Assad meets Annan on heels of massacre; Russia:Both sides have blood on their hands.

Assad meets Annan on heels of massacre;Russia:Both sides have blood on their hands.(AlArabiya).Syrian President Bashar al-Assad met with peace envoy Kofi Annan, the state news agency SANA said on Tuesday, following a massacre which Syria’s government blamed on Islamist militants, while the global body suggested government forces played a role. Annan is attempting to salvage a six-week-old peace plan that has U.N. and Arab League backing, but which has barely slowed the bloodshed in a 14-month-old uprising against Assad that began with mass protests and now has an armed insurgency. As many as 21 people have been killed by the gunfire of Syrian forces on Tuesday, Al Arabiya reported citing activists at the Syrian Revolution Commission.
The Syrian National Council (SNC), meanwhile, urged the United Nations and the Security Council to apply Article 7 regarding the protection of civilians in Syria and to force the Syrian regime to implement the international decisions, Al Arabiya reported on Tuesday. The SNC criticized the Security Council’s statement on al-Houla massacre, noting that it is so weak compared to the grave massacres committed by the regime. The SNC called for providing the Syrians liable tools for self-defense, after the international community failed to protect them. The SNC also criticized the Syrian stand in the U.N. and called on Moscow to frankly support the Syrian people and endorse their right to choose their political regime, according to Al Arabiya. The SNC also called on Annan to announce the failure of his plan, especially after the Houla massacre. In Damascus on Monday, Annan called on the authorities to act to end the killing after what the special envoy called the “appalling crime” late last week at Houla, near Hama, in which at least 108 people, many of them children, were killed. Russia and China, long defenders of Assad against Western lobbying for U.N. sanctions, backed a non-binding Security Council text on Sunday that criticized the use against the town of artillery and tanks -- weaponry Syria’s rebels do not have. But on a day when opposition activists said at least another 41 people had died in shelling of the city of Hama, Moscow and Beijing showed little sign of adopting the Arab and Western view that Assad should go.
Both sides must come together to ensure a peaceful resolution, Russian and Chinese officials said, according to Reuters. Annan called on the Syrian government to “take bold steps to signal that it is serious in its intention to resolve this crisis peacefully” before adding: “This message of peace is not only for the government, but for everyone with a gun.” In an open letter to the Security Council, Syria’s Foreign Ministry flatly denied any army role in the killings at Houla, an atrocity that shook world opinion out of growing indifference to a 14-month-old conflict that has killed over 10,000. Instead, the government blamed knife-wielding Islamist militants. “Not a single tank entered the region and the Syrian army was in a state of self-defense,” it said in the letter published by state media. “Anything other than this is pure lies.” “The terrorist armed groups ... entered with the purpose of killing and the best proof of that is the killing by knives, which is the signature of terrorist groups who massacre according to the Islamist way.” It said three Syrian soldiers were killed and 16 wounded.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon had said U.N. observers who visited the site after the massacre “saw artillery and tank shells and as well as fresh tank tracks,” adding that many buildings were destroyed by heavy weapons. But U.N. monitors could not determine who had shot and stabbed many of the dead. Witnesses and opposition activists said Assad’s forces, including “shabbiha” militiamen from his Alawite minority sect, carried out the massacre of the Sunni Muslim civilians in Houla.
The sectarian dimension to a conflict that began with mainly peaceful demonstrations among the Sunni majority has raised fear of a breakdown of society similar to that seen in Iraq -- fear which has drawn many Syrians, including wealthier Sunnis, into defense of the four decade-rule of the Assad family. However, in a sign of cracks in that solidarity, activists reported a widespread shuttering of shops and market stalls in the capital on Monday in what they described as a protest by the Sunni merchant class over the killings at Houla and elsewhere. One activist, Amer Momen, said security police forced open dozens of shops. But he added: “The merchants are a crucial power center,... the core of the silent majority. If they no longer remain silent, then the revolt has hit a milestone.” China said it was “deeply shocked by the large number of civilian casualties in Houla, and condemns in the strongest terms the cruel killings of ordinary citizens, especially women and children.” Premier Wen Jiabao said support for the Annan truce, and a peaceful resolution, should be stepped up. That deal calls for heavy weapons to be pulled out of towns and cities, followed by an end to fighting, and dialogue. But the attack on Hama was a reminder that the plan, policed by just 300 U.N. monitors, has done little to stem the violence. “We are dealing with a situation in which both sides evidently had a hand in the deaths of innocent people,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.Read the full story here.