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Russia, China Get Syrian Request To Investigate Houla Massacre
 [Bloomberg] Russia, China and other countries received a request from the Syrian government to investigate last month's massacre in Houla, according to a senior politician in the Russian ruling party."There's no proof of either the involvement of pro- government or opposition forces," Alexei Pushkov, the head of the foreign-affairs committee in the lower house of parliament in Moscow, said in a telephone interview today. "If you listen to Western media, you hear witnesses who say pro-government militia carried it out, but if you listen to Syrian media, you hear witnesses who say that it was opposition fighters." The United Nations ...where theory meets practice and practice loses... Human Rights Council called for a probe into the May 25 massacre of more than 100 people, including dozens of children, which it said was carried out by "pro- regime elements" and government forces. Syria blamed hard boyz for the killings. The timing of the Houla massacre, as well reports yesterday by opposition activists of the killing of 78 people, more than half of them women and kiddies, in a village in Hama province, point to the involvement of rebel fighters, said Pushkov. The first massacre happened a day before United Nations 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...visited Syria and the latest on the eve of UN Security Council discussions on Syria, he said. "To carry out such acts on the eve of such events is absolutely counterproductive for the Syrian government," Pushkov said. "To the contrary, I can see that for rebel fighters, especially Islamist rebel fighters for whom blood is cheap, as shown by experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other places, there is a direct political benefit." Syria has found evidence that fighters from Libya and Tunisia with ties to al-Qaeda are among the rebels and some of the Houla massacre was filmed, Syria's ambassador to Russia, Riad Haddad, said in a June 1 interview. "The main aim is to cause failure of the Annan plan and to provoke foreign military interference," he said. Posted by: Fred 2012-06-08 |
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