Several envoys expelled — more aid to be allowed
BEIRUT — Syria retaliated Tuesday for last week’s expulsions of its diplomats from Washington and other capitals, barring or expelling a series of foreign envoys representing 11 nations, including the United States.
But the government of President Bashar Assad also consented to longtime international demands for increased humanitarian access, agreeing to allow U.N. and other aid staffers to enter four strife-ridden provinces: Homs, Idlib, Daraa and Deir Elzour.
Human rights groups had complained about restricted access for aid, including food, medical assistance and shelter for victims of Syria’s escalating violence. Some estimates say that more than 1 million Syrians are in need of help.
Whether this is a breakthrough will be evident in the coming days and weeks, and it will be measured not in rhetoric and agreements, but in action on the ground, John Ging, operations director for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said in Geneva.
Opening a humanitarian aid flow to Syria is one of the major objectives of the six-point peace plan worked out by Kofi Annan, the U.N. and Arab League special envoy. Assad has been under intense pressure to show greater compliance with the faltering peace blueprint.
The concession on the humanitarian point may be meant to buy Assad’s government more time on more contentious requirements in the sixpoint plan. Among them are the mandate that Syria pull back troops from populated areas, end the use of heavy weapons and allow people to demonstrate freely. Implementing those points, many observers say, would inevitably embolden the opposition and hasten Assad’s fall.
Assad has blamed the unrest on foreign agitators and has been wary about outside scrutiny, even as allegations of human rights abuses multiply against both sides.
In other moves related to the U.N. peace process, Syria has allowed in almost 300 U.N. observers and said it has increased visas for foreign journalists and released some 500 prisoners.
Apart from helping civilians, the humanitarian staffers would be witnesses to what is happening on the ground in Syria. Government restrictions on journalists and other independent observers have made it difficult to ascertain the truth about many incidents, including the killings last month of more than 100 people, mostly women and children, in the town of Houla, a massacre that drew global condemnation.
The new humanitarian agreement calls for Syria to grant an unspecified number of visas to aid personnel from nine U.N. agencies and seven nongovernmental organizations, said a U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman. The diplomats barred by Syria on Tuesday include U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford, who, like many or all of those on the unwelcome list, had already been pulled from Damascus, the Syrian capital. Other diplomats on the list came from Turkey, Canada and eight European nations — Britain, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Bulgaria and Germany.