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Syria Offers Amnesty to Rebels, Calls on Refugees to Return Home
[An Nahar] Syria's government on Thursday offered an amnesty to opposition gunnies without "blood on their hands," urging them to surrender as a U.N.-backed ceasefire entered into force."The interior ministry calls on gunnies whose hands have not been stained with Syrian blood to hand themselves in, along with their weapons, at the nearest police center. They would be released and all legal procedures against them would be terminated," it said, quoted by state television ... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe? Syria also urged tens of thousands of displaced people who took refuge inside or outside the country due to violence to return home. "The interior ministry calls on brother citizens, who were forced to flee their homes, whether to areas within the country or to neighboring states, to return home, and ignore propaganda and misleading news," it said in a statement carried by state television ... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe? Some 25,000 Syrians have decamped to Turkey. In Jordan, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has registered between 5,000 to 8,000 Syrians, but the kingdom's foreign minister Nasser Judeh said more than 90,000 Syrians have sought refuge in the country. In Leb, there are around 16,000 Syrian refugees, according to the UNHCR. The number of internally displaced people is not available. Calm prevailed in Syria on Thursday after Damascus ...The City of Jasminis the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world. It has not always been inhabited by the same set of fascisti... said it would halt military operations against rebels at daybreak, on the day set by the U.N.-Arab League ...an organization of Arabic-speaking states with 22 member countries and four observers. The League tries to achieve Arab consensus on issues, which usually leaves them doing nothing but a bit of grimacing and mustache cursing... peace envoy Kofi Annan  ...Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh and so far the worst Secretary-General of the UN. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for something or other that probably sounded good at the time. In December 2004, reports surfaced that Kofi's son Kojo received payments from the Swiss company Cotecna, which had won a lucrative contract under the UN Oil-for-Food Program. Kofi Annan called for an investigation to look into the allegations, which stirred up the expected cesspool but couldn't seem to come up with enough evidence to indict Kofi himself, or even Kojo...as a deadline to implement a ceasefire aimed at ending 13 months of bloodshed. Meanwhile, ...back at the abandoned silver mine, the water was up to Jack's neck and still rising... state media reported that a "terrorist" attack killed a Syrian army officer and maimed 24 other people in second-largest city Aleppo ...For centuries, Aleppo was Greater Syria's largest city and the Ottoman Empire's third, after Constantinople and Cairo. Although relatively close to Damascus in distance, Aleppans regard Damascenes as country cousins... on Thursday, accusing rebels of seeking to "torpedo" the U.N.-backed peace plan. "An armed terrorist group used an bomb to target a bus transporting officers and non-commissioned officers to their unit in Aleppo. It killed a lieutenant colonel and maimed 24 other people" at 8:00 am (0500 GMT), the official SANA news agency reported. State television said the gangs were "intensifying criminal operations in an attempt to destablize Syria and torpedo the plan" of international peace envoy Kofi Annan, which went into effect at 6:00 am (0300 GMT). The head of Aleppo military hospital, Brigadier Osama Qashqash said that three of the maimed were at death's doors, SANA reported. The government mouthpiece posted a picture of damage to the front of a civilian bus. Posted by: Fred 2012-04-13 |
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