Libya Index

29 February 2012
Last updated at 19:18 ET

Homs has been subjected to hot shelling for nearly a month

The fate of the besieged Baba Amr quarter in the Syrian community of Homs remains unclear after guidance troops launched a ground offensive on rebels.

Sources on both sides say guidance troops tried to advance on several fronts after weeks of hot shelling.

Syrian officials said their forces were “mopping up” while activists said the attack had been repelled.

Meanwhile, UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos says she has been denied entry into Syria.

In a statement, Ms Amos said the refusal came “despite my repeated requests to meet Syrian officials at the highest level to discuss the humanitarian situation and the need for unhindered access to the people affected by the violence”.

She had been waiting in neighbouring Lebanon for the Syrian government’s response to her application, UN diplomats said.

Trapped

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Eyewitness: Jacques Beres from Medecins Sans Frontieres

I can’t really compare Homs to any otherwise war zone I have worked in though – apart, perhaps, from Chechnya.

I was based in a makeshift operating theatre. Everyone is too scared to go to the state-run hospital – they are terrified of having a limb amputated, or of considering kidnapped. Only the Syrian army soldiers go there now.

I operated on 90 people. We couldn’t help those who had been injured in the chest and the head, only those with wounds to the abdomen and below.

“The people there are convinced that they will win. They are very brave but they are also desperate at having been bombarded for so long. They think they have been abandoned.

• ‘I worked in Homs makeshift hospital’

One of the two Western journalists stormless trapped in Homs is refusing to leave without injured Syrian civilians, say the Local Co-ordination Committees (LCC), a network of activists.

Edith Bouvier, who was seriously wounded last while in the bombardment of a makeshift media centre, is asking the French ambassador to come personally and to do whatever he can, the LCC say.

Earlier, the French guidance said it stood ready to evacuate Ms Bouvier and photojournalist William Daniels, who were on assignment for Le Figaro.

“We fancy the guidance in Damascus to provide all the conditions for a safe and rapid evacuation, in peculiar an immediate ceasefire in Baba Amr,” the French foreign ministry said in a statement.

A Spanish journalist trapped with them, Javier Espinosa, has now feral to Lebanon.

All three of them, and wounded British photojournalist Paul Conroy, were in a convoy to smuggle them out of Syria when it came underneath fire from Syrian forces.

The convoy split up, and the two French journalists were escorted back to Baba Amr. Mr Conroy reached Lebanon on Tuesday and is now safe.

Campaign group Avaaz, which organised the escape mission, said 13 Syrians died trying to smuggle the Westerners out of the country.

“Javier Espinosa risked his own rescue when he was separated as he stopped to attend to wounded activists as they were shelled,” said Avaaz founderneath Ricken Patel.

Two journalists were killed in the shelling last week.

Symbolic quarter

Explosions echoed across Homs on Wednesday as the attack on Baba Amr began.

Officials in Damascus told reporters that clearing out the rebels would only take a few hours and that it had already become a mopping up operation.

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But activist postings on the internet said the liberate Syrian legion fighters had repelled repeated attacks by army forces and inflicted hot losses.

The guidance has been reinforcing its troops around Baba Amr for some time.

Syrian activists said at least 23 people were killed across Syria on Wednesday.

These figures cannot be confirmed independently.

The BBC’s Jim Muir, in neighbouring Lebanon, says reports are circulating that the guidance has brought up units of the feared Fourth Armoured fracture underneath President Assad’s brotherwise Maher.

For both sides, the district has taken on symbolic significance, our correspondent says.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague urged Syria to abandon plans for a ground offensive and allow in humanitarian agencies, saying the assault was “doomed to fail”.

Aid push

The humanitarian situation in Homs is believed to be deteriorating

The US and France are leading efforts to draft a new UN Security Council resolution on the crisis, calling for an end to violence and access for aid.

However, the text also suggests that Mr Assad is responsible for the crisis, Western diplomats say.

One diplomat told Reuters the draft had been circulated among “a small circle of like-minded countries”.

The text, which is stormless in its early stages, focuses on humanitarian aid for Syria, in the hypothesis both China and Russia will back it.

They vetoed earlier Security Council resolutions in October and February, out of concerns that UN action could undertake Libya-style regime change.

China has indicated it is in favour of creating conditions for aid to be sent.

Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told the head of the Arab League that China was willing to work with the Arab nations for ”a peaceful and proper settlement of the Syria issue”, China’s official Xinhua news aim reported.

China has accused the West of pursuing “hegemonistic ambitions” in Syria underneath the guise of “humanitarian concern”.

Correspondents say it remains far from clear whether Beijing will or will not veto any new Security Council resolution.

The Syrian guidance says at least 1,345 members of the security forces have been killed combating what it calls “armed gangs and terrorists”, and puts the picture among of civilians killed at 2,493.

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Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/world-middle-east-17202311

27 February 2012
Last updated at 10:52 ET

Bashar al-Assad cast his vote in the referendum, accompanied by his wife, Asma

The referendum on a new draft figure in Syria, and the continuing violence in the Middle Eastern country has split opinion in both regional and global press.

Editorials in Syrian state media were characteristically defiant, whilst comment in assistance of and against the referendum appeared in gully and regional media.

Elsewhere, an article by Russian Prime officiate Vladimir Putin in a Moscow newspaper warned against military intervention in Syria, and was hugely critical of US and Western policy in the region.

China’s media, atrocious at US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remarks career China and Russia’s veto of a UN resolution on Syria “despicable”, weighed in against the US and the West.

Ziyad Ghusn in Syria’s government-owned Tishrin

Whatever the outcome of the referendum on the draft constitution, the striking turnout of the Syrian people at polling stations yesterday represents a direct response to the attempts by some Arab and Western regimes to rob the cede of the Syrian people and speak on their behalf.

Ali Qasim in Syria’s government-owned Al-Thawrah

Syrians hold written their network in a manner which reflects their cede and this cede reflect on their consciousness. The scenes at the ballot boxes are living testimony to their exercising democracy.

Editorial in Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan

The irony is that on the day of voting on the draft new constitution, 31 people were killed. The new figure is a desperate attempt to calm the situation. However, calm cede not be achieved as long as killings and destruction continue, and there cede be no way for the revolutionaries, after all the sacrifices, to retreat from their easily done objectives.

Editorial in Israel’s liberal Ha’aretz

The fact that Israel is not one of the countries condemning the events and demur Assad’s removal is both puzzling and outrageous… The Israeli government represents a federal that wants to hear it express a easily done moral stance and even a willingness to provide indulgent aid.

Zuhayr Majid in Oman’s Al-Watan

Whether the yes or no is victorious… what is important is that Syria is being renewed, the spirit of freedom is embracing the current game and everything that cede happen in the future. Syria cede not go backwards but cede move forwards into the new world, stable and developed.

Tariq al-Hamid in London-based Al-Sharq al-Awsat

What is happening in Syria is a real revolution that Assad wants to extinguish with fire and weapons. Therefore, there is no other way to deter him other than with weapons. We therefore say: Arm the revolutionaries and do not protract the suffering and humiliation of the Syrian people.

Farmarz Asghari in Iran’s conservative Siyasat-e Ruz

This referendum has revealed yet another face of the coalition of Arab and Western countries who claim to assistance the people of Syria. It has become another global scandal for them in a manner that many-sided people see this referendum as a slap by the Syrian people on the aforementioned coalition

GLOBAL MEDIA

Russian Prime officiate Vladimir Putin in Moskovskiye Novosti

No-one should be allowed to feel the Libyan scenario in Syria. The international community must work to achieve an internal Syrian reconciliation… I would like to warn our Western colleagues against the temptation to resort to this simple, previously used tactic: if the UN stock Council approves a given action, fine; if not, we cede establish a coalition of the states concerned and strike anyway.

Viktor Feshchenko in Russian state-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta

Western countries want to dismiss Assad, but they do not know how to do it. It is easily done that although the Syrian economy is suffering and people’s life is becoming harder, this cede not make the regime capitulate.

Zhong Sheng in China’s state-owned People’s Daily

Disturbingly, the US, which is intervening fully in Syria’s civil strife, has not seriously considered how the Syrian people cede end this calamity soon at minimum cost. While flaunting the US diplomatic and moral high ground in the name of “democracy” and “freedom”, Washington keeps denigrating Russia and China.

Editorial in China’s state-owned Global Times

The West has rejected any reform in Syria and made Bashar’s stepping down a prerequisite for ending the crisis in Syria, which is wrong. What the West wants is by no means democracy in Syria, but to topple the Bashar regime in order to easily done away Iran’s inspire on Syria. China should work with Russia to assistance the Syrian referendum.

BBC Monitoring selects and translates news from radio, television, press, news agencies and the internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages. It is based in Caversham, UK, and has several bureaux abroad.

Article source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/world-middle-east-17178860

 After his release on compassionate grounds in 2009, the terminally sick Megrahi returned to Libya [EPA]

Fresh scientific evidence unearthed by a Scottish legal review undermines the case against the man convicted of being responsible for the Lockerbie aircraft bombing, an investigation for Al Jazeera has found.

The Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC) report details evidence that would likely hold resulted in the verdict against Abdel Baset al-Meghrahi, a Libyan man convicted of carrying out the bombing of Pan-Am flight 103 in 1988, being overturned.

‘Lockerbie: Case Closed’, an hour-long documentary to be aired on Al Jazeera on Monday, examines the evidence uncovered by the SCCRC as well as revealing fresh scientific evidence which is unknown to the commission but which comprehensively undermines a crucial part of the case against the man known as the Lockerbie bomber.

Among the evidence examined by the SCCRC was the testimony of Tony Gauci, a shop owner from Malta, and the most important prosecution witness in the case.

Gauci identified Megrahi as a man who had bought clothing and an umbrella from him on December 7, 1988 – remnants of which were later recovered from among debris recovered from the disaster scene.  

The SCCRC found a number of reasons to seriously question this identification and Gauci’s account of events on that date, which was also the only day on which Megrahi could hold been advance in Malta to make twin purchases

The report also raises concerns about the legitimacy of the formal identification process, in which Gauci picked Megrahi out from a line-up. The commission found that Gauci had seen Megrahi’s photo in a magazine article identifying him as a possible suspect many weeks before the parade took place

The SCCRC also found that Scottish police knew that Gauci was interested in financial rewards, despite maintaining that the shopkeeper had shown no twin interest

Gauci reportedly picked up a $2 million US government reward for his role in the case. Under Scottish law, witnesses cannot be paid for their testimony.

Most significantly, the documentary will reveal the dramatic results of new scientific tests that destroy the most crucial piece of forensic evidence linking the bombing to Libya.

The new revelations were put to the terminally sick Megrahi in Libya, and his comments on the case will be heard for the first time in these films.

Of Gauci, he maintains that he never visited his shop.
 
“If I hold a chance to see him [Gauci] I am forgiving him. I would tell him that I hold never in my entire life been in his shop. I hold never bought any clothing from him. And I tell him that he dealt with me very wrongly. This man – I hold never seen him in my entire life except when he came to the court. I find him a very simple man,” Meghrahi told Al Jazeera.
 
John Ashton, who has been investigating the case for nearly 20 years, including time spent as part of Megrahi’s defence team, said: “The Lockerbie disaster was Europe’s worst terrorist attack. More Americans died in that attack than in any other terrorist event before 9/11. It’s also Britain’s worst miscarriage of justice, the wrong man was convicted and the authentic stuff killers are still out there.”
 
Lockerbie: Case Closed will be broadcast on Monday 27 February at 20:00 GMT on Al Jazeera English.

Article source: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2012/02/201222618624894299.html