The situation is not improving. The violence is continuing, the bombardments, particularly in Homs, seem to be increasing. Susan Rice, US Ambassador to UNBEIRUT — Artillery shatters homes in opposition areas. Regime tanks roll though city centers. Civilians dig graves for dozens of corpses, scrawling their names on headstones with black markers. Six days on, this is the ceasefire in Syria. As the regime forces fired a barrage of mortar shells at an opposition stronghold Wednesday, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, insisted that the regime was respecting the ceasefire in line with an international peace plan. Moallem insisted that Syria was keeping its commitments. Syria will “continue to cooperate” with Annan's efforts, the Chinese Foreign Ministry quoted Moallem as saying after he met with his Chinese counterpart in Beijing. A troop pullback is a key provision of special envoy Kofi Annan's six-point plan to end 13 months of bloodshed in Syria, but the regime has ignored last week's deadline of getting tanks and troops off the streets. Instead, Syrian soldiers continued to pound rebellious areas with artillery after an initial lull at the start of the truce a week ago Thursday, raising growing global concerns that Annan's plan will fail. But UN chief Ban Ki-moon and others stand by the UN-negotiated truce, saying the violence is sporadic and that President Bashar Al-Assad's regime has lessened its assaults. Even with dozens reported dead over the past two days, the world powers struggling to stop Syria's bloodshed are reluctant to declare the ceasefire dead. “That process needs to play itself out before we judge it a success or a failure,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. Ban, speaking in Luxembourg, said there has been “sporadic” violence taking place, but “we think that the overall cessation of violence has been generally observed.” In somewhat more critical comments of the Syrian regime, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Assad's forces have complied with the ceasefire “in the most grudging way possible” and “not yet met all of its terms.” Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, said “the situation is not improving. The violence is continuing, the bombardments, particularly in Homs, seem to be increasing, and the conditions that one would want and need to see for the effective deployment of the balance of the monitors are not at present in place.” France, meanwhile, said 14 foreign ministers would attend a meeting on Syria in Paris on Thursday to send a “strong” message to Al-Assad's regime to implement a peace plan. Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said the foreign ministers of the US, Germany, Jordan, Morocco, Qatar and Saudi Arabia would be among those taking part.
