U.N.: Syria violence as bad, if not worse, than before ceasefire agreed

In this January 31, 2012, file photo taken during a government-organized tour for the media, Sister Verona, the head of the Sednaya Covent, shows journalists a damaged room which was attacked by artillery fire, in Sednya north of Damascus, Syria. / AP

Updated at 11:20 a.m. ET

(AP) GENEVA - The violence in Syria has worsened since a cease-fire deal in April and the bloodshed appears to be taking on dangerous sectarian overtones, the U.N. said Wednesday.

Investigators say they have concluded that Syrian government troops could be behind the killing of more than 100 civilians in the village of Houla last month. The findings, which were presented to the U.N.'s top human rights body, could lay some of the groundwork for prosecuting alleged crimes against humanity and other abuses in Syria.

Reflecting the sense of urgency, senior diplomats said world powers are planning to meet Saturday in Geneva in an attempt to end the bloodshed, with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying they will attend. Notably uninvited were major regional players Saudi Arabia and Iran, and Syria itself.

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Clinton said Wednesday she has "great hope" the Geneva meeting can be a turning point in the Syria crisis. Clinton said the U.S. supports U.N. envoy Kofi Annan's six-point plan for political transition in Syria.

Annan "has developed his own very concrete road map for political transition" from the Assad regime, Clinton said at a news conference at the start of her three-country European tour. "We believe it embodies the principles needed for any political transition in Syria that could lead to a peaceful, democratic and representative outcome reflecting the will of the Syrian people."

Assad "has relied on the support of Russia and China in the Security Council to prevent the international community from taking unified action," Clinton said. Russia and China, two of the Security Council's five permanent members, have twice shielded Syria from U.N. sanctions.

"If Kofi Annan is able to lay down a political transition road map that is endorsed by countries including Russia and China, for example, that sends a very different message," Clinton said. "That's the first time the international community will have really evidenced a direction that I think Assad will have to respond to."

Activists say more than 14,000 people have been killed since the uprising against President Bashar Assad's regime began in March last year and the increasing militarization of both sides in the conflict has Syria lurching toward civil war.

Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, who heads a U.N. panel conducting an international investigation of allegations of human rights abuses in Syria, called the country a "crime scene" and said investigators had prepare a list of names of people suspected of being responsible for crimes.

The probe into the massacre in the central Syrian village of Houla concluded that forces loyal to the government "may have been responsible" for many of the deaths.

The report says the military or pro-government shabiha forces had better access to the Houla village during the May massacre. The village leans toward the opposition and most of the victims were women and children who were slaughtered in their homes, it said.

"The manner in which these killings took place resembles those previously and repeatedly documented to have been committed by the government," Pinheiro told the U.N.'s top human rights body in Geneva.

A final position on who was responsible for the massacre would require more work, Pinheiro said, but in unusually direct language he said interviews conducted by the commission "indicated that government forces and shabiha have committed acts of sexual violence against men, women and children."

The U.N.'s deputy envoy for Syria, Jean-Marie Guehenno, told the Human Rights Council that the violence in Syria has "reached or even surpassed" levels seen before the April 12 cease-fire agreement and that the peace plan forged by Annan "is clearly not being implemented."

Growing numbers of Syrians also are being targeted in the country's conflict on account of their religion, said commission member Karen Koning AbuZayd, a U.S. citizen and former head of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees.

"Where previously victims were targeted on the basis of their being pro- or anti-government, the Commission of Inquiry has recorded a growing number of incidents where victims appear to have been targeted because of their religious affiliation," said the panel's report delivered to the Council.

Fayssal al-Hamwi, the Syrian ambassador in Geneva, charged that the allegations against the government are "quite fantastic." Then calling the council meeting blatantly political, he said he no longer wished to participate and strode out as if in protest. He also suggested Syria might reduce its longer-term cooperation internationally.

Annan said he sent invitations for the Saturday summit to the five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — plus Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar, and the European Union.

The U.S. has been adamantly opposed to Iran taking part, while Russia supported its inclusion. The invitations also included the secretary-generals of the U.N. and the League of Arab States.

[alphaa10000]

BLOODY HANDS ?

1. smittyc said, "Obama and Clinton initiated the violence in Syria, Egypt Libya Yemen Bahrain with their plan of regime change. "
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Where were you when Bush was busy "promoting democracy" in Georgia? Or the Ukraine? There lies far more of a case against Bush and Cheney (and McCain) for a heavy-handed and nearly botched operation.

In contrast, the Arab Spring represents an indigenous effort to throw off decades-old dictatorships. Dissidents met in neighborhood after neighborhood to coalesce a strategy and make their views known in the streets. The protestors were not always on the same page, and did not share all beliefs, but they were together on the need to remove the local dictatorship and restore popular rule.

The bloody risk of their undertaking came from military efforts to suppress popular protest, and that alone.


2. smityc said, "The body count across these nations exceeds over a hundred thousand people and just three years ago these nations had stability..."
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Any effort to link civilian deaths and a policy of regime change to Obama and Clinton is misdirected, because only G.W. Bush launched a unilateral military action.

And the comment is misdirected, not the least, because the phrase "regime change" was loudly used by Bush2 as rationale for his own very bloody policy in Iraq, which killed well over 200,000 Iraqi civilians and over 4,000 American soldiers.

Compared to false claims of "stability" under military dictatorships elsewhere, Bush's War introduced more than nine years of violent instability to Iraq and surrounding region. If you need to find blood on presidential hands, you easily can find it with the counsel and actions of Bush2, Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz.

In fact, the phrase "regime change" was first used back in 1992 by Wolfowitz and his small neo-con tribe as it submitted brief after brief to amused Washington officials, arguing for projection of American (military) power to any point on the globe. The policy was heedless of cost, as it later turned out in Iraq, arguing that the benefits of pre-emptive strikes could make almost any case for invasion.

Wolfowitz introduced without apology the doctrine of undeclared war, as if no war ever could occur after an American unilateral military action. In Iraq and elsewhere, Bush quickly discovered nothing promotes war like pre-emptive war.


3. Smittyc said, "In Pakistan and Afghanistan previously friendly governments are thwarting our efforts and demanding we leave..."
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Pakistan and Afghanistan during the Clinton era were "friendly" after a fashion, but the demeanor became extremely icy after Dick Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age in 2001. The thwarting of American efforts began on that day, and not eight years later when Bush left office.


4. "Our foreign diplomacy is a shambles."
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Hardly-- American support of the Arab Spring movements is a triumph of diplomatic policy, and one of the few times an American president has been on the right side of a revolution.

Whenever a subject people rises against a dictatorship, it is an act of courage and an affirmation that the democratic principle of self-rule is universal. In that sense, alone, every American should be instantly in sympathy with protests for greater democracy.

[smittyc]

Obama and Clinton initiated the violence in Syria, Egypt Libya Yemen Bahrain with their plan of regime change. The blood that is flowing is on their hands. The body count across these nations exceeds over a hundred thousand people and just three years ago these nations had stability. In Pakistan and Afghanistan previously friendly governments are thwarting our efforts and demanding we leave. Our foreign diplomacy is a shambles.

[usunus]

Worse violence than before in Syria is what the U.S and its allies want,if we are to believe the NYT story that the CIA is coordinating the supply of arms to the rebels from southern Turkey.

[melpol12]

Medieval Muslim officers had a sharpened wooden tent peg dangling from their belts; it was believed that when it broke an infidel's sphincter the evil one would forever obey Sharia Law. Islam is an art of submission, the use of the holy tent peg will again cause millions who are contaminated with pride to bow in reverence to the great one.