Syria sanctioned and condemned for "brutality" (Reuters)

BEIRUT (Reuters) ? Syria faced growing economic sanctions and condemnation over "gross human rights violations" on Monday, but President Bashar al-Assad showed no sign of buckling under international pressure to end his military crackdown on popular unrest.

State television broadcast pro-Assad rallies "supporting national unity and rejecting foreign interference," after the Arab League imposed sanctions on Sunday.

The European Union weighed in one day later, further tightening the financial screws on Damascus for its "brutality and unwillingness to change course."

Assad's foreign minister Walid al-Moualem hit back, lambasting the Arab League for "a declaration of economic war" that he said had closed the door to resolving the crisis.

"Sanctions are a two-way street," Moualem told a televised news conference. "I am not warning here, but we will defend the interests of our people ...."

In Geneva, a United Nations commission of inquiry said Syrian military and security forces had committed crimes against humanity including murder, torture and rape, for which Assad and his government bore direct responsibility.

It demanded an end to "gross human rights violations" and the release of those rounded up in mass arrests since March by Syrian forces quashing pro-democracy demonstrations.

Over 3,500 people were killed in 8 months, the UN says.

Syria's close trading partners Lebanon and Iraq rejected the Arab League measures, whose economic impact could be less severe than intended, analysts said.

"We do not agree with these sanctions and we will not go along with them," said Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour.

The Arab League meanwhile appealed once more to Damascus, offering "a review of all of the measures" if Syria dropped its opposition to an Arab plan to end the crackdown.

Anti-Assad activists in Syria said on Sunday that security forces had killed at least 24 civilians, many in a town north of Damascus that has become a focus for the protests. Others were killed in raids on towns in the province of Homs, they said.

In an apparent political concession, which protesters have been demanding for months, Moualem said Syria planned to drop a constitutional clause which designates Assad's Baath Party as the leading party.

The revised constitution foresees "multi-party" politics with "no place for discrimination between parties," he said.

FIGHTING BACK

The Arab League sanctions hit banking, finance, investment and official travel but stop short of a full trade embargo.

"The sanctions are still economic but if there is no movement on the part of Syria then we have a responsibility as human beings to stop the killings," said Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani of Qatar, the League's point man on Syria.

"Power is not worth anything when a ruler kills his people."

The president of the Union of Arab Banks, a division of the Arab League, said the sanctions would hit Syria's central bank, which has "big deposits" in the region, especially the Gulf.

Moualem said 95 percent of the targeted money had already been withdrawn beyond the reach of sanctions.

Along with peaceful protests, some of Assad's opponents are fighting back. Army defectors are grouped loosely under the banner of a Syrian Free Army and more insurgent attacks on loyalist troops have been reported in the last few weeks.

Arab nations wanted to avert a repeat of what happened in Libya, where a U.N. Security Council resolution led to NATO air strikes. Sheikh Hamad warned fellow Arabs that the West could intervene in Syria if it felt the League was not serious.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the Arab League sanctions demonstrate that "the regime's repeated failure to deliver on its promises will not be ignored."

France said it wanted Syria's powerful and critical neighbor Turkey to join an EU foreign ministers' conference to discuss further measures. Paris has proposed a secure humanitarian corridor linking Syria to Turkey.

One Western diplomat said Assad could, for now, count on support from China and Russia at the United Nations. But they may change position if he intensifies the crackdown and if the Arab League campaigns for international intervention.

China and Russia have oil concessions in Syria. Moscow also has a naval repair base on Syria's Mediterranean coast and announced on Monday that it was sending warships there, in an apparent display of determination to defend its interests.

"The sanctions are likely to lose Assad support among those in Syria who have been waiting to see whether he will be able to turn things around, such as merchants who could now see their businesses take more hits," the diplomat said.

Syrian officials blame the violence on armed groups targeting civilians. Government security forces say 1,100 of their members have been killed.

Assad, who inherited power from his father in 2000, said in an interview this month that he would continue the crackdown and blamed the unrest on outside pressure to "subjugate Syria."

(Additional reporting by Laila Bassam in Beirut, Khaled Oweis in Amman, David Brunnstrom and Justyna Pawlak in Brussels and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; writing by Douglas Hamilton; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/economy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111128/ts_nm/us_syria

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In Egypt, Elections Process Complexity Threatens Vote

CAIRO -- With Egypt's first democratic elections since the fall of Hosni Mubarak now less than a day away, voter confusion and the complexity of the process threaten to undermine the balloting -- assuming, that is, that renewed unrest doesn't sideline voting altogether.

For much of the past week, campaigning and party politics were largely set aside, as anti-regime protests and violent clashes with Egyptian security forces commanded most of the country's attention.

Now, several revolutionary activists insist that unless the ruling military regime that has governed Egypt since February promises to turn over power to a civilian president, the vote for a parliament shouldn't go forward at all. Many of them have once again taken to Tahrir Square, the site of the original revolution earlier this year, and pledged to stay there until the military yields.

But with a voting process that was invented entirely by the military regime this spring, and which at times seems designed to confound, many observers say there could be trouble ahead even without a spike in violence on election day or a dedicated boycott movement.

"Even without Tahrir, there are a million ways this could be a disaster," one Western election observer said this weekend, after being briefed on the intricacies of the process.

International election observers, who arrived in Cairo in droves over the weekend, say the system for electing a parliament from nearly 7,000 candidates is needlessly complex and time-consuming. The vote will take place over two days, plus a third run-off period, a process that will be repeated twice more in different regions of the country over the course of a month and a half.

Once in the booth, voters will have to select a party list, as well as two independent candidates. If they do not choose two independents, their entire vote will be invalidated, a technicality that few voters seem to be aware of.

Many essential decisions about the process have not yet been announced by the state. Details such as how the votes will be counted, how ballots will be stored overnight, and what portion of the results will be made publicly available before the entire process is complete remain unclear.

Other decisions, observers note, appear to have been made on the fly without much consideration. Until very recently, it wasn't clear how votes that were filed from abroad would be collected and tallied, and what districts they would be apportioned to. Observers say the government has suggested that they would let voters abroad self-indicate which district their votes would go to, and trust them to be honest.

Even the decision to expand voting in each locality to two days only was announced, with little explanation, on the election commission's Facebook page this Friday. Between the first and second day of voting, ballot boxes will be stored overnight in polling stations. They will be secured with locks and wax seals, but not security tape or numbered plastic ties, which are far preferred.

"It's not good," another Western election observer said. "What little 'system' there is is complicated, contradictory and non-transparent. The larger problem is that many procedures for the actual conduct of the voting remain undefined and could be interpreted and implemented differently in every polling center."

Meanwhile, political parties have been largely kept in the dark. In one particularly inept move, the government distributed information on registered voters to the campaigns, but ended up only including their names, and not any specific data about their locations or voting districts. "It was useless," a third observer said.

International election experts, from groups like NDI, the International Republican Institute and the Carter Center, have expressed concern, shared by many in Egypt, that their participation might offer false legitimacy to an inherently flawed process.

"Believe me, I've thought about it a lot; it's something that's on our minds," said Les Campbell, the Middle East and North Africa director for the National Democratic Institute (NDI), who is in Cairo as an election witness. "But the way I see it is, I'll let the Egyptians define what is legitimate or not. What we can do is amplify whatever that decision is. If the politicians are willing to compete, we should be willing to observe. But we will not pull punches on what we see."

"If we had to do it over again, I think it would be better if the rules weren't changing every day -- even up to today," Campbell said.

Among the voters themselves, confusion and lack of information about the process run rampant.

During a canvassing session last week, before violence erupted in Tahrir Square, a candidate repeatedly found himself being forced to explain the voting mechanisms and locations to the potential voters he encountered, rather than talk about his policy positions.

CNN's Ben Wedeman, who spent much of Sunday tweeting pictures of campaign flyers strewn across Cairo and the simplified hieroglyphs associated with the candidates -- bananas, blenders, carrots, missiles -- also sent out a diagram printed in a local newspaper of the convoluted party and bloc alignments (for a clearer map, see here).

"Simple, isn't it?" he wrote in jest.

Meanwhile, international observers' input seems to have been largely disregarded by the military regime. None of the observers interviewed by The Huffington Post in recent days seemed able to explain how the regime had settled on its formulas for the vote.

Late on Sunday, as a soft drizzle fell on Cairo, most of the city -- even the hundred or so revolutionary diehards left in Tahrir Square -- seemed resigned to the reality that the vote was one just one night away. Egypt's first democratic election was coming, ready or not.

Below, see a list of some of the main parties in this year's election. For more information on Egypt's election process, visit the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace's elections guide, Al Ahram's guide, or the analysis by the International Foundation For Electoral Systems.

Al-Hurriya Wa Al-Adala

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* Freedom And Justice Party * Muslim Brotherhood party * Dominant Islamist party * Established Democratic Alliance

* Freedom And Justice Party
* Muslim Brotherhood party
* Dominant Islamist party
* Established Democratic Alliance

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Al-Hurriya Wa Al-Adala

* Freedom And Justice Party * Muslim Brotherhood party * Dominant Islamist party * Established Democratic Alliance

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/27/egypt-elections-process_n_1114973.html

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