NO FLY ZONE

Wednesday 8 June 2011

The Syrian ambassador to France, Lamia Shakkour, denied resigning from her post early Wednesday morning and said that she had been the victim of disinformation intended to embarrass Syria.


A woman identifying herself as the Syrian ambassador had announced her resignation by telephone on the French television news channel France 24 on Tuesday evening, citing her disgust at the government’s crackdown against demonstrators in Syria.

Syrian state television and Al Arabiya, a cable channel based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, later broadcast their own telephone interviews with women identified as Ms. Shakkour, angrily denying the resignation.

She was unavailable for comment Tuesday evening and the Syrian Embassy Web site was taken offline.

But Ms. Shakkour appeared on camera early Wednesday on BFM TV, another French news channel, to deny that she had resigned and attacking France 24 for disinformation.

Standing in front of a Syrian flag and a portrait of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in the Paris embassy, Ms. Shakkour said that France 24 “is issuing a message in my name. Naturally, I will bring a lawsuit,” she said, “to condemn France 24 for its acts of disinformation, which are part of a campaign of falsification of information and disinformation which began in March 2011 against Syria.”

The television images of her denial ended several hours of confusion after France 24’s report, which had been quickly followed by a strong denial in Syrian media. France 24 insisted that they had called a number that it had used before and that had been provided to them by the Syrian Embassy press office.

It was unclear whether Ms. Shakkour had resigned, been impersonated, or resigned and then changed her mind. She took the ambassador’s post in August 2008 after it had stood vacant for nearly two years amid French-Syrian tensions over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon. Her father had also served as Syria’s ambassador to France, and she is a member of a Christian minority loyal to the Assad government.

The resignation had appeared credible in large part because of its rationale and timing. The woman who called France 24 said she could no longer support the government’s violent suppression of protesters; her statement came after violent clashes in the town of Jisr al-Shoughour that the government portrayed as a massacre by “armed groups” but that residents said was the government’s own answer to a wave of defections from military forces sent to besiege the town.

Syria bars foreign journalists from entering the country, and neither the government’s nor the residents’ accounts of the events could be independently verified. Nevertheless, either version would represent a serious escalation in both the chaos and violence of the Syrian uprising and harsh government efforts to crush it.

France 24 said it was convinced that Ms. Shakkour was the woman who made the resignation statements, in both English and French. Reuters said it had confirmed the resignation by e-mail via the Syrian Embassy’s Web site before it was taken down.

In the telephone statement on France 24, the woman identified as Ms. Shakkour said that she recognized “the legitimacy of the people’s demand for more democracy and freedom” and that she could not “ignore that demonstrators have died, that families live in pain.”

“I can no longer continue to support the cycle of extreme violence against unarmed civilians,” she said.

The Arabic Web site of the Syrian state broadcaster, SANA, said that reports of the resignation were “untrue and false” and part of a “distorting and biased media campaign against Syria.”

The Web site also quoted her as saying: “I greet President Bashar al-Assad and salute Syria, the homeland every Arab citizen carries in his heart. I am deeply disturbed by the false reports on some Arab and foreign satellite channels, part of a distorting and tendentious campaign aiming to achieve one thing: destroy the credibility of this great nation through its children and its young.”

Al Arabiya television broadcast a telephone interview in which someone identified as Ms. Shakkour insisted that she was “still the Syrian ambassador, the ambassador of the Syrian Arab Republic,” and said that she had not talked “to any channel in the world.”

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