist groups” – the Syrian government’s term for the rebels. He dismissed a “tsunami of lies” from the British, French and German envoys, who blamed the government for the massacre, among the worst carnage in an uprising that has cost more than 10,000 lives.
French president François Hollande and British prime minister David Cameron discussed Syria by phone, condemning the “senseless murderous brutality of the Damascus regime” as a threat to regional security. While both endorsed the Annan plan, they also called for an “orderly democratic transition” for Syria.
The Syrian National Council, the main umbrella group of exiled opposition figures, made its strongest call yet for foreign intervention. “It’s high time for concrete intervention to stop the daily massacres against the Syrian people,” it said. – (Reuters)