BEIJING: China defended on Monday its rejection of a UN resolution pressing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to abandon power, with state media saying Western intervention in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq showed the error of forced regime change.
The proposed resolution, that would have backed an Arab plan urging Assad to quit after months of worsening bloodshed, would not help ease tension in Syria, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin.
China joined Russia at the weekend in vetoing the resolution, drawing condemnation from Western governments with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling it a ‘travesty’.
‘China has always taken very seriously developments in Syria, and we have always urged the various sides in Syria to halt violence and especially avoid casualties among innocent civilians,’ Liu told a regular news briefing.
China continued to support the Arab League’s efforts to defuse the conflict, Liu said.
‘Unfortunately, the countries that proposed the resolution forced a vote despite the serious differences among various sides, and this approach was not conducive to the unity and authority of Security Council and is not conducive to the appropriate resolution of the problem. Therefore, China voted against the draft resolution.’
‘On the Syria issue, China is not favouring either side or deliberately backing anyone,’ he added.
Asked about an accusation from the US ambassador to the United Nations that China would have blood on its hand, Liu said: ‘China does not accept such accusations’.
The conflicting Chinese and Western positions on Syria exposed a more general rift about how China should use its rising influence and whether it should foresake its long-standing, albeit unevenly applied, principle of non-interference in other countries’ domestic conflicts.
Russia and China’s veto came a day after activists say that Syrian forces bombarded a district of the city of Homs, killing more than 200 people in the worst bloodshed of the 11-month Syrian uprising.
Syrian forces bombarded the city again early on Monday, killing 15 people, activists and residents said.
All 13 other members of the Security Council voted for the resolution, which also called for a withdrawal of Syrian troops from towns and the beginning of a transition to democracy.
China’s siding with Russia over Syria could add to irritants with the United States. Vice President Xi Jinping is due to visit there next week, burnishing his credentials as the Communist Party’s likely next top leader.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said she was ‘disgusted’ by Russia and China’s vetoes.
‘Any further bloodshed that flows will be on their hands,’ she said.
The People’s Daily, the top newspaper of China’s ruling Communist Party, also set out in a commentary a defence of the decision, suggesting Chinese distrust of Western intervention lay behind it.
‘The situation in Syria continues to deteriorate and numbers of civilian casualties keep rising,’ the newspaper, which echoes government thinking, said in the commentary.
‘Vetoing the draft Security Council resolution does not mean we are giving free rein to letting this heart-rending state of affairs continue.’
The author of the commentary used the pen name ‘Zhong Sheng’, which can mean ‘voice of China’ and is often used to give the government’s position on foreign policy.
It was China, not its Western critics, who had acted ‘responsibly’ for the sake of the Syrian people, the People’s Daily said in the commentary. (Reuters)
‘Currently, the situation in Syria is extremely complex. Simplistically supporting one side and suppressing the other might seem a helpful way of turning things around, but in fact it would be sowing fresh seeds of disaster,’ said the paper.
China and the United States have also sparred over Iran, which faces tightened Western sanctions over its nuclear ambitions.
The People’s Daily laid bare broader Chinese concerns about US-backed action in the Arab world and beyond. China is one of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members that hold the power to veto resolutions.
In March, China abstained from a Security Council vote that authorised Western military intervention in Libya.
The resolution became the basis for a NATO air campaign that led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, despite misgivings from Beijing and Moscow about the expanded campaign, which they said went beyond the resolution.
‘Whatever the (Syria) resolution may have said on paper, both China and Russia worried that it could have laid the way for legitimising another armed intervention,’ said Guo Xian’gang, a senior research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, a government-run think tank in Beijing.
‘Previously, on the Libya issue, China did not exercise a veto, and as a result the Western powers used armed force beyond the UN mandate,’ Guo, an expert on the Middle East, told Reuters.