UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan yesterday said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has agreed on a deadline to start implementing a peace plan, as the Red Cross chief began a new humanitarian mission there.
Past experience leads us to be sceptical
Mr Annan yesterday appealed to the 15-member UN Security Council to support the April 10 deadline which he said was agreed to by Mr Assad, diplomats at a closed briefing by the former UN chief said.
The partial implementation of Mr Annan’s six-point peace plan would include a full cessation of hostilities within 48 hours of the deadline, they said.
Damascus would start by halting the movement of troops into cities, withdraw heavy weapons from cities and start pulling forces back.
However, the US and other Western nations are sceptical that Syria will keep to a promise to start implementing the peace plan by April 10, Washington’s UN envoy Susan Rice said. “Past experience would lead us to be sceptical and to worry that over the next several days, that rather than a diminution of the violence we might yet again see an escalation of the violence,” she told reporters after the Security Council meeting.
Besides a humanitarian ceasefire, Mr Annan’s plan also calls for an inclusive Syrian-led political process, the right to demonstrate, and the release of people detained arbitrarily.
The former UN chief said the Security Council had to start considering the deployment of an observer mission with a broad mandate to monitor events in Syria where the UN says more than 9,000 people have been killed in the past year.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights said yesterday that 10,108 people have been killed since the uprising erupted in mid-March 2011.
Russia has rejected the idea of a deadline, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying “ultimatums and artificial deadlines rarely help matters.”
Moscow, a Soviet-era ally of the Assad regime, said only the UN Security Council, where it wields veto power, could put any time restrictions on Syria’s compliance with the Annan plan.
“The demands should be put to all sides of the barricades,” Mr Lavrov said. “We intend to be friends with both sides in Syria,” he said of Russia’s support for Mr Assad.
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) president Jakob Kellenberger, meanwhile, was making his third visit to Syria since 2011, as monitors and activists said at least 18 more people, mostly civilians, were killed yesterday.