UNITED NATIONS — With Syria lurching closer to civil war, world leaders on Thursday sought to apply new pressure on a government that they said showed no sign of honoring cease-fire agreements or halting the slaughter of noncombatants, but they remained divided on how to revive a peace process that U.N. officials conceded was in ruins.
As new details emerged of the latest massacre of civilians, U.N. officials spoke for the first time of unspecified “consequences” for the Syrian government. Yet the refusal by Russia and China to embrace new economic sanctions meant that the world body was left without a clear path forward.
“Pressure — substantial pressure — is what this crisis demands,” U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan said during a closed meeting of the U.N. Security Council, according to a diplomat who attended the session. “We will soon reach a day when it will be impossible to keep the crisis from spiraling out of control.”
The warnings came less than 24 hours after news broke of the second mass killing of Sunni civilians in as many weeks. Up to 78 people, most of them women and children, reportedly were slaughtered in Qubair, a small village in Hama province, by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The official Syrian Arab News Agency denied as “absolutely baseless” the reports that Assad loyalists had carried out the killings. Government forces moved into the area and killed “terrorists” after an “armed terrorist group” murdered nine women and children, the news agency said.
But Syrian troops blocked U.N. monitors from entering the village, and some observers came under small-arms fire as they tried to approach the town, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said. He provided no details on who had fired at the monitors or whether there were any injuries. U.N. monitors have frequently been fired at since they arrived in Syria in April to monitor a cease-fire.
Ban expressed revulsion at the “shocking and sickening” reports of massacres and called on the Syrian government to immediately implement the U.N.-backed plan for a cease-fire and political transition. But later, Ban and Annan acknowledged that the peace plan was approaching a dead end, with both sides refusing to implement it.
Ban and Annan pleaded for a reinvigorated diplomatic push to avert a full-fledged civil war and warned, for the first time, that any party blocking a political transition should face “consequences.”
