UNITED NATIONS - President Barack Obama on Tuesday challenged the United Nations Security Council to hold Syria accountable if it fails to live up to pledges to dismantle its chemical-weapons stockpiles. He said the U.N.’s credibility and reputation is at stake.
“If we cannot agree even on this,” Obama said, “then it will show that the United Nations is incapable of enforcing the most basic of international laws.”
The United States and Russia earlier this month brokered an agreement to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, thus averting a threatened U.S. military strike to deter and degrade Syrian President Bashar Assad’s ability to use the banned arms. Despite the agreement, Washington and Moscow remain at odds over possible consequences should Syria fail to comply.
“We believe that as a starting point the international community must enforce the ban in international weapons,” Obama said in his address to the U.N. General Assembly.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met privately at the United Nations for nearly two hours Tuesday to discuss how to enshrine the agreement in a binding Security Council resolution.
“We had a very constructive meeting,” Kerry said afterward.
They were to meet again at the U.N. on Friday with Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N.-Arab League special envoy for Syria, to push ahead with plans for a new international conference that would help form a Syrian transitional government.
Despite the chemical-weapons deal, the Russians have challenged the Obama administration’s claims of Assad’s culpability. Obama pushed back in his U.N. speech.
“It’s an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the regime carried out this attack,” the president said.
Critics of Assad have pointed to an investigation by a team of U.N. inspectors as proof the regime was responsible. The inspectors said the nerve agent sarin was used in the attack, but they did not assign blame.
The team of inspectors, led by Swedish expert Ake Sellstrom, announced it will return to Syria today to complete its investigation into “pending credible allegations” of chemical-weapons use March 19 in the village of Khan al Assal outside the city of Aleppo.
At the U.N., Obama also said that while the international community has recognized the stakes involved in the more than 2-year-old Syrian civil war, “our response has not matched the scale of the challenge.”
Obama also announced that the U.S. will provide $339 million in additional humanitarian aid to refugees and countries affected by the Syrian civil war, raising to nearly $1.4 billion the total American aid devoted to that crisis. The White House said the aid will include $161 million spent inside Syria for medical care, shelter and sanitation projects, with the remainder going to help Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt.
At the same time, Obama signaled that the U.S. might drop its opposition to Iran participating in the international conference on Syria that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and others are hoping to schedule for next month in Geneva. The U.S. opposed Iran’s attendance at the first Geneva conference on Syria last year because of its support for Assad and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which has been fighting alongside Assad’s forces against the opposition.
“I welcome the influence of all nations that can help bring about a peaceful resolution of Syria’s civil war,” Obama said.
Ban urged world leaders to stop fueling the bloodshed in Syria with weapons and instead get both sides to the negotiating table. He also urged the Security Council to adopt an “enforceable” resolution on the chemical-weapons deal.
Turkish President Abdullah Gul, whose nation hosts refugees from the conflict, welcomed the U.S.-Russian agreement to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons but said it should not allow those who perpetrated a “crime against humanity” to escape justice.
Jordanian King Abdullah II, whose country also borders Syria, said Syrian refugees numbering 10 percent of Jordan’s population have overwhelmed his nation, and he urged the international community to “fast-track a political transition in Syria.”
Meanwhile, Syrian opposition groups and international relief organizations are warning of the risk of mass starvation across the country, especially in the besieged Damascus suburbs where the gas attack killed hundreds last month. Activists said six people have died for lack of food in one of the stricken suburbs in the past 20 days.
The Brazilian government’s official gazette announced Tuesday that the National Committee for Refugees authorized the Foreign Ministry to issue visas for “humanitarian reasons,” allowing Syrians affected by the conflict and the “deterioration of living conditions” to enter the South American country that has a Syrian immigrant community estimated at about 3 million.
Also Tuesday, Spain’s interior minister said a correspondent from the Spanish newspaper El Periodico was kidnapped in Syria by an organization linked to al-Qaida. Jorge Fernandez Diaz said his ministry was working for the release of 46-year-old Marc Marginedas, who has not been seen since Sept. 4.
Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Lee, Matthew Pennington, Lara Jakes, Edith M. Lederer, Bassem Mroue, Jim Heintz and staff members of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 09/25/2013