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Ban Ki-moon to present key Syria chemical report
The world is expected to get a look at the findings of U.N. weapons inspectors Monday as Security Council powers work to turn a U.S.-Russian framework on Syria’s chemical weapons into a concrete plan.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon received the inspectors’ report on the August poison gas attack outside Damascus on Sunday, the United Nations announced. Ban is scheduled to brief the Security Council on the report in a closed-door session Monday morning — and two diplomats told CNN the report is likely to be released publicly at that time.
The attack led to U.S. threats of military action in Syria, where a civil war has left more than 100,000 dead since 2011, and Syria’s stated decision to hand its chemical weapons arsenal over to international control. Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov laid out a series of steps the Syrians must take to eliminate its stockpile.
The plan now goes to the Security Council, where members are working to craft a resolution that will keep the process under review and allow the world body to consider the use of force if Syria fails to comply.
That effort will start at U.N. headquarters in New York and in Paris, where French President Francois Hollande told the television network TF1 talks would start “as soon as tomorrow” among Kerry, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and British Foreign Secretary William Hague.
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“Then Laurent Fabius will go to Russia to meet with his Russian counterpart to end this process, and we could vote on this resolution before the end of the week,” Hollande said. But he added, “This does not mean that we would be done with the case. The violence is still ongoing, the war in Syria is still ongoing, so the next step will be to find a political solution.”
Under the plan, Damascus must submit a comprehensive list of its chemical arsenal within one week, and international inspectors must be on the ground no later than November. Senior U.S. State Department officials said that according to the timeline, initial inspections of declared chemical weapons sites must be completed by November; all production and mixing and filling equipment must be destroyed by November; and all chemical weapons material must be eliminated by mid-2014.
Framework for eliminating chemical weapons
Russia is Syria’s leading ally and has vetoed Security Council resolutions on the conflict in the past. China, the fifth of the veto-wielding Security Council members, said Sunday it welcomed the deal.
“We believe this framework agreement has cooled the tense situation in Syria and has opened a new opportunity to use a peaceful means to resolve the chemical weapons issue,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said after a meeting with Fabius in Beijing.
The verification and destruction process will be carried out by personnel from both the United Nations and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the body that implements the international ban on chemical weapons use, according to the framework agreement. A diplomatic source said the OPCW will assess the timeline Kerry and Lavrov laid out in Geneva to assist negotiations at the United Nations.
Syria confirmed it had chemical weapons in 2012. U.S. intelligence estimates it possesses about 1,000 tons of ordnance — mostly the nerve gases sarin and VX, which cause convulsions, paralysis, respiratory failure, and death, but also mustard gas, which inflicted horrific casualties on the battlefields of World War I.
Syrian official hails ‘victory’ in Geneva
A Syrian official, National Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar, called the framework a “victory” and thanked Russia for orchestrating a chemical weapons deal to avert U.S. military action, Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti reported.
“On the one hand, they will help Syrians come out of the crisis, and on the other hand, they prevented the war against Syria by having removed a pretext for those who wanted to unleash it,” RIA Novosti quoted Haidar. He called the deal an achievement of Russian diplomacy, and “a victory for Syria won thanks to our Russian friends.”
