Youssef Badawi/European Pressphoto Agency
A hotel employee raised the Syrian national flag in Damascus on Thursday. United Nations monitors were unable to gain access to the village of Qubeir, the site of a reported massacre on Wednesday.
ANTAKYA, Turkey ? The Syrian conflict escalated to a dangerous new level on Thursday when government troops and their civilian supporters blocked unarmed United Nations monitors from investigating a massacre of farm families, prompting sharp denunciations of Damascus from diplomats who have struggled vainly to find a workable, consensus solution to the crisis.
The monitors were thwarted from reaching the tiny hamlet of Qubeir, just west of Hama, to check on what activists say was the slaying of as many as 78 people, half of them women and children, who were shot, garroted and in some cases burned alive. The monitors themselves were fired upon, United Nations officials said.
The standoff at a government checkpoint seemed to symbolize the international paralysis over how to stem the bloodshed. It would be the fourth massacre in two weeks and suggested that the Syrian conflict was spiraling, seemingly daily, toward a sectarian civil war, pitting a government dominated by the Alawite sect against members of a Sunni Muslim majority feeling vulnerable to slaughter with no consequence. The Qubeir victims were all thought to be Sunnis.
On Friday, China, regarded along with Russia as the leading allies of President Bashar al-Assad, urged both sides in the conflict to stop fighting but declined to endorse calls for stronger pressure on the authorities in Damascus.
?I think the Syrian government and opposition should both truly shoulder their responsibility and cease fire and halt violence,? Liu Weimin, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, told a daily news briefing in Beijing, according to Reuters. ?Both sides have this responsibility because they both undertook this commitment.?
?We express strong condemnation of the recent barbarity involving attacks on innocent civilians, especially women and children, and we hope that the perpetrators will be punished according to the law as soon as possible,? Mr. Liu said.
The massacre and the government?s attempt to prevent the monitors from investigating it came as Kofi Annan, the special envoy from the United Nations and the Arab League, addressed both the General Assembly and the Security Council in an effort to salvage his six-point peace plan from irrelevance. He warned that the already terrible violence would only increase without concerted international pressure, which should be exerted through some kind of ?contact group? involving key international powers and Syria?s neighbors.
?We cannot allow mass killing to become part of everyday reality in Syria,? Mr. Annan told the General Assembly, while blaming both sides for the intensification. ?If things do not change, the future is likely to be one of brutal repression, massacres, sectarian violence and even all-out civil war. All Syrians will lose.?
Mr. Annan said that since his visit to Damascus last week, and despite promises from Mr. Assad to respect the peace plan, which includes a cease-fire, there had been more violence throughout Syria with worse shelling of cities. The government-backed militia ?seem to have free rein with appalling consequences,? he said. Armed opposition elements had intensified their attacks as well, he said.
In Beijing, Mr. Liu said that, in light of the violence, ?the importance of envoy Annan?s mediation efforts has not diminished but rather increased. The support of all sides for the envoy Annan should strengthen, rather than weaken.?
United Nations monitors stationed across the country, including Deir al-Zour, Idlib, Homs and Hama, as well as Aleppo, Syria?s biggest city, have all reported increased shelling and firing. ?You see a more than serious uptick in violence in all the places where we are,? said Jean-Marie Guehenno, a senior deputy to Mr. Annan.
Opposition activists said that an assault on the town of Hiffeh, just east of Latakia, which began last Monday, included the first use of missiles fired from helicopter gunships since the protests that started in March 2011 escalated into armed clashes last fall.
The violence is intensifying for several reasons, diplomats and other analysts believe.
First, Mr. Assad has been known to follow his late father, Hafez al-Assad, on the way he rules. His father crushed an insurgency in 1982 by wiping out an entire neighborhood in Hama.
Second, the support of Russia, China and Iran, along with the continued declaration of the international community that there will be no military intervention, has left him assured of no real consequences to his actions. ?They feel they are in control and don?t need to listen,? said a United Nations diplomat familiar with Mr. Annan?s negotiations. ?Assad is just too comfortable.?
Third, Mr. Assad knows that if he stops the violence and actually engages in a political process, his government will be doomed by a mass protest movement.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8470caa805199563886819731c3eefa8
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