FRANCE PRESS

NEW YORK/DAMASCUS: French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe accused the Syrian regime Monday of “crimes against humanity” and slammed the U.N. Security Council for failing to take a strong stand on the unrest.
“Crimes against humanity are committed in Syria. The silence of the Security Council is unacceptable,” Juppe told the Council on Foreign Relations, at a talk held on the sidelines of a week of U.N. summits.

Syria has been rocked by protests against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad that began March 15 and triggered a brutal crackdown in which the United Nations says 2,600 people have been killed.
China and Russia, both permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, have opposed plans to slap more sanctions on Damascus.

Juppe said he had recently traveled to both Russia and China for talks. “The dialogue with Russia was more frank. We have a fundamental difference in how we see things,” he told a later press conference at the French U.N. mission.

“We believe that the [Syrian] regime has little by little lost its legitimacy by practicing such a repression and unparalleled brutality,” Juppe said.
The permanent members of the Security Council are deeply divided on how to deal with the unrest in Syria, and the regime’s crackdown on the pro-democracy protests.

The U.S., Britain and France have called for Assad to step down, and have pressed for U.N. sanctions against the regime. But they have met stiff opposition from Russia and China.
A group of Russian lawmakers is in Syria to broker an end to the violence.

Assad told them Sunday that he welcomes the “balanced and constructive Russian position toward the security and stability of Syria,” the state-run SANA news agency reported.
But Assad, who has blamed “armed terrorist gangs” for the violence rocking his country, also warned against “any foreign intervention that threatens to divide states in the region.”

Meanwhile, Syrian security continued to pursue their repression of anti-regime protesters, killing five in the town of Houla and conducting arrests elsewhere, activists said.
“Five residents, including a woman, were shot dead Monday by security forces, who have been conducting a sweep in Houla since Sunday,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a statement.

Security forces fired on demonstrators in two other towns in Homs, and made arrests in the second city Aleppo, eastern Deir al-Zour and the coastal cities of Latakia and Banias, it said. Activists have called for rallies Tuesday in support of Lieutenant Colonel Hussein Harmush, the first officer to publicly declare his desertion in early June in protest at the crackdown.

State television broadcast an interview with Harmush Thursday in which he said he had returned willingly to Syria from Turkey, and denied receiving orders to shoot civilians.

According to U.N. estimates at least 2,600 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the crackdown on pro-democracy protests since the movement was launched March 15.

“Despite the mounting international pressure in the past six months since the start of protests … the bloody crackdown in Syria has intensified,” U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kang Kyung-wha said in Geneva Monday.

She told the U.N. Human Rights Council that it “should continue to use all means available in this regard,” to help stop the bloodshed.
“It has undermined those promises by more excessive use of force, killing of demonstrators, mass arrests, raids on cities, torture and other abuses,” Kang said.

A fact-finding mission by Kang’s office to Syria found that the crackdown may amount to crimes against humanity and urged the U.N. Security Council to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court.

A Syrian envoy told the council in Geneva that the mission’s report was “biased” and that “the events that have taken place have nothing to do with peaceful protests.”
Since mid-March, several opposition groups have emerged united in their call for the regime’s ouster but have been divided about how to do it.

The latest group, the Syrian Coalition of Secular and Democratic Forces, meeting in Paris, issued a statement Monday urging the international community to protect civilians against the repression.
The CSDF brings together a dozen parties and political figures representing non-Islamist opposition groups from Kurdish and Arab, Christian and Muslim communities.