Editorial Note: The following news reports are summaries from original sources. They may also include corrections of Arabic names and political terminology. Comments are in parentheses.

 
Syrian Army Shells Protest Cities, Bloodshed Continues, Constitution Referendum, Foreign Journalists Escape

Syrian military pounds rebel areas, foreign journalists escape

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

Tue Feb 28, 2012 7:47am EST

AMMAN (Reuters) -

Syrian forces shelled an opposition stronghold in Hama province, killing 20 people, on Tuesday and hit rebel-held parts of Homs, activists said, as two wounded foreign journalists trapped in the city were reported to have been smuggled safely to Lebanon.

President Bashar al-Assad sent units of an elite armored division, which is led by his brother Maher, into Homs overnight, activists said. Tanks with the words "Fourth Division Monsters" painted on them moved close to the besieged Baba Amro district.

French journalist Edith Bouvier and British photographer Paul Conroy, both wounded last week in an attack in Baba Amro, were now safe in Lebanon, a diplomat and opposition sources said. It was not clear how they escaped.

In Hama province, security forces bombarded the town of Helfaya, a hotbed of protests in the uprising against Assad.

Activists said the 20 deaths of Sunni Muslim villagers there were among at least 100 killed in the province in the last two weeks in revenge for rebel Free Syrian Army attacks on security forces commanded by members of Assad's minority Alawite sect.

The reports could not be independently confirmed. Syrian authorities tightly restrict media access to the country.

Opposition groups say hundreds of civilians have been killed or wounded in the siege of Baba Amro and other rebellious districts in Homs, where terrified residents are enduring dire conditions, without proper supplies of water, food and medicine.

Syrian forces on Tuesday launched the heaviest bombardment in their three-week assault on Baba Amro, activists said.

Assad, projecting an aura of normality in a land ravaged by 11 months of conflict over his right to power, decreed that a new constitution was in force on Tuesday after officials said nearly 90 percent of voters had endorsed it in a referendum.

Opposition groups and Western leaders seeking Assad's removal denounced Sunday's vote as a charade that diverted attention from the violence in Homs and elsewhere.

"BARBARISM"

Assad's government had "broken all the limits of barbarism". French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said.

"And when I see the Syrian president paraded around this voting station in Damascus for this phony referendum, it makes you deeply indignant," he told RTL radio.

Juppe said he felt "immensely frustrated" at difficulties in obtaining security guarantees to enable wounded civilians and Western journalists to be evacuated from Homs.

American reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed in Baba Amro on February 22 in a strike on a house in which Conroy and Bouvier were wounded.

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent did manage to evacuate three people from Baba Amro on Monday, but not the foreign reporters, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.

The outside world has proved powerless to halt the killing in Syria, where repression of initially peaceful protests has spawned an armed insurrection by army deserters and others.

"As long as we have not halted the massacres, we are impotent, but we are not inactive," Juppe said.

He told the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday it was time to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court and warned Assad he would be brought to justice.

Foreign powers have argued over whether to arm Syrian rebels trying to resist Assad's forces, but there is little appetite in the West for any Libya-style military intervention.

Russia and China have used their vetoes to protect Syria from any action by the U.N. Security Council, where Western and Arab powers had sought backing for an Arab League transition plan under which Assad would voluntarily relinquish office.

Qatar joined Saudi Arabia on Monday in advocating arming the Syrian rebels. "We should do whatever is necessary to help them, including giving them weapons to defend themselves," Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said in Oslo.

Assad says he is battling a foreign conspiracy featuring "armed terrorist groups" and al Qaeda militants, while pressing ahead with political reforms toward greater democracy.

His opponents scorn his calls for dialogue as meaningless while Syrian security forces are violently repressing dissent.

The Syrian leader says the new constitution will lead to multi-party elections within three months.

The document drops a clause making Syria's Baath party the leader of state and society, allows political pluralism and limits a president to two seven-year terms.

But this restriction is not retroactive, implying that Assad, 46 and already in power since 2000, could serve two further terms after his current one expires in 2014.

The opposition dismisses the reforms on offer, saying that Assad, and his father who ruled for 30 years before him, have long paid only lip service to existing legal obligations.

(Additional reporting by Dominic Evans, Erika Solomon and Mariam Karouny in Beirut; Writing by Alistair Lyon, Editing by Rosalind Russell)

 

Syrians 'back' constitution amid bloodshed

By Lucy FIELDER ,  28/02/2012

FRANCE 24 correspondent reporting Lebanon (video) News Wires (text)

REUTERS -

Syrian artillery pounded rebel-held areas of Homs as President Bashar al-Assad’s government announced that voters had overwhelmingly approved a new constitution in a referendum derided as a sham by his critics at home and abroad.

The outside world has proved powerless to halt the killing in Syria, where repression of initially peaceful protests has spawned an armed insurrection by army deserters and others.

Assad will face day of reckoning says France

The day is coming when Syrian civilian and military authorities will face justice for crimes against the population, “first among them President Assad himself”, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Monday.

In a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Juppe slammed the Security Council’s “impotence” on Syria, shown by vetoes by China and Russia, and said that an Arab League peace plan was the “only path” forward to end the crisis.

“The day will come when the Syrian civilian and military authorities, first among them President (Bashar al-) Assad himself, must respond before justice for their acts. In the face of such crimes, there can be no impunity,” Juppe told the 47-member Geneva forum, which will hold an emergency debate on Syria on Tuesday.

It was urgent for the whole world to show its revulsion at the “odious crimes” Damascus had committed against its people, Juppe said, citing massacres of civilians, bombardment of towns, torturing of children and killing of wounded in hospital. (REUTERS)

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent did manage to enter the besieged Baba Amro district of Homs and evacuate three people on Monday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said. Foreign reporters trapped in the area were not evacuated and the bodies of two journalists killed there had not been recovered, it said.

While foreign powers argued over whether to arm the rebels, the Syrian Interior Ministry on Monday said the reformed constitution, which could keep Assad in power until 2028, had received 89.4 percent approval from more than 8 million voters.

Syrian dissidents and Western leaders dismissed as a farce Sunday’s vote, conducted in the midst of the country’s bloodiest turmoil in decades, although Assad says the new constitution will lead to multi-party elections within three months.

Officials put national voter turnout at close to 60 percent, but diplomats who toured polling stations in Damascus saw only a handful of voters at each location. On the same day, at least 59 people were killed in violence around the country.

Assad says he is fighting foreign-backed “armed terrorist groups” and his main allies - Russia, China and Iran - fiercely oppose any outside intervention intended to add him to the list of Arab autocrats unseated by popular revolts in the past year.

But Qatar joined Saudi Arabia in advocating arming the Syrian rebels, given that Russia and China have twice used their vetoes to block any action by the U.N. Security Council.

“I think we should do whatever is necessary to help them, including giving them weapons to defend themselves,” Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said in Oslo.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe criticised the U.N. Security Council’s “impotence” on Syria, shown by the Russian and Chinese vetoes, and accused the Syrian authorities of “massacres” and “odious crimes”.

In a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Juppe said the time was ripe for referring Syria to the International Criminal Court and warned Assad he would be brought to justice.

“The day will come when the Syrian civilian and military authorities, first among them President Assad himself, must respond before justice for their acts. In the face of such crimes, there can be no impunity,” Juppe told the 47-member Geneva forum, which will hold an emergency debate on Syria on Tuesday.

Homs bombarded again

Shells and rockets crashed into Sunni Muslim districts of Homs that have already endured weeks of bombardment as Assad’s forces, led by officers from his minority Alawite sect, try to stamp out an almost year-long revolt against his 11-year rule.

The ICRC has been pursuing talks with the Syrian authorities and opposition forces for days to secure access to besieged neighbourhoods such as Baba Amro, where local activists say hundreds of wounded need treatment and thousands of civilians are short of water, food and medical supplies.

ICRC spokesman Hicham Hassan said a team from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent team had entered Baba Amro. “They have been able to evacuate three persons, including an aged woman, and a pregnant woman and her husband,” he said.

The trio were believed to be Syrian and did not include four Western journalists trapped in Baba Amro, two of them wounded. A U.S. reporter and a French photographer were killed there on Feb. 22.

International consternation has grown over the turmoil in Syria, but there is little appetite in the West for military action akin to the U.N.-backed NATO campaign in Libya.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Western powers hoped diplomacy could change minds: “We are putting pressure on the Russians first and the Chinese afterwards so that they lift their veto.”

The European Union agreed more sanctions, targeting Syria’s central bank and several cabinet ministers, curbing gold trading with state entities and banning cargo flights from the country.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin reiterated Moscow’s opposition to any military intervention in Syria.

“I very much hope the United States and other countries ... do not try to set a military scenario in motion in Syria without sanction from the U.N. Security Council,” said Putin.

The new constitution drops a clause making Assad’s Baath party the leader of state and society, allows political pluralism and limits a president to two seven-year terms.

But this restriction is not retrospective, implying that Assad, 46 and already in power since 2000, could serve two further terms after his current one expires in 2014.

The opposition dismisses the reforms on offer, saying that Assad, and his father who ruled for 30 years before him, have long paid only lip service to existing legal obligations.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, now the new U.N.-Arab League envoy on Syria, was holding separate talks in Geneva with Juppe and Iran’s foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi on the sidelines of a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting.

Iran is Assad’s closest ally. The main Shi’ite Muslim power, it has religious ties to Assad’s Alawites and is confronting the Sunnis who dominate the Arab League - both the Sunni Islamists who have done well out of the past year’s democratic changes and autocratic, Western-backed leaders in the Gulf and elsewhere.

SYRIA Journalists still trapped as Red Crescent enters Homs

SYRIA EU agrees to new sanctions on Syrian regime

SYRIA Syria says 89% of voters approve new constitution