Syrian cities, Palestinian camp reportedly bloodied

Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari (left) talks Friday with Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin and Wang Min, China’s deputy U.N. ambassador, before the General Assembly approved a resolution denouncing the Syrian government.
Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari (left) talks Friday with Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin and Wang Min, China’s deputy U.N. ambassador, before the General Assembly approved a resolution denouncing the Syrian government.

— Armed clashes broke out in at least three Syrian cities Friday amid reports of a deadly mortar attack on a major Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, an event that threatened to draw Syria’s displaced Palestinian population into its civil war.

The new mayhem, reported in Damascus, Aleppo and Hama, came as the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly approved an Arab League-backed resolution denouncing the Syrian government for the conflict. The vote, which carries no enforcement power, came a day after the resignation of Kofi Annan, the special peace envoy from the United Nations and the Arab League, who is quitting in frustration after six months of what he characterized as an impossible task.

Russia, the most important foreign backer of the Syrian government, was among those that voted against the resolution, and it blamed Western nations for undermining Annan by supporting the Syrian insurgency. The Russians also called for an expedited search to replace Annan and said it was important to maintain a U.N. monitor mission in Syria. The current one expires in little more than two weeks.

A Russian Foreign Ministry statement said Russia had done everything possible to support Annan’s peace plan but opposition forces had refused to negotiate, supported by “our Western partners, and certain regional states.”

Western nations, led by the United States, have accused Russia of helping to sabotage Annan’s diplomacy and have questioned the need for a U.N. monitoring presence in Syria if there is no viable peace plan to monitor.

INTERACTIVE

Uprising in Syria

Foreign Secretary William Hague of Britain said Friday that Annan’s decision represented “a bleak moment” for diplomatic efforts to resolve the Syrian conflict. While Britain will intensify its support for the rebels, he said in a BBC radio interview, its help will not involve weapons.

“We are helping elements of the Syrian opposition but in a practical and nonlethal way,” he said.

SYRIAN RESOLUTION OK’D

At the United Nations, the General Assembly passed the Syria resolution, which was drafted and introduced by Saudi Arabia, a major supporter of the Syrian opposition, on a vote of 133-12, with 31 abstentions. But the diplomatic exercise was seen as a largely symbolic move that reflected Arab League frustration over the failure of the Security Council to take more decisive action to halt the 17-month Syrian conflict.

Before the vote, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon reminded the General Assembly of the fresh violence in the city of Aleppo and drew comparisons between the failure to act in Syria with the international community’s failure to protect people from past genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia, and Rwanda.

“The conflict in Syria is a test of everything this organization stands for,” Ban said. “I do not want today’s United Nations to fail that test.”

The vote came after the more powerful Security Council was stopped by a series of Russian and Chinese vetoes on resolutions that would have opened the door to sanctions on Syria.

Syrian Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari called the resolution’s main sponsors, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, “despotic oligarchies.”

“The draft resolution will have no impact whatsoever. It is a piece of theater,” he told reporters after the vote. And Iran’s deputy ambassador, Eshagh Alehabib, called the resolution “one-sided.”

British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said the resolution was not meant to be balanced. The intent, he said, was to issue an unequivocal condemnation of the Syrian regime.

RUSSIAN WARSHIPS NEAR

Senior Syrian officials have pleaded with Russia for financial loans and supplies of oil products, a sign that the global fallout from President Bashar Assad’s crackdown is squeezing his regime.

While the Syrian delegation was holding talks in Moscow, a squadron of Russian warships was approaching Syria’s port of Tartus, the only naval base Russia has outside the former Soviet Union. The Russian Defense Ministry said some of the ships may call on the port to replenish their supplies.

Syria’s Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil, who led a delegation of several Cabinet ministers on a trip to Moscow, told reporters Friday that they have asked for a Russian loan to replenish Syria’s hard-currency reserves, which have been depleted by international embargoes on Syrian exports.

Jamil and Syrian Finance Minister Mohammad al-Julaylati refused to disclose the sum of the loan Syria is seeking.

“We have asked Russia for a hard-currency loan to allow us to overcome the current problems, and they promised to consider our request,” al-Julaylati said at a news conference. “We need some additional resources. Countries in such situations usually ask for foreign loans.”

Jamil said Syria may get the loan within weeks. Russian authorities did not issue any comments about the requests.

Jamil also said Damascus wants to get diesel oil and other oil products from Russia in exchange for crude supplies. He said Syria currently produces 200,000 barrels of crude a day. “The most important thing is to break the blockade of Syria and continue the supplies of oil and imports of oil products,” Jamil said.

As tensions have risen in Syria this summer, there have been several reports that Russia was deploying warships, but each time they have been followed by official denials. Military experts say Russia’s naval base in Tartus is tiny and understaffed and would be difficult to defend in a conflict.

20 DIE AT REFUGEE CAMP

Mortar shells rained down on a crowded marketplace in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Syrian capital, killing at least 20 people as regime forces and rebels fought nearby, activists said.

The U.N. agency running Palestinian camps confirmed that at least 20 people had died in the shelling of Yarmouk. The Britain-based Syria Observatory for Human Rights, which first reported the deaths, said the mortar shells hit as shoppers were buying food for the evening meal. The group declined to speculate over who had fired the mortars.

The state news agency blamed the bombardment on “terrorist mercenaries” — a term the government uses for rebel fighters — and said they had been chased away by security forces.

Government troops have in the past attacked the camp, home to nearly 150,000 Palestinians and their descendants driven from their homes by the war surrounding Israel’s 1948 creation. Palestinian refugees in Syria have tried to stay out of the uprising, but with Yarmouk nestled among neighborhoods sympathetic to the rebels, its residents were eventually drawn into the fighting.

If the attack was carried out by the Syrian military, that would constitute a shift on the part of Assad, who has always sought to portray Syria as the lead defender of Palestinian rights and the vanguard of resistance to Israel.

In its account of the attack, SANA quoted Palestinian leaders in the camp as saying that the compass of the Palestinian people “would ever remain pointing to Palestine” — apparently an indirect warning to Palestinians to avoid siding with the rebels.

The Syrian Observatory said at least 133 civilians died in fighting Thursday and it reported continued clashes Friday in and around Damascus, the city of Hama further north, and Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and commercial center, which has been the focus of much of the violence over the past few weeks.

The Syrian National Council, meanwhile, is deep into organizing an alternative to the Assad regime that could include those already in state institutions or even the ruling Baath Party, a senior member of the opposition group said Friday.

Bassma Kodmani, the Syrian National Council’s Parisbased spokesman, did not exclude a role for Manaf Tlass, the Syrian general who was the first defector within Assad’s inner circle but whose motives have raised suspicions.

The “two major pillars” of a transitional authority in a post-Assad era must include political and military components, Kodmani said, and the road map is being prepared “in full coordination with the Free Syrian Army” battling Assad’s forces. But “all sectors of society” would have a role, she said.

Information for this article was contributed by Damien Cave, Ellen Barry, Alan Cowell and Rick Gladstone of The New York Times; and by Peter James Spielmann, Paul Schemm, Zeina Karam, Elizabeth Kennedy, Ali Akbar Dareini, Dalia Nammari, Vladimir Isachenkov and Elaine Ganley of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/04/2012

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