US Secretary of State John Kerry flew into Geneva on Thursday to hear Russia’s plans to disarm Syria of its chemical weapons and avert US-led military strikes, an initiative that has transformed diplomacy over a two-and-a-half year old civil war.US officials said Kerry would insist any deal force Syria to take rapid steps to show it is serious about abandoning its chemical arsenal, senior US officials said ahead of Kerry’s talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Among the first steps Washington wants, one US official said, is for the government of Bashar al-Assad to quickly make a complete, public declaration of its chemical weapons stockpiles as a prelude to allowing them to be inspected and neutralised.
The eleventh-hour Russian initiative interrupted a Western march to war, persuading President Barack Obama to put on hold a plan for military strikes to punish Assad for a poison gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians on Aug 21.
Syria, which denies it was behind that attack, has agreed to Moscow’s proposal that it give up its chemical weapons stocks, averting what would have been the first direct Western intervention in a civil war that has killed 100,000 people.
In the past Syria had not confirmed that it held chemical weapons. It was not a party to treaties that banned their possession and required disclosure, although it was bound by the Geneva Conventions that prohibit their use in warfare.
The US official, briefing the media on condition of anonymity ahead of Kerry’s talks with Lavrov, said the aim was “to see if there’s reality here, or not” in the Russian proposal. Kerry and a contingent of experts plan to hold at least two days of talks with the Russians on the plan.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, long cast as a villain by Western leaders for supplying Assad with arms and blocking Security Council efforts to dislodge him, took his case to the American public, penning an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he argued against military strikes.
Putin argued that intervention against Assad would further the aims of al Qaeda fighters among the Syrian leader’s enemies.
There were “few champions of democracy” in Syria, he wrote, “but there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all types battling the government.”
US intervention would “increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism,” Putin argued. “It could undermine multi-lateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilise the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law out of balance.”
US officials said they hoped Kerry and Lavrov could agree on a blueprint for Syrian disarmament whose main points would be adopted in a UN Security Council resolution. – bdnews24.com
