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Crowds of demonstrators in Tripoli tried to storm the Chinese embassy on Monday. They were protesting China’s veto of an UN resolution which would have condemned . . .[restrict]the Assad regime’s violence against the Syrian opposition and called on President Bashir Assad to resign. On Sunday, protestors attacked the Russian embassy in the capital and raised the Syrian opposition flag on the roof and damaged equipment before being forced out by Libyan security forces; Moscow also vetoed the UN resolution.
On Saturday, demonstrators seized control of the Syrian embassy. They still hold it.
Monday’s demonstrators, who included both Syrians and Libyan supporters, were however prevented from storming the Chinese embassy. Armed Libyan security men had been brought in to protect it following the assault on the Russian mission the previous day. They shot into the air to try and disperse the crowd.
Nonetheless protestors were able to throw rocks at the embassy, smashing a number of windows. They also burned the Chinese flag and spayed the walls with graffiti.
No-one was hurt and an embassy security guard was reported by a Reuters journalist as telling him: “We are fine.”
Demonstrators said they had acted because of what has been happening in the Syrian city of Homs, where government shelling of the city is claimed by activists to have resulted in 50 more deaths on Monday, and because of the Chinese and Russian veto. Syrian government forces were reported to have intensified their shelling of the city on Tuesday.
A Chinese government commercial delegation arrived in Tripoli on Saturday to improve relations with Libya and investigate the possibility of reactivating a number of construction projects, notably in housing and railway projects. These are worth over 7 billion. The project include 100,000 unfinished apartments.
There have been protests at Syrian, Russian and Chinese embassies around the world in the the past three days. In Malta, dozens of Syrians protested outside the Russian embassy in San Gwann on Sunday. They were joined by numbers of the island’s Libyan community. [/restrict]
