Syria death toll mounts: Russia resists UN drive Wednesday, 01 February 2012 23:02

 

Anti-government protesters carry coffins during the funeral of two protesters killed in earlier clashes in Homs, yesterday.

DAMASCUS: Fresh bloodshed swept Syria yesterday after Western powers and the Arab League demanded immediate UN action to stop the regime’s “killing machine” but holdout Russia vowed to veto any proposal it deemed unacceptable.

Wrangling at the United Nations came as fierce clashes raged across Syria’s powder keg regions killing 59 people, mostly civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The Britain-based monitoring group said at least eight civilians were killed in shelling by regime forces in the restive central city of Homs while 24 were killed in fighting in the Damascus region.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said yesterday that the UN Security Council could vote on a resolution next week demanding an end to bloodshed in Syria.

“We hope that perhaps during next week we will have a vote,” on a resolution condemning the Syrian unrest and backing an Arab League plan for a political solution to the crisis, Juppe said in a speech in Paris.

Activists said the unrest had killed nearly 200 people nationwide over the previous three days while France said yesterday 6,000 people had been killed since the beginning of the uprising nearly 11 months ago.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, backed by her French and British counterparts and Qatar’s Premier, led the charge on Tuesday for a tough UN resolution that would call on Assad to end the bloodshed and hand over power.

“We all know that change is coming to Syria. Despite its ruthless tactics, the Assad regime’s reign of terror will end,” Clinton told the UN Security Council.

“The question for us is: how many more innocent civilians will die before this country is able to move forward?”

But yesterday, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov appeared to snuff out any hopes of a quick vote.

“Attempts are being made to find a text that is acceptable to all sides and would help find a political solution for the situation in Syria. Therefore there is going to be no vote in the next days,” he told Interfax news agency.

Analysts warn that the conflict, between a guerrilla movement backed by growing numbers of army deserters and a regime increasingly bent on repression, has largely eclipsed the peaceful protests seen at the start of the uprising.

“It is the beginning of an all-out armed conflict,” said Joshua Landis, head of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

“We are heading toward real chaos,” he added. “The Syrian public in general is beginning to (realise) that there isn’t a magic ending to this, there isn’t a regime collapse.”

The new French death toll comes after UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said on January 25 that her organisation had stopped counting the dead from Syria’s crackdown on the protests because it is too difficult to get information.

Early in January, UN data showed more than 5,400 people killed in Syria since the pro-democracy uprising began in mid-March.

Qatar’s  Prime Minister and Foreign Minister H E Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor Al Thani, speaking at the Security Council on behalf of the Arab League, said Assad’s regime had “failed to make any sincere effort” to end the crisis and believed the only solution was “to kill its own people.”

“Bloodshed continued and the killing machine is still at work,” he said.

But Russia, a longstanding ally of Assad and one of the regime’s top suppliers of weapons, declared that the UN body did not have the authority to impose a resolution that called for regime change in Syria, a position supported by China.    “If the text is unacceptable then we will vote against,” Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency.

Russia would not approve a text it viewed as “incorrect” and would “lead to a deepening of the conflict”, he said.

But Juppe told MPs in Paris that Russia had a “less negative” attitude towards a UN Security Council resolution.

The draft resolution, introduced by Arab League member Morocco, calls for the formation of a unity government leading to “transparent and free elections.”

Syria’s Al Watan newspaper on Wednesday gave a rundown of dozens of deaths on the two sides in clashes in Homs and elsewhere in central Syria over the past two days.

Thirty-seven rebels were killed in the Homs district, four soldiers were killed in an attack on a checkpoint in Bab Dreib and 15 rebels and two members of the security forces died in clashes in Rastan, another town in central Syria.

Agencies

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