Western governments prepared to send their top diplomats to lobby for a UN resolution condemning the Syrian regime’s deadly crackdown as Russia said yesterday that it opposes the proposed text.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the UN Security Council “must act” to end President Bashar al-Assad’s “violent and brutal attacks” against demonstrators after adopting not a single resolution since the protests erupted in March last year.
Mrs Clinton said she would travel to the United Nations on Tuesday to “send a clear message of support to the Syrian people – we stand with you.”
The Syrian opposition flatly rebuffed a Russian call for talks with the Assad regime as violence across Syria killed 53 people, 35 of them civilians, activists said.
On Sunday, 80 people were reportedly killed, equally divided between military and civilian deaths, in the most intense clashes since the 10-month-old uprising began, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The latest spike in violence, on top of what the United Nations said at the start of January already added up to 5,400 killings, pushed the Arab League to suspend a much criticised observer mission to Syria on Saturday.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe too is to head to New York today to press the Security Council into taking action over the Assad regime’s “crimes against humanity,” his ministry said.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said a ministerial meeting at the UN on Tuesday would allow the Security Council to listen to the Arab League’s report on the situation in Syria.
The Foreign Office in London said that Foreign Secretary William Hague would also go to the Security Council, although Juppe admitted that “conditions aren’t yet right to get a resolution passed, because Russia is still reluctant”.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said the latest draft tabled by Morocco on Friday was little different to one Moscow and Beijing vetoed last October.
“The current Western draft has not gone too far from the October version, and, certainly, cannot be supported by us,” Mr Gatilov told Interfax news agency in an interview.
“The draft has statements in it calling on the member states to stop arms deliveries to Syria,” he said.
Moscow, which has close ties with its Soviet-era ally, said earlier that Damascus had agreed to its offer to host talks with opposition representatives.
But the head of the Syrian National Council (SNC) said that the opposition rejects all talks with the Damascus regime until Assad steps down.
“The resignation of Assad is the condition for any negotiation on the transition to a democratic government in Syria,” Burhan Ghalioun told AFP.
The position was echoed by the second largest opposition grouping, the Syrian National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change.
“Any negotiation or meeting is inconceivable in the shadow of the growing violence and killings, and the persistent arrests,” its leader Hassan Abdel Azim said.
Regime forces, who were reported to have executed a founder of the rebel army, appeared determined to wrest back control of Damascus suburbs which have intermittently fallen into the hands of the rebels.