President Bush Meets With Syrian Opposition Leaders Options

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President Bush Meets With Syrian Opposition Leaders



President Bush met with international dissidents from 17 countries and five continents in Prague, Czech Republic earlier this year including Syrian opposition leaders.

Continuing that pledge to promote freedom and democracy, President George W. Bush met privately with Syrian opposition leaders at the White House recently.

Free Syria reported:

Homsy, Abdul Hamid, and Hesso meet with President Bush

In an extraordinary move to quell any notion of a deal with the deadly Damascus regime, US President Bush invited to the White House three Syrian opposition leaders representing the wide spectrum of Syrians fighting for democracy, freedom, and human rights in Syria.

The meeting with Mamoun al-Homsy, an ex-parliamentarian who has opposed the regime and was imprisoned for 5 years as a result, Ammar Abdul Hamid, representing the liberal voices inside Syria, and Genkhis Hesso, a Kurdish leader with support inside Syria was intended, as read by many Syrian oppositionists, as a signal to the Syrians that the US has no intentions to strike any deal with Damascus after an invitation to the conference in Annapolis gave that impression. Syria's Ambassador to the US abused his role as a messenger of diplomacy when he began flaunting around Washington and on Arab media outlets the meeting in Annapolis as a sign that not only Damascus has won with its terror tools but that Syrian isolationist policies of Bush have failed. The White House had no choice but to put a stop to the Syrian Ambassador exaggerations by inviting well known Syrian dissidents to assure them that no deal was in the offing with Baschar al-Assad.

The meeting comes on the heels of also many nervous Lebanese March 14 who view the latest invitations by the international community for Assad to "play a positive role" in Lebanon after four different UN Resolutions, which demanded Assad to cease and desist in his terror campaign against the Lebanese and their sovereign nation as signals that the US warming to Assad is a prelude to giving-up on Lebanon. The meeting with the Syrian dissidents has tipped the balance to demonstrate that US policies do not favor a capitulation to Damascus and that human rights in Syria still matters to US policy makers.


Image released by his family Tuesday April 24 2007 shows one of Syria's most vocal human rights activists, lawyer Anwar al-Bunni as he talks on his cell phone in Damascus in this February 21, 2006 file photo. A Syrian court sentenced al-Bunni to five years in prison on April 24, 2007 for criticizing government policy towards Lebanon.(AP).

On International Human Rights Day on Tuesday, the Assad regime arrested at least 20 opposition leaders.
http://www.free-syria.com/en/loadarticle.php?articleid=24314

These brave people fighting for freedom have my full support and prayers.

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Dismay Over New U.N. Human Rights Council

By WARREN HOGE
Published: March 11, 2007

UNITED NATIONS, March 9 — The United Nations Human Rights Council begins a three-week session in Geneva on Monday amid expressions of frustration from rights advocates at its early performance and alarm over proposals that might weaken it further.

“So far it’s been enormously disappointing, and the opponents of human rights enforcement are running circles around the proponents,” said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch.

The council was created in a 170-to-4 vote of the General Assembly a year ago to replace the Human Rights Commission, which had been widely discredited for allowing participation by countries like Sudan, Libya and Zimbabwe who used membership to prevent scrutiny of their own records.

The commission was long a major embarrassment to the United Nations, with former Secretary General Kofi Annan, who first proposed its replacement in 2005, commenting that it “cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.”

When the 47 members of the new council were elected last March, tighter entry requirements succeeded in keeping the most notorious rights abusers off the panel, and there was some hope of less politicized behavior.

But member countries from Africa and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an association of 57 states promoting Muslim solidarity, have dashed those hopes by voting as a bloc to stymie Western efforts to direct serious attention to situations like the killings, rapes and pillage in the Darfur region of Sudan, which the United Nations has declared the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Most notably, as happened with the commission, the council has focused its condemnation almost exclusively on Israel. It has passed eight resolutions against Israel, and the Islamic group is planning four more for the current session. The council has cited no other country for human rights violations.

[...]

The United States was one of only four countries that voted against the General Assembly resolution that created the Council. The U.S. was concerned that the Council lacked the measures necessary to prevent it from repeating the worst mistakes of the Commission it was created to replace. The deplorable record of the Council has validated both the United States' concerns and its decision not to run for a seat on the Council in 2006 and in 2007.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/world/11rights.html

U.N. Further Weakens Human Rights Council:
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Internati...ions/wm1707.cfm

To use an old Texan saying -> the UN is as useful as tits on a bull so don't depend on them for any help!