Kuwaiti MPs vote to recognize Syrian council

By AFP – Kuwait City
Al Arabiya, 29 Feb 2012 – Kuwaiti MPs overwhelmingly approved a resolution on Wednesday calling on the government to recognize the opposition Syrian National Council as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

Forty-four members including all cabinet ministers present voted in favor of the non-binding resolution, while five MPs opposed it.

The motion noted that the “Syrian people are facing bloody massacres at the hands of the brutal Baathist regime of (President) Bashar al-Assad.”

“This is a butcher regime that is killing its own people and has lost its legitimacy,” opposition MP Mussallam al-Barrak said.

A number of Shiite MPs opposed the recommendation.

Thirty-three MPs also filed a motion calling to debate the Syrian issue on Thursday with the aim of calling for “moral and material support” for the Syrian people.

Last week, five opposition MPs, including parliament speaker Ahmad al-Saadun, submitted a bill calling for the scrapping of all economic cooperation agreements with Syria.

The bill would also require the government to cancel a host of agreements, sever diplomatic ties with Damascus and ban all loans to Syria.

Earlier this month, Kuwait joined other Gulf States in expelling the Syrian ambassador and recalling its own envoy from Damascus.

Kuwaitis have held repeated demonstrations against the deadly crackdown in Syria by Assad’s regime, which the United Nations says has left more than 7,500 people dead since last March.