FRI 29 - 3 - 2024
 
Date: Sep 7, 2011
Source: The Daily Star
2 killed ahead of Arab League chief Syria visit

DAMASCUS/GENEVA/BEIRUT: Syrian forces killed two people as they pressed their crackdown on dissent Tuesday, on the eve of the Arab League chief’s visit to push for an end to the violence and urge reforms and elections.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a 15-year-old boy and another civilian were killed by gunfire in the flashpoint central province of Homs, where another five bodies were found Tuesday.


The latest bloodshed came as the embattled President Bashar Assad prepared to host Wednesday Arab League secretary general Nabil al-Arabi, who is carrying a 13-point initiative to end the crisis. It also comes a day after the International Committee of the Red Cross said Syria had agreed, for the first time since anti-regime protests erupted more than five months ago, to allow its delegates to visit a detention center.
More than 2,200 people have been killed in Syria since the almost daily mass protests began, according to U.N. figures. Human rights groups say that more than 10,000 are behind bars.
Syria says it is fighting foreign-backed “armed terrorist gangs.”


The Arab League chief has been tasked by foreign ministers of the 22-member bloc with traveling to Damascus to outline a 13-point proposal to end the bloodshed, and to push Syria to launch reforms. According to a copy of the document seen by AFP, Arabi will propose that Assad hold elections in three years, move towards a pluralistic government and halt immediately the crackdown on anti-regime protesters.


The initiative, agreed at an Arab foreign ministers’ meeting in Cairo last month, calls for a “clear declaration of principles by President Bashar Assad specifying commitment to reforms he made in past speeches.”


It says Assad should declare his “commitment to making the transition toward a pluralistic government and use his powers to speed up reforms and announce multi-candidate elections … for 2014, when his current mandate ends.”
The proposal also calls on the Syrian government “to immediately end” the crackdown on protesters in order “to spare Syria from sliding into sectarian strife or providing justification for foreign intervention.”


Speaking a day after the International Committee of the Red Cross announced Syria had opened its prisons for the first time, its chief Jakob Kellenberger said Tuesday the ICRC would press Syria for swift access to all detainees including thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators believed to be in informal lockups, as arrests continued across the country. ICRC staff were paying further visits to Damascus central prison, which has 6,000 inmates, both criminal and political.


“We have enough information to know that there are [other] places we have to see as early as possible,” Kellenberger told a news conference upon his return from Syria where he held talks with Assad.
For now, Syria has granted access to prisons under the authority of the Interior Ministry, according to the ICRC. Prison visits were an “ambitious and delicate exercise” for any country, Kellenberger said, noting that neither Egypt nor Bahrain had granted them despite repeated ICRC requests.


On the ground activists reported that anti-regime demonstrations took place late Monday near Homs, hours after Syrian forces raided several parts of the rebellious province where 12 people were killed earlier in the day.
Meanwhile Syrian soldiers raided homes and made arrests Tuesday in a manhunt for a provincial attorney general who appeared on video last week saying he had defected in protest, activists said.


Soldiers demanding information about Adnan Bakkour fanned out near the Turkish border and in central Syria, said Omar Idilbi, a spokesman for the activist network The Local Coordination Committees. Bakkour’s whereabouts remained unclear. The former attorney general for central Hama province appeared in two videos last week declaring his resignation, but authorities said “terrorists” had kidnapped him and forced him to make the recording.
Bakkour denied the government claim in one of the videos.


In an audio message posted online Tuesday, a man who identified himself as Bakkour said that security forces and pro-regime thugs had attacked his convoy Friday in the Maaret Hirmeh area in Idlib province, killing four people accompanying him and wounding three others.
“I, myself, was lightly wounded because of shrapnel,” he said in the audio recording, adding he was able to escape with the help of other dissidents.


The AP could not verify the videos or the audio recording.
Idilbi, the LCC spokesman, confirmed the Friday attack in Maaret Hirmeh, saying a high-ranking leader of the protest movement from the rebellious city of Hama died in the attack on Bakkour. He said Bakkour was now “safely out of the country,” but troops were still conducting raids and arrests in the Hama countryside and Idlib province in search for him.



 
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