Russia’s proposal for the Assad regime in Syria to place its chemical weapons under the control of the United Nations has postponed the possibility of US-led military strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad and changed the dynamics of this two-year conflict.
US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met in Geneva (together with UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi) this week to negotiate just how Syria’s chemical weapons are to be handed over and disposed of. Yesterday Kerry and Lavrov agreed on a deal which will lead to the destruction of these weapons by mid-2014.
If Syria fails to comply the deal could be enforced by a UN resolution backed by the threat of sanctions or military force. “There can be no room for games. Or anything less than full compliance by the Assad regime,” Kerry said in Geneva yesterday, adding that Syria has 1,000 tonnes of chemical agents.
The Syrian regime has been ready for this fight since Hama in 1982
This agreement is very welcome, and has averted military action for now. However, the US should always keep the military option open, even if not authorised by the UN Security Council. President Barack Obama was right to have threatened the Assad regime with military force. He was also right to ask Congress to postpone the vote on military action (there was also the possibility Obama would have lost the vote) in order to give this latest diplomatic initiative a chance.
However, it seems quite clear that Russia’s proposal came about as a direct consequence of Obama’s threat to use force. I think the Russians really thought that the US would go ahead with the military strikes, and came up with this latest proposal to avert them.
Furthermore, the fact that Syria on Tuesday actually publically admitted, for the first time, to possessing chemical weapons –after years of denying this – is a major step forward. Syria has now joined the Chemical Weapons Convention, an arms control agreement which outlaws the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.
Taking control of and destroying Syria’s chemical weapons will not be an easy task. They are spread out in a number of sites throughout the country and reaching them in a civil war will be difficult. Furthermore, Assad has proved to a massive liar and he certainly cannot be trusted.
However, a Security Council resolution agreed to by the US and Russia will be a major step forward in this conflict and one which hopefully will lead to further cooperation by Washington and Moscow in ending the Syrian war. Of course, the devil is in the detail of any resolution, and we’ll just have to wait and see what the Security Council comes up with.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said that a UN report due tomorrow will “overwhelmingly” confirm that poison gas was used last month. Furthermore, a number of news reports have stated that UN inspectors will also “point the finger of blame” at the Assad regime for last month’s chemical weapons attack outside Damascus, which killed over 1,000 people.
Such a declaration will increase the pressure on both Assad and his main ally Russia, which continues to support him. In a letter published in the New York Times last week, President Vladimir Putin said he believed the Syrian rebels were responsible for the chemical attack, something which will now make him look very silly.
Of course, any chemical weapons agreement will not end the war or stop the killing, as the Syrian rebels have pointed out.
Free Syrian Army spokesman Louay Moqdad told the BBC that Mr Assad still had plenty of conventional weapons and was attempting to “buy time” with the help of the Russians.
It is important, therefore, that the pressure is kept up on Assad in order to bring him to the negotiating table, and that certain rebel groups (not the jihadists) continue to be armed by the US and their allies. It is also equally important that the US and Russia continue to work towards a political settlement.
The fact that Kerry, Lavrov and Brahimi are to meet again on September 28 to discuss the Syrian crisis is encouraging.
Assad, however, is a tough nut to crack. Ryan Crocker, a former US Ambassador to Syria, told CNN last week: “The Syrian regime has been ready for this fight since Hama in 1982 when 10,000 innocent Sunni civilians were murdered by Assad (President Assad’s father, Hafez). It radicalised the Sunni population and the regime knew that a day of accounting may come. And they’ve been ready for it for three decades.”