Assad regime has lost humanity – UN

Secretary general says Syrian people 'are bleeding' and that crimes against humanity may have been committed 

The Syrian regime has "lost its fundamental humanity" and no longer has any legitimacy, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said on Thursday as he described a massacre of around 90 villagers as "shocking and sickening" and demanded that the killers be brought to account.
Using some of the strongest language yet to condemn the government of Bashar al-Assad, Ban said UN monitors were shot at trying to get to the scene of the massacre on Wednesday.
He said the situation in Syria was close to breaking point and the danger of civil war was imminent and real.
The recent mass killings were "indicative of a pattern that may amount to crimes against humanity," he added. "The Syrian people are bleeding. They are angry. They want peace and dignity. Above all, they all want action."
The latest massacre, in the hamlet of al-Qubair, near Syria's fourth city of Hama, comes less than three weeks after more than 100 people were killed in Houla – an event that has sharply increased sectarian tensions and appears to be sending the country sliding towards civil war.
A loyalist civilian militia known as the Shabiha was widely accused of carrying out the Houla killings. Witnesses to the massacre in al-Qubair insisted that the Shabiha, whose members are largely from the ruling Alawite sect, had again been responsible.
Ban said the village had apparently been surrounded by Syrian forces. "The bodies of innocent civilians lying where they were, shot. Some were allegedly burned or slashed with knives," he said, adding that "each day seems to bring new additions to the grim catalogue of atrocities". Ban said it has been evident for many months that President Assad and his government "have lost all legitimacy", and added that "any regime or leader that tolerates such killing of innocents has lost its fundamental humanity".
Soon after Ban's address to the UN general assembly, Kofi Annan, the envoy he dispatched to Syria, conceded that his battered peace plan was faltering.
UN diplomats said Annan is urging the divided security council to unite and act immediately to press the Syrian government to implement his peace plan. The diplomats said Annan told council members that there must be consequences – usually a term for sanctions – for opponents of his six-point plan.
Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, warned that the Annan peace plan was in serious trouble, and said Syria was on the edge of a worse and more bloody phase than seen so far. Hague said: "The Annan plan won't last indefinitely. Syria is clearly on the edge … of deeper violence, of deep, sectarian violence, village against village, pro-government militias against opposition areas, and of looking more like Bosnia in the 1990s than Libya last year.
"The Annan plan has clearly failed so far, but it is not dead, all hope is not lost."