THE HAGUE: At a closed door meeting, Western governments led by the United States took Syria to task for failing to surrender its chemical weapons under ambitious deadlines agreed with Russia after a poison gas attack in August.
Speaker after speaker stood up to berate Damascus at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), until it came to Russia’s turn and Moscow took a much more lenient view – the international split over Syria writ large.
Russia defended President Bashar al-Assad and said his government needed more time to ship the chemicals safely through territory where it is fighting rebels.
Syria missed a first deadline to give up the most dangerous toxins on December 31 and another cut-off date passed on Wednesday, when it was due to hand over all the remaining critical chemical materials.
The success of the destruction program, now also at risk of missing the final June 30 deadline, is in the interests of both powers, but the confrontation in The Hague on January 30 exposed a deep division between Moscow and Washington over how to respond to Syria’s lack of progress.
The U.S.-Russian clash also bodes poorly for a broader Moscow-Washington partnership that is seen as critical to resolving other major foreign policy challenges, from Iran’s nuclear program to the Geneva peace talks for Syria, which are set to resume on Monday. Further bad feeling was aroused by a leaked phone conversation about Ukraine between U.S. officials.
Even with the latest setback, the agreement to destroy Syria’s chemical stockpile that averted a U.S.-led military strike and led to a Nobel Peace Prize for the OPCW, can still be pulled off, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said.
MAJOR DEADLINE
The next major deadline is March 31, by when the most toxic substances are supposed to be destroyed outside Syria on a special U.S. cargo vessel, the Cape Ray, which is on the way from Virginia.
“The odds of Syrian compliance increase if Washington and Moscow speak with one voice, but that isn’t happening at present,” Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the U.S. Monterey Institute, a leading think tank, told Reuters.
“These two countries are both key to the potential success of chemical disarmament in Syria, not to mention a settlement to the overall conflict, so hopefully they will rapidly find a way to resolve this impasse,” she said.
With Russia opposed to automatic U.N. Security Council action against Syria if it is deemed non-compliant – a stage diplomats say has not been reached – Washington finds itself in a similar situation to last September, when it had threatened military action, diplomats said.
Western powers fear the program is being stalled intentionally to give Moscow more time to provide military hardware to Damascus and to enable Syria to retain its weapons of mass destruction as a negotiation tool in the Geneva peace talks.
It is a process that has faced difficulties from the beginning, with OPCW inspectors held up in Cyprus for weeks before they could get into Syria to check its chemical arsenal. The August 21 gas attack happened within days of their arrival and inspectors were earlier shot at by snipers while trying to check allegations of chemical weapons use. (Reuters)
