Beirut – Russia, China Veto UN Resolution Calling on Syrian President to Step Down

Beirut – Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution backing calls for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down, despite international outrage Saturday over a devastating bombardment of the city of Homs by his regime’s forces. Activists said more than 200 were killed in the bloodiest episode of the nearly 11-month uprising.

The overnight onslaught on restive neighborhoods in Homs, Syria’s third largest city, signaled a willingness by Assad’s regime to bring a new level of violence to stamp out an opposition that has grown increasingly bold and armed.

Its timing, hours before a planned vote on the U.N. resolution, suggested Assad was confident of his ally Russia’s protection on the world stage.

Residents of Homs on Saturday described a night of ceaseless bombardment by mortars and rockets that lasted until dawn, sending them fleeing to lower floors and basements. When daylight came, dozens of buildings were left punctured by shells, facades collapsed, and some streets were stained with blood.

Thousands gathered for a funeral ceremony for some of the victims in the worst hit neighborhood, Khaldiyeh, where more than 60 coffins and bodies in white shrouds were lined up in a park, according to footage of the scene.

“A few more nights like this one and Homs will be erased from the map,” Ammar, a resident, said, speaking on condition that only his first name be used for fear he and his family could be targeted. “We are being massacred.”

Activists’ reports of the death toll could not be independently confirmed, and the counts varied due to the confusion of tracking the dead.

The Syrian government denied any bombardment took place at all, saying the high death tolls were opposition propaganda aimed at pressuring the United Nations and the bodies were those of people who had been kidnapped previously by “terrorists.”

The bloodshed added heat to negotiations that have been going on for days, as Western and Arab nations tried to overcome Russia’s opposition to the resolution. The measure would have backed an Arab call for Assad to hand over his powers to his vice president and allow formation of a unity government.

“The Assad regime must come to an end,” President Obama said in a statement Saturday before the vote, calling on the Security Council to “stand against the Assad regime’s relentless brutality.”

But Russia demanded further changes be made, saying the draft did not make enough demands on the armed opposition in Syria and calls for Assad to step aside could wreck chances for a negotiated solution to the country’s upheaval. In the end, the resolution’s proponents pushed ahead with a vote, challenging Moscow to veto or back down.

After the veto, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said her country was “disgusted” by the vote.

“It is a sad day for this council, a sad day for Syrians and a sad day for all friends of democracy,” French Ambassador Gerard Araud said. He said Russia and China had “made themselves complicit in a policy of repression carried out by the Assad regime.”

Syria has been a key Russian ally since Soviet times and Moscow has opposed any U.N. call that could be interpreted as advocating military intervention or regime change. Russia and China also used their veto powers as permanent council members in October to block a previous Western attempt to condemn the violence in Syria.

Assad has seen the Russian backing as crucial as he wages a crackdown that has killed well over 5,400 people since March, according to a U.N. estimate.

In a sign of Assad’s thinking, a pro-Syrian Lebanese politician who met with the Syrian leader last week told a Lebanese newspaper that Assad was “confident in the Russian position.”

Wiam Wahhab said Assad told him that the time had come to decisively put an end to the uprising. “The price of chaos is worse than the price of decisiveness,” he quoted Assad as telling him.

The regime has appeared more determined to crush army defectors who have joined the uprising and grown increasingly bold, trying to overtly establish control of pro-opposition cities and neighborhoods. Last week, regime forces carried out a heavy offensive to crush defectors who held sway in suburbs of Damascus, bringing them to the doorstep of the capital.

There were signs that the bombardment in Homs was in response to moves by army defectors to solidify control in several neighborhoods.

Residents reported that defectors set up new checkpoints in several areas, and two Homs activists said defectors attacked a military checkpoint in the Khaldiyeh district Thursday night, capturing 17 soldiers. The activists spoke on condition of anonymity to protect themselves from retaliation.

On Saturday, thousands protested across Syria in solidarity with the beleaguered city. “Homs, your blood will not go in vain,” read a banner held by a protester a Damascus suburb.

At least 21 people were killed in violence outside Homs on Saturday, including 12 shot when security forces opened fire on a funeral procession for victims of a shooting in the Damascus suburb of Daraya a day earlier, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Tunisia decided to expel Syria’s ambassador and end its recognition of Assad’s regime in response to what it called a “bloody massacre” in Homs. Angry Syrians stormed their embassies in Berlin, London, Athens, Cairo and Kuwait, clashing with guards and police and — in Cairo — setting fire to part of the embassy.

In Khaldiyeh, an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim district of Homs, residents checked on relatives after a night spent in hiding and cleaned streets of shattered glass, debris and bloodstains. As many as 30 buildings were left uninhabitable by the extent of the damage, said local activist Majd Amer.

Mohammad, a Khaldiyeh resident who like most in Homs declined to be further identified, said the shelling started shortly before midnight and lasted until early Saturday.

“We were sitting at home and the mortars just started slamming into buildings around us,” he said by telephone. “There was nothing that prompted it, not even protests … people are terrified today.”

“It’s a catastrophe, no other way to describe it,” he said.

Online video by activists taken during the onslaught showed chaotic scenes in a makeshift clinic set up in what appeared to be a Khaldiyeh mosque, the room filled with wounded men with gashes and broken limbs being bandaged as well as several dead bodies. In another video, fire ravaged a house that had been shelled, as people poured water on the blaze.

The videos could not be independently verified.

The Syrian Observatory said the death toll in Homs was at least 217, counting victims whose names it had collected. About 140 of the deaths were in Khaldiyeh, it said. The Syrian National Council, one of the main opposition groups, put the toll at more than 220.

“This is the worst attack of the uprising, since the uprising began in March until now,” said Rami Abdul-Rahman, the head of the Observatory, which tracks violence through contacts on the ground.

The group’s figures could not be independently verified.

Residents said most shelling came from a military installation west of Khaldiyeh and Alawite-dominated neighborhoods to the east. Syria’s Alawite minority, which belongs to an offshoot of Shiite Islam, forms the backbone of Assad’s regime and the military leadership.

Homs has been one of the biggest centers of anti-regime protests since March and has seen increasingly large numbers of army defectors. It has been hit by near daily regime raids and fighting. It has also seen bloody bouts of tit-for-tat killings between its Alawite and Sunni communities, a harbinger of what many Syrians fear could happen if the country descends into an outright confrontation of armed forces.

Syria’s uprising began with peaceful protests around the country. But in the face of the regime’s withering crackdown, the opposition has increasingly taken up arms. Military and security forces have responded with progressively greater force.