Around 89 percent of Syrians approved a new constitution, proposed by President Bashar al-Assad, in a referendum on Sunday, state television said on Monday. Turnout in the referendum was 57.4 percent, state television said.
The international community should provide arms to Syria's opposition and Arab countries should take the lead in providing a safe haven for rebels inside Syria, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said on Monday.
"I think we should do whatever is necessary to help them, including giving them weapons to defend themselves," the prime minister said during a visit to Norway.
Meanwhile, European Union governments agreed to impose new sanctions against Syria on Monday, targeting the central bank and several cabinet ministers in bid to increase the pressure on President Bashar al-Assad and target sources of funding for his government. The new measures take effect later in the week and also include a prohibition on trade in gold and other precious metals with state institutions and a ban on cargo flights from Syria, officials said.
French
President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that a solution for evacuating
wounded
Western reporters out of the besieged Syrian city of Homs was in sight.
"We
have the beginnings of a solution," he told RTL radio. "It seems that
things are starting to move."
The U.S. and
its allies have dismissed the Syrian regime's referendum on a new
constitution
as a "farce" meant to justify the bloody crackdown on dissent. U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Sunday's poll "a
cynical
ploy" and urged Syrians who still support Assad to turn against him.
A
"farce" and a "sham vote" was how German Foreign Minister
Guido Westerwelle described it.
"It's a
phony referendum and it is going to be used by Assad to justify what
he's doing
to other Syrian citizens," Clinton said in an interview with CBS News in
Rabat, Morocco.
China's main
official newspaper on Monday described U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton's criticisms of Beijing's stance on Syria "super arrogant"
and argued that, after the Iraq war, the United States has no right to
speak
for Arab people.
The People's
Daily, the top newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, gave China's
first
public answer to Clinton's comments on Friday, when she called the
Chinese and
Russian veto of a U.N. resolution on Syria "despicable".
In turn,
Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned against a military
intervention
in Syria and an attack on Iran and claimed that the West had backed the
Arab
Spring revolts to advance its interests in the region.
Instead of
promoting democracy the Arab Spring had given rise to religious
extremism,
Putin said in an article published Monday in the Moscow News daily.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said its teams have succeeded in entering the central Syrian city of Hama for the first time in over a month.
A Red Cross spokesman in Geneva says a joint team of the ICRC and Syrian Arab Red Crescent brought an emergency delivery of food and other items for 12,000 people.
It was earlier reported that Syrian government troops fired heavy barrages of artillery and rockets on Monday into Sunni Muslim districts across Homs, where rebels have been holding out through weeks of bombardment, opposition activists said.
"Intense shelling started on Khalidiya, Ashira, Bayada, Baba Amro and the old city at dawn," activist Mohammad al-Homsi told Reuters from Homs.
"The army is firing from the main thoroughfares deep into alleyways and side streets. Initial reports indicate four people were killed in the Souk area," he added.
Reuters/LBCI