26/08/12

I am deeply concerned by emerging reports of a brutal massacre of civilians in Daraya, in the outskirts of Damascus.

The Syrian regime’s appalling repression of its people, over more than 17 months, has left little space for independent observers to operate in Syria. This makes it extremely difficult to verify what took place yesterday.

Opposition groups report that over 300 people, including women and children, were killed and that some were shot at close range. If confirmed it would be an atrocity on a new scale, requiring unequivocal condemnation from the entire international community. It would make yesterday the bloodiest day since the unrest in Syria began in March 2011, with over 400 killed across the country.

– Minister for the Middle East and North Africa, Alistair Burt

01/08/12

As anti-government protests in Aleppo increased, the state reacted with a characteristically reckless and brutal use of force!

The assault by government forces on the city of Aleppo is the culmination of months of a brutal crackdown against dissident voices, Amnesty International said in a new report published today.

The new report All-Out Repression is based on first-hand field investigations by Amnesty International in Aleppo city at the end of May.
 
It documents how security forces and the notorious government-backed shabiha militias routinely used live fire against peaceful demonstrations, killing and injuring protesters and bystanders, including children, and hunted down the wounded, the medics who treated them, and opposition activists.
 
“The current onslaught on the city of Aleppo – which puts civilians even more at grave risk– is a predictable development which follows the disturbing pattern of abuses by state forces across the country,” said Donatella Rovera, Senior Crisis Response Adviser at Amnesty International, who recently spent several weeks investigating abuses in northern Syria, including in Aleppo.
 
The new report provides evidence that families of demonstrators and bystanders shot dead by security forces have been pressured to sign statements saying that their loved ones were killed by “armed terrorist gangs”.
  
Demonstrations in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and main economic centre, started later and remained smaller than in other main towns.
 
As the size and frequency of these anti-government protests in Aleppo increased in recent months, the state security apparatus reacted with a characteristically reckless and brutal use of force that inevitably led to peaceful demonstrators being killed and injured.

Those arrested were routinely tortured, threatened and intimidated while in detention.
 
The report details a wide range of systematic, state-directed violations including the deliberate targeting of peaceful protesters and activists, the hunting down of injured protesters, the routine use of torture, the targeting of medics providing life-saving emergency treatment to the wounded,  arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances.
 
“The peaceful demonstrations I witnessed in different parts of the city invariably ended with security forces firing live rounds at peaceful protesters, their reckless and indiscriminate shooting often killing or injuring bystanders as well as demonstrators,” said Donatella Rovera.

In the report, Amnesty International again calls on the Security Council to ensure a human rights monitoring mission is present in the country, either by strengthening, extending and expanding the paralyzed UN Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) whose mandate ends in August, or by establishing another mechanism.

The organization reiterates its long-standing calls for the Security Council to refer the situation in Syria to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and to impose an arms embargo on Syria with the aim of stopping the flow of weapons to the Syrian government.  

Amnesty International wants the Security Council to implement an asset freeze against President Bashar al-Assad and others who may be involved in ordering or perpetrating crimes under international law.

With the crisis in Syria turning into internal armed conflict and with rising reports of abuses by the armed opposition, Amnesty International again calls on all governments considering the supply of arms to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) or other armed opposition groups to first carry out a rigorous risk assessment based on objective information to ensure that there is not a substantial risk those arms would be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of human rights, including crimes under international law.
 
Amnesty International has been able to investigate independently allegations of human rights violations on the ground in Syria, including in Aleppo and surrounding areas, and concludes that the Syrian government is responsible for mass violations amounting to crimes against humanity.
 
“It is manifestly evident that the Syrian government has no intention of ending, let alone investigating, these crimes. Indeed it has attempted to prevent any independent investigation of these grave abuses in Aleppo and in other parts of the country,” said Rovera.

“It is incumbent on the international community to provide justice to the Syrian people and to ensure those responsible for such grave violations and crimes are held to account.

“But only a few days ago, the Security Council again failed to agree on a resolution on Syria. The paralysis of the international community over the past 18 months has unsurprisingly resulted in the Syrian government believing it can continue to commit violations, including war crimes and crimes against humanity with impunity.  The situation in Syria should be referred to the International Criminal Court without further delay.”

30/07/12

At the Sunday Angelus prayer, Pope Benedict XVI appealed for peace in Syria, calling on the international community to guarantee humanitarian care for all those affected by the violence and to work toward a just, lasting solution to the crisis. The Nuncio to Syria, Archbishop Mario Zenari, told Vatican Radio that the Holy Father’s words were very welcome. “The appeal of the Holy Father,” said Archbsihop Zenari, “for the cessation of the violence in Syria, and his solidarity with the sufferings of the people, was of great consolation.” The Nuncio went on to describe the situation in Syria as very grave. “At this moment,” he said, “the feeling among the people is of a great [uncertainty].” Archbishop Zenari called on all the religious leaders of Syria to unite in the cause of reconciliation and peace. “Come together,” he said, “all of you – and with all the strength of your moral authority, launch a joint and severe warning to the parties to the conflict, to stop, in the name of God, the violence and repression that take the country to destruction

He is a Republican Guard brigadier and son of Syria’s longest-serving defence minister. But most of all Manaf Tlas is a friend of President Bashar al-Assad, a member of his inner circle and a prominent figure in the Damascus “young guard.”

Reuters / Handout

Syrian Brigadier-General Manaf Tlas in Damascus in April 2011.

Or he was. Rebels and a news website with links to the Syrian security apparatus said Thursday Brig. Tlas had fled to Turkey. If confirmed, he would be the first real insider to defect from the embattled elite fighting off a revolt against the Assad clan.

Tlas has long been a rare Sunni name within a ruling clique dominated by Mr. Assad’s fellow Alawites; the brigadier’s flight may reflect a growing sectarian divide and eroding support for the dynasty among richer Sunnis, who have been slow to join a revolt launched by poorer sections of the majority population.

A handsome man in his 40s with a beautiful wife, Brig. Tlas cut a dashing figure on the Damascus social scene, entertaining diplomats, artists and journalists, and rooting for what he saw as reformist policies of his president friend.

An enthusiast of fancy cars, he smokes cigars and his favourite holiday spot is the French Riviera.

But he grew increasingly disillusioned with the system that awarded his family rank and privilege.

His playboy father, Mustafa Tlas, attended military academy with Hafez al-Assad and remained his friend, confidant — and defence minister — through his three decades in power.

When Hafez died in 2000, Mustafa Tlas helped arrange a smooth transition for his son Bashar; at the same Baath party congress that anointed the younger Assad, Mr. Tlas’s son Manaf was elevated to the Central Committee of Syria’s ruling party.

The elder Tlas and another son have both left Syria since the revolt against Mr. Assad began last year. Mustafa Tlas left for France for what he described as medical treatment some months ago. Opposition sources say he is still there, though his whereabouts could not be independently confirmed. His son Firas, a business tycoon, left for Egypt; he is now thought to be in Dubai.

Like their fathers, Manaf Tlas and Bashar al-Assad are old friends and underwent military training together. Brig. Tlas helped introduce Bashar, now 46, to the Sunni Damascus social scene when he was being groomed for power in the 1990s.

In the decade that followed, Brig. Tlas spoke of reform but defended its cautious, some said glacial, pace under the Assads: “You need time. You need years,” he told The Washington Post in 2005. “There’s a generation you have to push forward.”

But the 2011 uprising rocked his cosy world. His father’s home town Rastan, about 160 kilometres north of Damascus, was among the first to rise up against Mr. Assad — and get hammered by the army for its defiance.

Peaceful demonstrations were silenced by the gun, prompting Rastan’s residents, many of whom served in the army and had the patronage of the Tlas family, to take up arms.

Brig. Tlas was privy to the inner working of the military crackdown by the core Alawite forces. As a senior officer in the Republican Guard, he would have been in regular contact with its commander, Bashar’s feared younger brother Maher, an architect of repression.

AFP PHOTO/LOLO/AFP/Getty Images

A destroyed Syrian army tank is abandoned after fighting with rebels on the side of a highway between Aleppo and Damascus Wednesday.

He did not like what he saw, and tried to do something to ease the crackdown, friends and opposition sources say. They credit him with intervening to negotiate local ceasefires.

“Manaf has been growing increasingly frustrated for months,” one friend said. “Being from Rastan, he felt increasing dishonour as his hometown was being leveled and hundreds of his relatives fell dead or injured.

“He started to tell people he trusted that he wanted out, and that he has respect among the Free Syrian Army,” the friend said, referring to the rebel force that has attracted many Sunni officers and soldiers from Rastan.

A Western diplomat who served in Damascus said Brig. Tlas, with his boyish good looks and fluent English and French, a taste for paintings and concerts, stood out among an officer corps drawn largely from the historically disadvantaged Alawite minority and often poorly educated.

He and his wife Tala regularly spent weekends in Paris, where his sister Nahed, widow of billionaire Saudi arms dealer Akram Ojjeh, is a prominent socialite.

“Manaf does not give the impression that he is a thug,” the diplomat said.

“But he mattered in the military. His defection is big news because it shows that the inner circle is disintegrating.”

Others take a different view.

“If his defection is confirmed I do not think it will have any impact. The Tlas family has distanced itself for some time from what is happening,” said a Lebanese official close to the Damascus government.

“It will not change anything in the balance of power inside the country. They do not have any influence on the ground. They have made promises that they did not deliver.

“The main goal for this defection will be to cause a moral shock. The Americans will try to use it to the maximum.”

Syriasteps, the website with Syrian security links that reported Brig. Tlas’s defection, quoted a security official for Assad’s administration saying, “His desertion means nothing.”

With files from Agence France-Presse

by Ghassan Karam

Dictatorship is illegitimate by definition since it represents taking power by force and it maintains it through oppression, fear and brutality. That is one reason that most dictatorships, Arab ones in particular have felt the need to pretend that they are legitimate by setting up sham elections. As if anyone really believed that 99.9% support abuse and cruelty.

The Arab Spring has not given the Arab world a single dynamic democracy yet but it has given voice to the Arab masses who have decided to stand up and demand their right to be heard. Governance in the Arab world will never be the same again. Finally a movement has been born to tell dictators that the long journey to democracy and personal freedom, the journey to human dignity will not be stopped.

Bashar Assad of Syria exemplifies the tyranny of Arab dictatorships. His father rose to power through a coup and ruled the country under emergency law for 30 years. When Hafez Assad died his son Bashar, an ophthalmologist, inherited a country and continued the exploitation and the one man rule of governance.

Many Syrians were encouraged by the relative success of the Arab masses in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen and so initiated small roving peaceful demonstrations. Dictators do not seek the approval of those that they govern; instead they maintain control by the use of brutal secret service supporters/gangs that inflict random violence. The response of the Bashar Assad regime was initially subdued because he had feared that a sharp escalation would bring about a response from the world community similar to that in Libya.  As time passed the Syrian forces became more forceful but stopped shy of leveling civilian quarters in major cities with tanks and artillery. The West had warned that such attacks will not be tolerated but will be met with a stern response.

This is when Russia decided to step in and protect its only client in the Arab world. Russia sent armaments and assured the Syrian regime that Russia and China will veto any attempt by the Security Council to pass any measures similar to what had happened in Libya. The regime then tested the will of the international community by waging a strong military attack on a neighbourhood in Hama. No meaningful Western response was forthcoming.  Russia and China delivered on their promise to keep the UN Security Council in check. This emboldened the Syrian regime to try its strong military tactics again in Homs.  Again the West failed to act. Since then the Syrian government, shielded by Russia and China and helped by Iran has been acting with impunity.

One Arab League initiative, which was passed through the UN Security Council, appointed Kofi Annan to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian crisis. This was not opposed by either Russia or China and so Mr. Annan is trying to apply the same rules to the victims as well as the victimizers. It appears that this effort will be abandoned since so far  the level  of violence by the Syrian forces has not diminished, actually it has led to the most grotesque massacre in this conflict so far; Al Houla Massacre.

So where we and what are next in this conflict? The current government is illegitimate, it is a dictatorship that has failed to evolve and reform for over forty years, it has sought and obtained Iranian help in putting down the insurrection, it has used Russian and Chinese political protection to increase the frequency and ferocity of its military attacks against its own civilian population. It has taken advantage of the well meaning efforts by Mr. Annan in order to increase the level of violence and it has called on its Lebanese minions to expand the Syrian conflict into Lebanon so as to make the Syrian government’s warning that without Bashar regional instability will ensue a reality.

This is a regime that has never had any legitimacy, a regime that does not value personal freedom, a regime that survives by oppression and brutality a regime that is best described as a regime of human depravity. This regime must be held accountable for all its human right abuses over the past 14 months of this uprising as well as all its previous excesses against Hama, Kurds and all its political opponents. To argue that this regime must be negotiated with only because it has large guns is an insult to reason and rationality. Furthermore the efforts to justify a continuation of this regime on the ground that its level of brutality is not as grotesque as it is in some other dictatorships are ludicrous and actually contemptuous. And last but not least, as the world evolves and as cosmopolitanism spreads the circle of ethics widens from the self to the family then the tribe the state and eventually the world. That would then call for a universal right to protect against slavery, exploitation and flagrant violation of the most basic principles of human rights. The Syrian people are entitled to freedom of expression and self determination in an open and free election without having to fear the ghosts of the Assad secret services and their egregious acts.

Thomas Seibert 01/04/12

ISTANBUL // Rebels fighting the forces of Bashar Al Assad have the right to weapons supplies from other countries if the world fails to stop the bloodshed, Turkey’s foreign minister told The National on the eve of a second international conference on Syria.

“The international community should take very concrete steps to prevent a massacre,” Ahmet Davutoglu said. “If it doesn’t happen, of course those who are being attacked will look for all the alternatives to defend themselves.”

The kingdom, along with Qatar, is also in favour of carving out a safe haven inside Syria from which the opposition can operate. Turkey, which shares a border of 900 kilometres with Syria, would be a key route for any large-scale weapons shipments to the rebels.

“People say there should not be any foreign intervention, but the flow of arms to the Syrian regime continues, and that’s not acceptable,” Mr Davutoglu said.

He compared the situation in Syria to that in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina the early 1990s, when Serb forces attacked Muslim civilians in a war that eventually triggered armed intervention by Nato.

“I made an analogy to the Bosnia case, when there was an asymmetric war: on one side an army with full capacity of attack, on the other side victims without any proper equipment to defend themselves. This is not sustainable.”

The world should not allow the Syrian government to continue with the violence. “Either there must be some international effort to stop these attacks, or there should be a clear message to the regime that there will be some international position to stop the bloodshed.”

Mr Davutoglu was speaking before today’s second meeting of the Friends of Syria, a group of western and Arab nations seeking to increase the pressure on Mr Al Assad to end the violent repression of protests that has killed more than 9,000 people since March last year. At least 75 countries will be represented at the meeting, which follows a conference last month in Tunis.

The United Nations-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan called on the Syrian forces to end operations immediately. Mr Al Assad accepted Mr Annan’s plan on Tuesday, but his security forces have continued their attacks. Turkey, a former close ally of Syria, ended its own mediation efforts last year, when the Syrian regime refused to enact political reforms.

Mr Davutoglu said he expected the Istanbul meeting “to give a clear message to the regime that these methods will not be tolerated by the international community. In Tunisia we gave a strong message, but now the message will be much stronger.”

In fact, he said, Turkey hoped the meeting would “take certain measures, new measures, steps, to stop the bloodshed”.

Mr Davutoglu said he could not go into detail before the conference. “But we want to have some more concrete steps.”

He also said the meeting would discuss getting humanitarian aid into Syria and would strengthen the role of the Syrian National Council, an opposition umbrella group. A third meeting of the Friends of Syria would take place in Paris, he said.

The Syrian opposition and the Free Syrian Army, a group of Syrian deserters fighting government troops, have repeatedly called for weapons, but Mr Annan has warned against further militarisation.

Mr Davutoglu, who put the number of Syrian defectors at 60,000, would not be drawn on whether he agreed with the Saudi position on arming the opposition, but he stressed it was the international community’s duty to prevent further bloodshed.

“When the oppression continues and people are being killed - if the international community is idle and cannot do anything, people will start to think that they have the right of self-defence,” he said. “The responsibility is on the shoulders of the international community, rather on the people who are trying to defend themselves.”

While Mr Davutoglu, 53, a close aide and former chief adviser to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, reiterated his government’s support for Mr Annan’s mission, he warned that Damascus was trying to gain time. He said Mr Annan’s plan “should not be seen as if it’s a mediation for the continuation of the Syrian regime”.

The Turkish foreign minister said Mr Al Assad was hoping he could secure his position by crushing the opposition militarily.

“This is what I call the illusion of dictators,” said Mr Davutoglu, a former professor of international relations. “They think that if they have time, they will control the situation and then they will make a cosmetic type of change.”

In Syria, as in other countries that shook off authoritarian regimes, this tactic would fail, Mr Davutoglu insisted. Even after a year of repression, Syrians were still calling for their democratic rights. “A regime or a leader cannot survive if that regime or that leader fights against its own people.”

Mr Davutoglu said the Syrian government lost its legitimacy the moment the regular army attacked cities with artillery, helicopters and the navy. “Even during a war, this is unacceptable. When you fight another country - even in that case it’s a war crime to shell a city indiscriminately.” He said Turkey condemned that kind of military operation as a “crime” when Israel attacked Gaza in late 2008. “Now the Syrian army is doing this against their own cities.”

Mr Davutoglu said he had no doubt that the Al Assad regime was doomed. “Such a regime cannot continue after all the crimes they committed against their own people. It is just a matter of time.”

Erdogan said, “We cannot remain a spectator to these developments.”

Both leaders spoke at the end of their meeting.

Turkey hosts a meeting of the diplomatic group known as the “Friends of Syria,” next week to show Syrian President Bashar Assad a united front against his repression.

The Assad family has ruled Syria for more than four decades, relying on ‘repression and injustice’ [AFP]

As the Syrian revolution enters its second year, three scenarios loom on the horizon. However, as they say in Arabic: “their sweetest is bitter”.

What started a year ago as a peaceful protest in the southern town of Dera’a demanding limited reform, has morphed into a popular uprising demanding sweeping changes, mutating into a national upheaval calling for regime change.

With its back to the wall, the Syrian regime rejected all compromise with the opposition and prepared itself for a violent cross country crackdown.

The balance sheet is hardly encouraging. With more than eight thousand Syrians dead, a quarter of a million displaced and countless imprisoned or tortured, the opposition is arming itself in self-defence and its regional supporters are chipping in with western complicity.

In recent days, the regime has made some tactical advances against opposition strongholds in Homs and Idlib, giving President Bashar al-Assad and his cronies a renewed sense of confidence.

The Syrian regime’s cold and calculated strategy has proved far more potent than what fallen dictators in Libya or Tunisia could muster.

It speaks of reform and uses measured language to cover up for its excessive force and to deny Western powers the alibi to intervene.

But time is NOT on Assad’s side. Nor is it for that matter on Syria’s side.

The arming of Syria’s popular opposition despite the crackdown has for all practical purpose torpedoed the regime’s deterrence and undermined its military gains.

Alas, thousands more are bound to die and Syria could descend into civil war if the nation’s wrong-headed leadership doesn’t draw the right conclusions.

If 2011 was a divisive year, 2012 might prove decisive.

The people are showing formidable capacity to withstand the crackdown and organise.

Time is on the side of those willing to sacrifice everything for a free nation, not those willing to sacrifice their nation for their own privileges.

As the two sides are vying for greater outside support, Iran, Russia and China on one side, the majority of the Arab league, Turkey and Western nations on the other. Time is a luxury Syria can’t afford.

The Algerian scenario

Two decades ago, the secular military regime in Algeria was able to crack down hard on the opposition, following its substantial electoral gains - thanks, in no small measure, to the explicit support of France and the implicit support of the  US.

The deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and security forces were ‘justified’ in Western circles on the basis of the right of a regime to fight terrorists and extremists within a sovereign country.

The Assad regime hopes Russia and China will provide it with a similar cover to ‘finish the job’.

It reckons Moscow’s veto at the UN Security Council will translate into a strategic veto against any foreign/Western military intervention in the eastern Mediterranean.

Assad calculates such Russian backing allows the Syrian Elite Forces and Republican Guards to successfully crackdown on the revolution just as the French backed the Algerian Generals to purge the opposition.

Then as now, Western, Russian and Chinese leaders share little political or moral quarrels about Arab civilian deaths or “collateral damage”. (For the record I think “collateral damage” is the most despicable phrase in the English language; a euphemism apparently first used during the Vietnam War.)

Unlike Algeria’s opposition in 1992, the 2012 Syrian uprising will not defeated through force.

Times have changed. The revolution of consciousness that has swept through the region over the last year has picked up momentum in Syria and can’t be defeated by violence.

Alas, by the time they realise this , it might be too late.

The Libyan scenario

Syrian opposition leaders are hopeful Arab/Gulf pressure, recent declarations and visits by Russian and Chinese diplomats to the region, and mounting pressure from Western nations on their UNSC counterparts in light of the spiralling of violence in Syria, could lead to greater consensus in the international community in favor of isolating the Syrian regime.

Increasing numbers of Syrian opposition leaders hope that serious overtures towards Moscow and Beijing will lead to consensus around foreign military intervention under the “Right to Protect” on the Libyan model that includes a no-fly zone.

If between 25,000 and 40,000 Libyans died after the NATO intervention, the number of deaths in Syria is bound to be higher.

It’s also far from clear whether the regime will cow and implode from within as a result of military bombardments.

More importantly, neutralising Syria’s air defences including the bombing of its land-to-air missiles and radar centers, is bound to alter the Middle East’s strategic equation, leaving Iran exposed and Israel enforced.

It could also enforce claims of a US/Israeli conspiracy against the Assad regime and lead to a widespread backlash in the region.

All of this assumes that NATO is willing to enter the Syrian quagmire today. I doubt it.

Which takes me to the third scenario

Back to the future: The “Syrbian nightmare”

As the regime builds on the Algerian scenario and many in the opposition bet on the Libyan scenario, regional and Western powers might entertain a Serbia/Kosovo like scenario.

Back in the late 1990s, Kosovo’s opposition to Belgrade was armed and for a whole year. In 1998-1999, it fought against the Serb government. When the humanitarian and security situation deteriorated, a Western led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ intervened militarily without a UN Security Council resolution that Moscow was likely to veto.

Seventy eight days of US bombardment followed by NATO direct intervention and the division of the country. They argued their decision was ‘legitimate’ even if it wasn’t necessarily legal.

Something similar is building up in Syria. Growing effort to finance and arm the opposition, coupled with diplomatic pressure to isolate Damascus, could pave the way towards discrediting and weakening the regime.

Humanitarian deterioration could then be used as a legitimate alibi for military intervention on the line of Serbia/Kosovo (even Bosina) with potentially similar results: ethnic cleansing, breakup, and sectarianism.

While I doubt Syria would break-up like the former Yugoslavia, the nightmare would be no less horrific.

Assad, and the test of patriotism

The Syrian revolution has taken far longer than the other Arab revolutions due to the regime’s unity and divisions in the opposition.

Despite its secular-nationalist rhetoric, which shouldn’t be discounted nor underestimated as source of legitimacy in a country like Syria or in the Mashreq (East) in general, the regime has based its power mostly on sectarian and personal loyalties.

For more than four decades the regime has made sure there is no day light between leader, family, clan, sect, regime, army and state.

These layers of power have secured the position of Assad family and clan at the helm of the country. But it also led to terrible repression and injustice.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, no less Sunnis benefited from the regime than Alawaites. Indeed many if not most Alawaites remain marginal and poor in Assad’s Syria.

As the country slides into civil war, it’s high time to reverse the direction of loyalty. Instead of sacrificing clan, sect and country for the leader, the latter must give up his authority to save the country he claims to love and defend.

Ultimately, when the chips are down, personal sacrifice for public good is the test of patriotism.

Otherwise, clan and the Alawaite minority, and military must sacrifice the dictator for the sake of future unity, peace and justice in the country.

Indeed, they need to do it for their own sake.

UN-Arab League envoy to Syria Kofi Annan. Photograph: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

Kofi Annan, the UN-Arab League envoy to Syria, said he would urge president Bashar al-Assad and his foes to stop fighting and seek a political solution, drawing angry rebukes from dissidents.

“The killing has to stop and we need to find a way of putting in the appropriate reforms and moving forward,” Mr Annan said yesterday in Cairo ahead of his trip to Damascus tomorrow.

Syrian dissidents reacted with dismay and said government repression had destroyed prospects of a negotiated deal. More than 7,500 people have been killed in a year-long crackdown on an uprising against Mr Assad, according to the United Nations.

“We reject any dialogue while tanks shell our towns, snipers shoot our women and children and many areas are cut off from the world by the regime without electricity, communications or water,” said Hadi Abdullah, contacted in the city of Homs.

Another activist said Mr Annan’s call for dialogue sounded “like a wink at Bashar” that would only encourage Mr Assad to “crush the revolution”.

UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos, on a separate mission to Syria, said she was “devastated” by the destruction she had seen in the Baba Amr district of Homs city, and wanted to know what had happened to its residents, who endured a 26-day military siege before rebel fighters withdrew a week ago.

Ms Amos is the first senior foreign official to visit Baba Amr since the government assault.

As world pressure on Syria mounted, the deputy oil minister announced his defection, the first by a senior civilian official since the start of the uprising. Abdo Hussameldin (58) said he knew his change of sides would bring persecution on his family.

Two rebel groups later said four more high-ranking military officers had defected over the past three days to a camp for Syrian army deserters in southern Turkey.

Lieutenant Khaled al-Hamoud, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army (FSA), told Reuters by telephone the desertions brought to seven the number of brigadier generals who had defected.

In Damascus, the authorities continued to crack down on Assad opponents, with government forces shooting and wounding three mourners at a funeral for an army defector that turned into a protest against the president, locals said.

Opposition sources and residents say protests in the capital are driven by inflation and the plunging value of the Syrian pound.

The world has failed to stop an unequal struggle pitting mostly Sunni Muslim demonstrators and lightly armed rebels against the armored might of Assad’s 300,000-strong military, secret police and feared Alawite militiamen.

Western powers have shied away from Libya-style military intervention in Syria, which sits at the heart of a conflict-prone Middle East.

This week, US defense secretary Leon Panetta defended US caution about military involvement, especially without international consensus on Syria, but said the Pentagon had reviewed US military options.

Tunisia and Turkey, a neighbor of Syria, have also declared their opposition to intervention by any force from outside the region, and Mr Annan argued against further militarisation of the conflict.

“We should not forget the possible impact of Syria on the region if there is any miscalculation,” the former UN chief said.

But Syrian dissidents said diplomatic initiatives had proved fruitless in the past. “When they fail no action is taken against the regime and that’s why the opposition has to arm itself against its executioner,” said one rebel army officer.

Russia, a staunch defender of Syria, said Mr Assad was battling al Qaeda-backed “terrorists” including at least 15,000 foreign fighters who it said would seize towns if Assad troops withdraw.

“The flow of all kind of terrorists from some neighboring countries is always increasing,” Russia’s deputy ambassador Mikhail Lebedev said in Geneva.

The Libyan government denied Russian accusations that it was running camps to train and arm Syrian rebels.

On the ground, the humanitarian situation appeared dire. The United Nations said it was preparing food supplies for 1.5 million Syrians as part of a 90-day emergency plan.

“More needs to be done,” John Ging of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which is headed by Ms Amos, told a Syria Humanitarian Forum in Geneva.

Reuters

Syria is another instance of Western sympathy for despotic regimes.

Nancy Pelosi and Bashar Al-Assad meet in Syria in 2007.

By Mona Charen 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a firm statement to the Syrian elite this week, urging them to overthrow the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. “The longer you support the regime’s campaign of violence against your brothers and sisters, the more it will stain your honor,” she advised.

Only now? Only after thousands of men, women, and children have been murdered, tens of thousands wounded, and countless homes destroyed by artillery shells has the Obama team finally shed its illusions about the Syrian regime?

A mere eleven months ago, when peaceful demonstrators in the streets of Dara and other cities were met with bullets, Secretary Clinton referred to Assad as a “reformer.” She was not alone. Last year, Germany’s foreign minister Guido Westerwelle visited Assad and declared him indispensable for a “constructive solution” to the Middle East’s problems. A leading German think tank, which advises the foreign ministry, called Assad a “modernizer.”

Rare is the sceptered thug who does not attract fawning admiration from some in the free and democratic West. Fidel Castro was the darling of the smart set in the 1960s, and Che Guevara, one of his “wet work” assistants, adorns t-shirts worldwide to this day. Sean Penn is a shill for Hugo Chavez, and Robert Scheer had admiring things to say about Kim Il-Sung.

The more repressive and vicious the regime, the more some in the West will strain to find benign intentions in their leaders. One after another of the old Soviet general-secretaries was hailed, when he first ascended the greasy pole of Kremlin politics, as a “moderate.” Yuri Andropov, we were assured, loved American jazz, good Scotch, and “cynical political jokes with an anti-regime cast.” He went out of his way to meet with dissidents, we were advised. Perhaps he was drunk on Chivas Regal when he shot down civilian airliner KAL 007.

Similarly, when Syrian dictator Hafez Al-Assad (the butcher of Hama) died and was replaced by his son Bashar, the New York Times offered a highly sympathetic portrait of the “shy, young doctor.” The Times noted that expectations of the younger Assad were high, because, in the words of a member of the Syrian parliament, “he’s young and open and wants to give more liberty and democracy.”

Well, it may be churlish to begrudge people their optimism. But Assad has wielded absolute power in Syria for twelve years, and not a single reform has materialized. Quite the contrary. Even before the current bloodbath began, Syria was responsible for arming and protecting Hezbollah, assassinating Lebanese premier Rafik Al-Harriri, cooperating closely with Iran and North Korea, and sending terrorists into Iraq to kill Americans.

None of that prevented Hollywood’s glamour couple, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, from visiting with the Assads to discuss their “refugee work.” Just-released photos captured rock star and “human rights” campaigner Sting and his wife enjoying a good laugh with the Assads in 2008. Vogue magazine, apparently immune to shame, ran a fawning profile of the dictator’s wife, “a rose in the desert.” “Asma al-Assad,” Vogue told its readers, “is glamorous, young, and very chic — the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies.” Along with fetching views of Asma, Vogue featured shots of Bashar playing on the floor with his children.

When images of bleeding and dead children — shot by Assad’s troops — began to cascade out of Syria, Vogue quietly removed the piece from its website.

Then-speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Assad in 2007 (against the wishes of the Bush administration) and came away satisfied with his cooperation. “We were very pleased with the assurances we received from the president that he was ready to resume the peace process.” In this, she was echoing a sentiment often expressed by former secretary of state James A. Baker, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, who argued that the key to peace in the Middle East was to “flip Syria.”

But no visitor was more enthusiastic about Bashar Assad than President Obama’s informal envoy, Senator John Kerry, who made six visits to Damascus between 2009 and 2011. In 2010, he said “Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region.” Even after the tanks rolled into cities and began blasting away civilian demonstrators, Kerry stuck to his self-delusion: “My judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it. . . . ”

The “shy doctor” became a cold killer. Those who, without a particle of evidence, persuaded themselves that he was ever anything else, were useful idiots.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.

The Associated Press

BEIRUT - A French photojournalist and a prominent American war correspondent working for a British newspaper were killed Wednesday by Syrian shelling of the opposition stronghold Homs as President Bashar Assad’s regime escalated its attacks on rebel bases by strafing from helicopter gunships, activists said.

Weeks of withering barrages on the central city of Homs have failed to drive out opposition factions that include rebel soldiers who fled Assad’s forces. Hundreds have died in the siege and the latest deaths further galvanized international pressure on Assad, who appears intent on widening his military crackdowns despite the risk of pushing Syria toward full-scale civil war.

“This tragic incident is another example of the shameless brutality of the Assad regime.” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said of the journalists killed.

“That’s enough now, the regime must go,” said French President Nicolas Sarkozy after his government confirmed the two deaths.

French spokeswoman Valerie Pecresse identified those killed as French photojournalist Remi Ochlik and American reporter Marie Colvin, who was working for Britain’s Sunday Times.

France’s Foreign Minister, Alain Juppe, said the attacks show the “increasingly intolerable repression” by Syrian forces. French Communication Minister Frederic Mitterrand said of the journalists killed: “It’s abominable.”

Syrian activists said at least two other Western journalists - French reporter Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro and British photographer Paul Conroy of the Sunday Times - were wounded in Wednesday’s shelling, which claimed at least 13 lives.

The Syrian military has intensified its attacks on Homs in the past few days, aiming to retake rebel-held neighborhoods that have become powerful symbols of resistance to Assad’s rule. For the government in Damascus, Homs is a critical battleground to maintain its control of Syria’s third-largest city and keep more rebel pockets from growing elsewhere.

In the northwestern restive province of Idlib, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that Syrian army helicopters fitted with machine guns opened fire on the village of Ifis. Idlib is a main base of the rebel Free Syrian Army.

Another opposition group, the Local Coordination Committees, said troops conducted raids in the Damascus district of Mazzeh district and the suburb Jobar, where dozens of people were detained. In Jobar, the group said troops broke doors of homes and shops and set up checkpoints.

The group also said Syrian troops backed by tanks stormed the southern village of Hirak and launched a wave of arrests.

The Obama administration opened the door slightly Tuesday to international military assistance for Syria’s rebels, with officials saying new tactics may have to be explored if Assad continues to defy pressure to halt a brutal crackdown on dissenters that has raged for 11 months and killed thousands.

The White House and State Department said they still hope for a political solution. But faced with the daily onslaught by the Assad regime against Syrian civilians, officials dropped the administration’s previous strident opposition to arming anti-regime forces. It remained unclear, though, what, if any, role the U.S. might play in providing such aid.

A Homs-based activist, Omar Shaker, said the journalists were killed when several rockets hit a garden of a house used by activists and journalists in the besieged Homs neighborhood of Baba Amr, which has come under weeks of heavy bombardment by forces from Assad’s regime. At least 13 people were killed in Wednesday’s shelling, including the journalists, activists said.

The U.N. estimates that 5,400 people have been killed in repression by the regime of President Bashar Assad against a popular uprising that began 11 months ago. Syrian activists, however, put the death toll at more than 7,300.

He added that intense Syrian troops shelling with tanks and artilleries began at 6:30 a.m. and was continuing hours later. He said the apartment used by journalists was hit around 10 a.m.

An amateur video posted online by activist showed what they claimed were bodies of two people in the middle of a heavily damaged house. It said they were of the journalists. One of the dead was wearing what appeared to be a flak jacket.

Many foreign journalists have been sneaking into Syria illegally in the past months with the help of smugglers from Lebanon and Turkey. Although the Syrian government has allowed some journalists into the country their movement is tightly controlled by Information Ministry minders.

Colvin, from Oyster Bay, New York, was in her 50s and a veteran foreign correspondent for Britain’s Sunday Times for the past two decades. She was instantly recognizable for an eye patch worn after being injured covering conflicts in Sri Lanka in 2001.

Colvin said she would not “hang up my flak jacket” even after the eye injury.

“So, was I stupid? Stupid I would feel writing a column about the dinner party I went to last night,” she wrote in the Sunday Times after the attack. “Equally, I’d rather be in that middle ground between a desk job and getting shot, no offense to desk jobs.

In Geneva, the International Red Cross said it was holding talks with members of the opposition Syrian National Council. The ICRC called Tuesday for a daily two-hour halt to fighting in Syria so it can bring emergency aid to affected areas and evacuate the wounded and sick.

Head of ICRI operations for the Middle East, Beatrice Megevand-Roggo, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the ICRC had almost no contacts with opposition figures inside Syria.

The journalists’ deaths came a day after a Syrian sniper shot dead Rami al-Sayyed, a prominent activist in Baba Amr who was famous for posting online videos, Shaker and the Local Coordination Committees activist group said.

On Jan. 11, award-winning French TV reporter Gilles Jacquier was killed in Homs. The 43-year-old correspondent for France-2 Television was the first Western journalist to die since the uprising began in March. Syrian authorities have said he was killed in a grenade attack carried out by opposition forces - a claim questioned by the French government, human rights groups and the Syrian opposition.

Last week, New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid died of an apparent asthma attack in Syria after he sneaked in to cover the conflict.