The ‘Friends of Syria Conference’ in Tunis has seen the representatives of the United States and the UK, Clinton and Hague, laying into Russia and China for preventing them getting a UN Security Council decision to intervene Libyan-style into Syria, with massive airpower to bomb and blast it into oblivion.
Clinton, who recently openly gloated over the murder of Gadaffi and has ignored the butchering and torturing of thousands of his supporters, shed crocodile tears for the Syrian dead – deaths caused by imperialist intervention.
Clinton has incited the fighting inside Syria and gloried in the fact that the country is being forced into a civil war which she hopes will lead to ‘regime change’ and then the vanquishing of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Hague openly declared that he recognised the Syrian opposition as the representative of the Syrian people declaring that the regime was ‘criminal’ – the same formula that was used to support the TNC in Libya, and organise the Libyan oil grab.
To make things perfectly clear, after all of the babble about the need for democracy, the imperialist powers told their Syrian oppositionists not to support yesterday’s vote on a referendum that, at the least, would have ended the recognition of the Ba’ath Party as the only legal political body, and permitted multi-party elections.
Rather than calling a ceasefire so that the entire country could take part in the referendum, the Syrian opposition kept on shooting in the areas under its control, and thus prevented people voting. So much for the struggle for democratic change!
Fourteen million Syrians over 18 were eligible to vote and 14,000 polling stations were opened.
One of the features of the ‘Friends of Syria Conference’ was that the most undemocratic forces in the Arab world, the Saudi, Bahraini and Qatari monarchies, where democrats are killed and women drivers are jailed or frowned upon, were openly impatient at what they saw as the caution and nervousness of the imperialist powers to ignore the UN veto.
The feudalists were openly scornful. The promised war on Iran cannot come soon enough for them.
These ‘Friends of Syria’ are determined to smash the Ba’athist movement that once ruled both Iraq and Syria, treats the Arab people as one nation and has no time for feudalism. The ‘friends’ pledged to carry on arming, supplying and reinforcing the Free Syria Army, till the regime-change job is done.
The Qatari prime minister, Hamad Bin Jassim, said: ‘There is a need to create an Arab force and open humanitarian corridors to provide security to the Syrian people.’
The Saudi Arabian delegation walked out of the talks in protest, saying that talks about humanitarian aid ‘were not enough’.
Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent stated they ‘will continue to negotiate with the authorities and the opposition to try to come to Baba Amr in order to evacuate the wounded’.
On Friday, the Red Cross and Red Crescent made an agreement with the Syrian government to evacuate seven wounded and 20 sick women and children from Baba Amr.
The News Line urges Russia and China to stand fast against the imperialist powers. We warn them that if they weaken it will not be long before their governments are being denounced as criminal and the imperialists and their proxies are at their gates.
We urge the workers of the world to defend Syria against imperialist attack, and to take action against the enemy at home, that is remove the war-mongering Cameron government that is determined to smash their Welfare State, as well as to launch yet another war – against the people of Somalia.
