GENEVA, June 1, (Agencies): Kuwait seeks an immediate and peaceful solution to the crisis in Syria in accordance with international law and precepts of human rights, said Kuwait’s permanent ambassador to the UN in Geneva Dherar Rezouqi on Friday.

Addressing a special UN session here on Human Rights violations in Syria, he said “We meet once more to look into the deteriorating human rights situation in Syria where the right to life has been snuffed out of numerous children, women, and the elderly, especially recently in the town of Houla.” He emphasized that, while Kuwait deplored in the starkest terms the rampant violence against the innocent in Syria, it appealed to the international community to put an expeditious end to it.

Rezouqi underscored the urgency in applying the decisions arrived at consensually by the UN Human Rights Council regarding the dire situation in Syria, which calls for bringing to account all violators of human rights in that country and pursue them legally and ensure that they do not escape just punishment for their deeds.

Furthermore, he made it abundantly clear that Kuwait fully backed the efforts currently being undertaken by the UN-Arab League envoy to Syria Kofi Annan to end the crisis in that country, at the same time cautioning that a scuttling of Annan’s mission might result in catastrophic consequences not only on Syria but on other states in the region.

He noted that the UN Human Rights Council was now at the crossroads of a momentous event that required all members of the Council to work in unison to cease the unnecessary bloodletting in Syria. In that regard, he stressed the notion that Kuwait was doing its utmost to lend a helping hand to displaced Syrians who have sought refuge from the violence in their homeland in neighboring countries.

In his assessment of the cycle of violence and destruction in Syria over the past year, the Kuwaiti diplomat asked “who really is behind the events in Syria and why are we witnesses to this repulsive butchering of human beings there so early in the 21st century?”

Meanwhile, twenty human rights groups and organisations, including eighteen from Arab countries, have sent an open letter to Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Al-Arabi exhorting him to pressure UN Security Council action on the Syrian crisis and push for access to Syria by a UN Commission of Enquiry into the recent massacres there.

The Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights, which is a signatory, published the letter Friday, noting the appeal was being issued on the eve of an extra-ordinary meeting of Arab League Foreign Ministers due to be held on Saturday.

The reputable Human Rights Watch also signed the appeal and countries from several Gulf countries were among a broad collection of other Arab nations included among signatories.

Among other demands in the letter, the humanitarian groups called for an immediate arms embargo on Syria and targeted sanctions for those individuals responsible for grave violations of human rights.
The letter also urges the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to bring those responsible for violations in Syria to justice.

The human rights groups noted that the Arab League has been working hard to end the Syrian crisis
since it began in March 2011, but that Syria is not respecting its commitments made to UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan.

The Arab League members must now work so that sanctions against Syria are “effectively implemented” and are “clearly defined.”

Protesters
Meanwhile, Syrian regime forces opened fire on protesters in the Douma area near the capital on Friday, activists said, as monitors reported that at least six people were killed in violence across the country.
Scores of protests broke out across Syria to condemn the May 25 Houla massacre.
At one protest in Douma, “regime forces opened fire on demonstrators. Everyone had to run away because there was nobody there to protect them,” activist Mohammed al-Dumani said via Skype.
He said several people were wounded.
The demonstrations were called to commemorate the 108 victims of a massacre last week, including 49 children, in the central town of Houla. Activists hailed the children as the “flares of victory” in the 15-month anti-regime uprising.
Large crowds in Aleppo, northern Syria, “chanted for the victory of the martyrs of Houla,” also reportedly coming under regime gunfire, another activist who declined to be named told AFP.
“People chanted in honour of the martyrs of Houla, and condemned the failure of (UN-Arab League envoy Kofi) Annan’s peace plan,” notably a ceasefire which has been violated each day, Halabi added.
The UN-backed ceasefire that came into force on April 12 has failed to take hold. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, almost 2,300 people have been killed since the start of the truce.
Earlier on Friday, regime troops killed five people during raids in the town of Daraya outside the capital Damascus, the Britain-based monitoring group said.
Regime troops stormed the town — a centre for the armed opposition — with tanks and fired shells at its western districts, the Observatory said.
Local activists said the five killed were civilians, adding that one of them was an activist and “regime forces burnt his body completely after they killed him.”
An amateur video posted on YouTube showed the victim’s charred body, with the voiceover: “They burned his body in a message to the world and to all the Syrians.”
The Houla massacre, which Damascus blamed on “armed groups,” stoked an international outcry and the expulsion of top Syrian diplomats from several Western countries.
On Friday morning, in Al-Esseily neighbourhood of Damascus, protesters demanded that further action be taken against the Syrian authorities.
“O Arabs, we demand more than the expulsion of the (Syrian) ambassadors; we also demand the expulsion of the Russian and Chinese ambassadors” in Damascus, read one poster.
In the southern province of Daraa, a man was shot dead as he left a mosque in Al-Sheikh Maskeen village, while heavy gunfire and explosions were reported in several towns.
In Homs province, a child was injured in regime shelling of Houla, according to the Observatory.
Video
In a graphic video posted to Youtube on Friday by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Syrian tank is seen running over the body of a dissident fighter.
A group of four tanks and an open truck carrying approximately 10 soldiers are seen parked on a dirt road while others in uniform and one man in plain clothes casually mill around the area.
A soldier on one of the tanks films as his vehicle begins to move, panning down to the dead body of a dissident on the road between the tanks, his body completely disfigured and bloody, and his head already split open.
The tank proceeds to run over the body as the soldiers in the truck observe the scene.
A soldier, who appears to be the one filming the scene, then faces the camera, his face stern, saying nothing. He points the camera to the gun of the tank and then to the man in plain clothes, who slaps hands with another soldier as they walk away from the tank.
Observatory head Rami Abdel-Rahman told AFP by phone that the man shown on the ground, along with a second crushed body not pictured, were confirmed to be dissidents.
The footage was taken March 14 at a checkpoint in Al-Bara village in northwest Idlib province, according to the Britain-based watchdog.
Viewers are cautioned that the images seen in the released video are extremely gruesome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGHj1pwZbUo
In a statement released with the video, the Observatory says the footage “confirms the horror and brutality that regime forces use against Syrian dissidents, even after their deaths.”
Executed
Syrian government forces summarily executed 12 civilians on their way home from work in a fertiliser factory in Qusayr, activists in the central town told AFP by telephone on Friday.
“The workers were on a bus when they were forced to stop at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Qusayr,” said Salim Kabbani of the Local Coordination Committees, which organise protests on the ground.
“Regime forces tied their hands behind their backs and shot them.”
Kabbani said abuses had become routine in Qusayr, a town southwest of the flashpoint central city of Homs. “The checkpoint where the workers were killed is dangerous, and people are often tortured there.”
Several areas of Qusayr have been under non-stop shelling by government forces, Kabbani said. “We have a very high number of wounded, and we fear many of them will die because we don’t have the medical materials we need to treat them.”
Amateur video posted on YouTube by activists showed bodies lain out side by side, several with bullet wounds to the head.
The footage, purportedly shot when rebel fighters reached the scene to recover the bodies, included the voice of one man crying out: “This is my son, my son,” as he tugged in vain at the leg of a corpse lying face up, his blue shirt and white trousers covered in blood.
Another video posted on Friday showed hundreds of people in Qusayr taking to the streets for a joint funeral for the slain workers.
A man bearing the Syrian independence flag led the cortege. Crowds chanted: “Oh God, we only have you to turn to,” and: “We won’t surrender, we won’t surrender.”
Volcano
Syrian activists threatened a “volcano of rage” on Friday over the killing of civilians by government forces as a deadline set by rebel fighters passed for Damascus to honour a UN-backed truce.
On the first Friday since the Houla massacre, opposition activists called on Syrians to rise up across the country in honour of the 49 children who were among the 108 dead in Houla counted by the UN mission.
“A new volcano of rage is exploding thanks to them,” protest organisers said on their Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page, which has been a major engine of the 15-month uprising against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
“For those pure souls who sacrificed themselves at the altar of our freedom and sacrificed their blood ... tomorrow Friday, we will rise up in such a resounding way, and we promise them, there will be no second Houla,” they said.
Help
Russia wants to help UN envoy Kofi Annan achieve “positive results” and prevent an all-out civil war in Syria, President Vladimir Putin said in Germany on Friday.
Moscow has shielded Syria from UN action aimed at halting Assad’s deadly crackdown on an anti-government uprising. On his first trip abroad since returning to the presidency, Putin rejected assertions, however, that Moscow is propping up Assad’s regime.
“We don’t support any of the parties that are creating threats of a civil war,” Putin told reporters after meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Putin said Russia would remain in contact with Assad and the Syrian leadership, insisting that nothing could be imposed by force, but was vague about exactly what “political instruments” Russia might be prepared to use.
The United States meanwhile, lashed Moscow for arming the Syrian government and warned of the threat of civil war, as it stepped up diplomatic pressure on Assad.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking in Denmark, said that Russia’s policy of resisting UN Security Council action against Damascus was only increasing the chance of civil war erupting.
The Russians “are telling me they don’t want to see a civil war. I have been telling them their policy is going (to) help to contribute to a civil war,” Clinton said.
At the United Nations, US Ambassador Susan Rice described Russian arms shipments to Syria as “reprehensible” while accusing Damascus of a “blatant lie” by denying involvement in a massacre in which 108 people were killed.
Their comments came after UN chief Ban Ki-moon warned that Syria risked a “catastrophic civil war” following the massacre in the village of Houla last week in which 49 children were killed.