Syrian rebels seize U.N. peacekeepers near Golan Heights

Syrian refugees top 1 million, rebels take city

Syrian refugee Bushra, 19, who fled her house from Homs 17 days ago, holds her son Omar, 2, as she registers at the UNHCR center in the northern city of Tripoli, Lebanon, Wednesday, March. 6, 2013. The number of Syrians who have fled their war-ravaged country and are seeking assistance has now topped the one million mark, the United Nations’ refugee agency said Wednesday warning that Syria is heading towards a "full-scale disaster." (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

FILE - In this Wednesday, Sept. 5, 2012 file photo, newly-arrived Syrian refugee families receive food from the Jordanian military after they crossed the border from Tal Shehab city in Syria, through the Al Yarmouk River valley, into Thnebeh town, in Ramtha , Jordan. Jordan is home to than 425,000 registered refugees, and the numbers are growing daily by 2,000 to 3,000. Most of the Syrians are staying in the Zaatari refugee camp, and authorities are building another camp to manage the massive surge. (AP Photo/Mohammad Hannon, File)

BEIRUT (AP) — Syria's accelerating humanitarian crisis hit a grim milestone Wednesday: The number of U.N.-registered refugees topped 1 million — half of them children — described by an aid worker as a "human river" of thousands spilling out of the war-ravaged country every day.

Nearly 4 million of Syria's 22 million people have been driven from their homes by the civil war. Of the displaced, 2 million have sought cover in camps and makeshift shelters across Syria, 1 million have registered as refugees in neighboring Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon,Iraq and Egypt, and several hundred thousand more fled the country but haven't signed up with the U.N. refugee agency.

The West has refrained from military intervention in the two-year-old battle to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad, a conflict that has claimed more than 70,000 lives, and many Syrians hold the international community responsible for their misery.

"The refugee numbers swelled because the world community is sitting idly, watching the tyrant Assad killing innocent people," said Mohammed Ammari, a 32-year-old refugee in the Zaatari camp straddling Jordan's border with Syria. "Shame, shame, shame. The world should be ashamed."

Despite an overall deadlock on the battlefield, the rebels have made recent gains, especially in northern Syria. On Wednesday, they completed their capture of Raqqa, the first major city to fall completely into rebel hands, activists said.

But with no quick end to the conflict in sight, the refugee problem is bound to worsen, said Panos Moumtzis of the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR. The number of uprooted Syrians is still lower than those displaced in other conflicts, including Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans, but the Syria crisis will likely be protracted, and widespread devastation will make quick repatriation unlikely.

"We fear that the worst may not have come yet," Moumtzis said.

The exodus from Syria picked up significantly in recent months, turning into a "human river flowing in, day and night," he added. The number of registered refugees doubled since December, he said, with some 7,000 fleeing Syria every day.

Many refugees moved from shelter to shelter in Syria first before deciding to leave the country, while others were driven out by the increasing lack of basic resources, such as bread and fuel, in their hometowns. In the hardest-hit areas, entire villages have emptied out and families spanning several generations cross the border together.

On Wednesday, a 19-year-old mother of two became the one-millionth Syrian refugee to register with UNHCR. She would only give her first name, Bushra, because she feared reprisals.

Bushra waited with several others at a U.N. office in Lebanon's northern city of Tripoli to sign up. Along with her 4-year-old daughter, Batoul, and 2-year-old son, Omar, she fled fighting in the central city of Homs more than two weeks ago.

"Our life conditions are very bad. It is very expensive here (in Lebanon) and we cannot find any work," Bushra said.

Only about 30 percent of the 1 million registered refugees live in 22 camps — 17 in Turkey, three in Jordan and two in Iraq — and the rest live in communities in host countries, Moumtzis said.

Zaatari, one of the largest, is home to some 120,000 people. Refugees have been struggling with harsh desert conditions, including cold and floods in the winter, and scorching heat, along with snakes and scorpions, in the summer.

Moumtzis said he recently met a woman in Zaatari with an ID that shows her to be 101 years old. The woman, from the southern Syrian town of Daraa, was carried by her relatives, he said.

The U.N. refugee agency needs money to help overstretched host countries cope. Of the $1 billion inrefugee aid pledged at a donor conference in Kuwait in January, only $200 million has come through, officials said.

"We are doing everything we can to help, but the international humanitarian response capacity is dangerously stretched," said the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, adding that "Syria is spiraling toward full-scale disaster."

The uprising against Assad began in March 2011 with peaceful protests, but soon became a civil war. The rebel takeover of Raqqa, a city of 500,000, would consolidate opposition gains in the northern towns along the Euphrates River, which runs from Turkey to Iraq.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group, said rebels seized control of the military intelligence headquarters and another security building after three days of fighting with regime holdouts.

In southern Syria, rebel fighters detained about 20 U.N. peacekeepers Wednesday, said U.N. deputy spokesman Eduardo del Buey. The peacekeepers are part of a force that monitors a cease-fire between Israel and Syrian troops on the Golan Heights.

In video circulated by the Observatory, a rebel identifying himself as a fighter from the "Yarmouk Brigade" walks along an armored U.N. vehicle. He accuses the peacekeepers of helping regime soldiers redeploy in an area near the Golan that the fighters had seized a few days earlier.

Del Buey said the U.N. observers were on a regular supply mission when they were stopped by the rebels. He said a team was dispatched to try to resolve the issue.

The Observatory quoted rebels as saying the peacekeepers, all Filipinos, would not be released until regime forces withdraw from a village called Jamla.

The U.N. Security Council demanded their immediate and unconditional release.

Peter Bouckaert, a researcher for the international group Human Rights Watch, said he is investigating suspicions, based on amateur video, that the same group of rebels was involved in the execution of captured regime soldiers in the area several days ago.

In Belgium, the top rebel commander renewed an appeal to the international community to send weapons to the opposition.

Gen. Salim Idris, head of the rebels' Supreme Military Council, asked for anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to protect Syrian civilians from Assad's warplanes.

He said Russia and Iran are aiding the regime, while the West, while calling for Assad's ouster, is not doing enough to help the rebels.

"The people don't understand why the international community just looks at the news on their TVs," he said. "They just speak in the media and say, 'that is not good and the regime must stop and must go, Bashar must go.' And they don't act."

Britain seemed to be stepping up its support. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said his country would provide armored vehicles, body armor and search-and-rescue equipment to the opposition. But he said Britain is sticking to the European Union's sanctions against Syria, which include an arms embargo.

In Cairo, the 22-member Arab League gave a diplomatic boost to the opposition. The League's chief, Nabil ElAraby, offered Syria's seat to the opposition, provided it forms a representative executive council. The League had suspended Syria's membership in 2011, after Assad's government did not abide by an Arab peace plan.

___

Associated Press writers Barbara Surk, Bassem Mroue and Zeina Karam in Beirut; Jamal Halaby in Amman; David Rising in Berlin; Don Melvin in Brussels; Jill Lawless in London; and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed.

Bulgarians mourn self-immolation victim

SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) — A Bulgarian mayor stepped down on Wednesday as his country held a nationwide day of mourning for a man who committed suicide in a protest demanding the official's resignation.

Protester Plamen Goranov, 36, died after setting himself on fire in front of a public building in his city of Varna on Feb. 20. Goranov and other protesters accused the mayor of shady ties with an influential group that allegedly controls most businesses in Varna.

Its mayor, Kiril Yordanov, resigned on Wednesday after 13 years in office.

He denied any wrongdoing, but said he would bow to Goranov's sacrifice. "Plamen Goranov took an astounding step, and it brought about an overwhelming moral responsibility," Yordanov said at a televised news conference.

Demonstrations began in Bulgaria in mid-February against high utility bills and widespread poverty, then grew into nationwide civil unrest challenging the established order. That prompted the central government to resign.

Speaking at the last meeting of his Cabinet on Wednesday, outgoing Prime Minister Boiko Borisovsaid his government resigned to avoid the shedding of people's blood. "That is why today is a day of national mourning because this person — Plamen Goranov, one of the protesters — shed his own blood. That is why we made this decision," Borisov said.

He and his center-right GERB party won 2009 elections on promises to reduce crime, including widespread graft, and reform the judiciary. But at a time of financial stability, Bulgaria kept one of the lowest living standards in the European Union, triggering resentment among people struggling with an average monthly salary of less than €400 ($520).

This week, President Rosen Plevneliev said, "Our compatriots want decent politicians. They don't want to be robbed. They do not want to be lied to, and they want to live good lives." He will appoint a caretaker government next week to rule until early elections on May 12.

Meanwhile, several hundred people protested outside Parliament in the capital on Wednesday to demand that legislators amend the Election Code during their last few days in power to allow citizens to run for office without the endorsement of a political party.

"I think that the government betrayed us as it ran away with many of its promises left unfulfilled," said one of the protesters, Grigor Pavlov, a 30-year-old construction worker.

Insight: Palestinian street boils at plight of prisoners

A Palestinian woman takes part in a protest calling for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails near the Red Cross headquarters in East Jerusalem February 28, 2013. REUTERS/Ammar Awad

Israeli prison guards wheel Samer al-Issawi, a Palestinian prisoner held by Israel whom has been on an intermittent hunger strike, as he leaves Jerusalem's magistrates' court in this February 19, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Ammar Awad/Files

OFER PRISON, West Bank (Reuters) - In a sprawling Israeli prison, Palestinian activist Hassan Karajeh sat through a hurried court hearing in a language he didn't understand under the authority of a military occupation he and his people reject.

The translator in the cramped portacabin-turned-courtroom seldom bothered to relay the military judge's words, and the tall, bearded detainee spent most of the time whispering to his family and blowing kisses to his young fiancée.

Outside Ofer Prison's walls and throughout the West Bank, Israeli troops have clashed in recent weeks with Palestinian protesters fed up with Israeli detention policies, an emblem of what they see asIsrael's unjust rule over their lives.

The violence raised concern in Israel that it could snowball into a third mass Palestinian uprising if either of two detainees on a months-long hunger strike dies, further burying hopes of reviving a long-stalled peace process.

Some 4,800 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails and are feted at home as political prisoners or freedom fighters. Israel says the majority are terrorists with blood on their hands, and some have pleaded guilty to killing Israeli civilians en masse.

But the arrests have netted 15 members of parliament, a football player, a political cartoonist, hundreds of stone-throwing youths and a handful of what Amnesty International calls human rights defenders and prisoners of conscience.

Karajeh, a member of the "Stop the Wall" rights group that campaigns against Israel's vast metal and concrete separation barrier in the West Bank, has yet to be charged.

"We're just confused," said Sundous Mahsiri, his fiancée and a student at a local university. "Their group doesn't even organize protests, only advocacy work. None of this makes any sense to us."

Seized from his house in the dead of night on January 22, Karajeh has spent the last five weeks in solitary confinement, and complains of being denied medicine for an old leg injury.

According to Israel's military laws in the occupied West Bank, Palestinians can be held for 90 days without charge. In cases that prosecutors believe are especially sensitive, detention can be indefinite.

MASSIVE DEMONSTRATIONS

The latest hearing ended with Karajeh being dispatched back to his interrogators and away again from loved ones, in a pattern that is making Palestinians increasingly furious.

When an apparently healthy, 30-year-old Palestinian died last month after a week in interrogation, massive demonstrations rocked the West Bank.

Palestinian leaders said the man was tortured to death. Israel rejects this, saying cracked ribs and bruises found in an autopsy were likely caused by resuscitation efforts. But it said more tests were needed to determine why the father of two died.

Samer al-Issawi and Ayman Sharawneh, the two hunger strikers at the heart of the recent unrest, were sentenced by Israel to decades behind bars after being convicted of attacking Israeli civilians on behalf of armed groups.

They were released in a prisoner swap in 2011 only to be re-arrested last year and told to serve out their full sentences for fleeing jurisdiction and engaging in unspecified "terror activities".

In coffins or as free men, they have resolved to extract themselves from the legal maze.

Unrest in solidarity with their cause just weeks before U.S. President Barack Obama is due to visit Jerusalem and Ramallah may yet apply pressure on Israel to cut a deal for the release of the duo, while keeping detention policies intact.

Few issues raise as much passion or fury as the question of the prisoners, uniting the fractured Palestinian political landscape unlike any other issue.

"There's no Hamas, no Islamic Jihad and no Fatah when it comes to the sons of the Palestinian people, our heroic prisoners," one activist shouted through a bullhorn at a protest in the West Bank city of Ramallah last week, listing the main factions that are often deeply at odds.

Local authorities estimate that some 800,000 Palestinians have been detained under Israeli military orders since the 1967 war when Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. That represents around 40 percent of the male population and few families have not been directly impacted.

MILITARY TRIBUNALS

The Palestinian Liberation Organisation says those who are charged face a "staggering" 99 percent conviction case in the military tribunals.

"Israel's military courts, in all the versions of their work, exist to facilitate the policies of its occupation," said Jawad Boulos, a veteran lawyer for Palestinian detainees.

But arrests have helped paralyze militant groups that launched attacks on Israeli civilians -- including during the Second Uprising (Intifada) between 2000-2005.

Israel says that in the wake of a brief, bloody war in Gaza at the end of November, it has noted a "marked increase in attempts to execute terrorist attacks against Israeli security forces or civilians" and has stepped up detentions.

"These arrests take place following intelligence indications of terrorist activity," the Israeli military told Reuters.

Palestinian leaders are keen to gain prisoners' freedom to shore up their standing in the eyes of their people, making them useful bargaining chips for Israel.

Islamist group Hamas gained the release of 1,027 prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier it abducted in 2006 and held in Gaza for five years.

It was the biggest such exchange carried out by Israel and was widely seen as a triumph for the Palestinian cause.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, hoping to regain the initiative from his militant rivals in Hamas, has since said he would return to the negotiating table only if more prisoners went free -- especially those incarcerated before the 1993 Oslo Accords that granted the Palestinians limited self-rule.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev hinted that more Palestinian detainees might be released in future as a "confidence-building measure", but could give no guarantees about the long-term prisoners sentenced for violence.

"It's a difficult issue given that these people in jail pre-Oslo were sentenced to extended sentences for horrendous crimes," he said.

COLONIAL LEGACY

More than the fate of the 108 "pre-Oslo" prisoners, it is Israel's use of "administrative detention" that remains a main lightning rod of popular anger.

Scores of suspected militants are in jail under the measure, which was adapted from Britain's colonial laws when it governed Palestine, and relies on secret evidence that is presented in closed military courts.

Led by a small group of administrative detainees, a mass Palestinian hunger strike last May was defused by an Egyptian-mediated deal in which prisoners agreed to back off from their protest if Israel curtailed administrative detention.

Since then, the number of Palestinians held without charge has fallen from 308 to 178.

Israel says the practice was sanctioned by international law as a means of pre-empting violence and protecting sources as long as a peace deal with the Palestinians remains elusive.

"We're dealing with hardcore terrorist organizations that have no compunction whatsoever about taking immediate, violent retribution against those testifying in an open court," Regev said.

The May deal did not bring total calm to the prisons, with occasional hunger strikes still rumbling on.

Protesters have for a month held a weekly sit-in outside the Ramallah Red Cross in solidarity with the hunger strikers.

Among dozens of protesters at one rally stood a frail-looking Thaer Halahla, whose 68-day hunger strike gained his freedom from administrative lock-up last year.

Despite having to undergo two operations on his damaged organs, Halahla said hunger striking was a powerful tool against an unjust system.

"It was the most difficult decision a man can take. I did it despite the pain and the threats and pressure from our guards - I felt I was close to martyrdom at any moment," he said.

Last week, Israel struck a deal to free soon two fasting men on administrative detention, leaving just al-Issawi and Sharawneh on the list of long-term hunger strikers.

PROTESTS, PREGNANCIES

In al-Issawiya, Samer's home village, his kinsmen have engaged in rock-throwing clashes with Israeli riot police for much of his six-month fast. A tent set up to hold vigils for him has been taken down by Israeli forces 33 times.

"No matter how many courts he's subjected to, we know that his detention is political and people will keep fighting against it," said his sister, Shireen, a lawyer who has spent a year in Israeli prison.

Palestinians aren't waiting for a diplomatic deus ex machina to try to live a normal life.

A Palestinian fertility centre has offered free insemination treatment to the wives of long-term prisoners, whose sperm they sneak out of Israeli prison and on to the next generation. The campaign has led to one delivery and six pregnancies.

Umm Ali, a woman protesting outside the Red Cross, recalled how she was able to help her son, Refaat Maarif, a prisoner serving a 15-year sentence, get his wife pregnant.

"Prison will not keep our men from having a legacy and passing down their name," Umm Ali said. "The world must realize that the issue of prisoners is the issue of Palestine. If it's not solved, nothing else will be."

(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta; Editing by Crispian Balmer and Giles Elgood)

About 60,000 could lose homes for controversial China dams

BEIJING (Reuters) - China expects 60,000 people to lose their homes in the remote southwest if a series of four dams along the country's last free-flowing river gets the go-ahead, a local official said on Thursday in the first government estimate for relocations.

Outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao, a geologist by trade and populist by instinct, vetoed the dams inYunnan province on the UNESCO-protected Nu River, known outside China as the Salween, in 2005, after an outcry from environmentalists.

But in late January, the government unexpectedly announced that dam building would resume, with the Nu River high on the list for development.

Qin Guangrong, Yunnan's Communist Party chief, told reporters on the sidelines of China's annual meeting of parliament that work had not yet begun.

But Li Siming, head of the prefecture along the Myanmar border where the dams would be built, said the prefecture had already begun looking at how to relocate people.

"The initial estimate is that 60,000 people will have to be relocated," Li told Reuters. Most are from the ethnic Lisu minority.

"We've not yet got to the stage of working out where they will be relocated to. There are no details yet on whether the projects will even happen," he added. "There are limited amounts of land."

China relocated 1.3 million people during the 17 years it took to complete the massive, $59 billion Three Gorges Dam, built in a much more heavily populated area in central China.

Li, an ethnic Lisu himself, said the environmental impact assessment had not been completed and he did not know when construction might start.

"The whole process, from the central government to the provincial government to the prefectural government, will be open to the public - it's part of the policy of 'letting the light shine on the government'," he said.

Environmentalists have long complained about the lack of transparency about the dam project.

"The problem is that for a matter that has provoked concern from the international community, they have never held a hearing before," Wang Yongchen, an environmentalist who has long campaigned for the Nu River, told Reuters recently.

Li said that most residents supported the dam project, but added that "a minority" did not.

"If we see that development of hydropower resources on the Nu River will not benefit the local people, then we will not do it," he said.

Li sounded uncertain, however, when asked if he personally supported the project.

"I grew up along the Nu River. How to protect it, how to develop it, how to use it, I have my own opinions on that," he said. "I'm a local boy: we've always relied on the land, and the water.

"As head of the prefecture, I'm always thinking about how to protect the land but also how to use it. This is always on my mind... It's not about whether I personally support it or not."