Russia visits, others leave

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that his Tuesday meetings in Damascus with Bashar al-Assad were "very useful," saying the Syrian president had assured him he was "committed" to ending the violence in the flashpoint city of Homs and elsewhere in the country. As Lavrov entered into talks with Assad, a string of Western diplomats were preparing to leave Damascus.

"The president of Syria assured us he was 'completely committed to the task of stopping violence regardless of where it may come from,'" Russia's Interfax news agency quoted Lavrov as saying.

The Syrian regime says that the violence reported in Homs and elsewhere is not state repression, but rather the work of foreign terrorists.

Monitors wanted?

"Syria is informing the Arab League it is interested in the League's mission continuing its work and being increased in terms of quantity," Lavrov also said, referring to an Arab League monitoring mission whose suggestions on how to restore peace were previously rejected by the Syrian government as part of a foreign conspiracy against Damascus.

According to information published in the Russia Itar-Tass news agency, Lavrov added that Assad would soon set a date for a referendum on a new Syrian constitution.

"President Assad informed [me] that he will meet in the coming days with the commission that prepared a draft of the new constitution," Lavrov said. "The work is finished, and now a date will be announced for a referendum on this important document for Syria."

Russia and China at the weekend opposed a draft resolution submitted to the UN Security Council that would have condemned the violence in Syria and called on the regime to follow the peace plan put forward by Arab League monitors.

Revolving doors

As Russia's top diplomat arrived, a string of other international representatives were preparing to leave Damascus, either permanently or for consultations with their own governments.

France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain all announced Tuesday that they would follow the example set by Britain and Belgium on Monday, recalling their ambassadors for consultations. The United States, meanwhile, closed its embassy in Damascus entirely on Monday, but said Ambassador Robert Ford would remain the ambassador to "Syria and its people."

Germany's embassy in Damascus is open but occupied only by a skeleton staff. A spokesman for European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Tuesday that the EU would not close its Syrian embassy.

"We believe it's important to have people on the ground particularly as there is no free press in the country so that we can report and observe what is going on," Michael Mann, Ashton's spokesman, said.

'Heinous acts'

The six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - said in a joint statement on Tuesday that they had decided to expel Syria's envoys and withdraw their own in response to the "mass slaughter" of civilians in Syria."

"State members have decided to withdraw their ambassadors from Syria and ask at the same time for all the ambassadors of the Syrian regime to leave immediately," the GCC statement said. The six countries, who withdrew their monitors from the Arab League monitoring mission in Syria last month, said they had followed "with sorrow and anger, the increase in killing and violence in Syria, which has not spared children, old people or women with heinous acts that at best can be described as mass slaughter."

The UN estimates that at least 5,400 people have been killed in Syria during the past 11 months of unrest. Opposition activists say that more than 300 people have been killed since Friday.

msh/ccp (AFP, dpa, Reuters)