UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Friday night to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile, a decision aimed at taking poison gas off the battlefield in the escalating 2½ -year-old conflict.
The vote after two weeks of intense negotiations marked a major breakthrough in the paralysis that has gripped the council since the Syrian uprising began. Russia and China previously vetoed three Western-backed resolutions pressuring President Bashar Assad’s regime to end the violence.
“Today’s historic resolution is the first hopeful news on Syria in a long time,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Kimoon told the council immediately after the vote.
Ban stressed, however, that eliminating chemical weapons from the Syrian conflict “is not a license to kill with conventional weapons.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the “strong, enforceable, precedent-setting” resolution shows that diplomacy can be so powerful “that it can peacefully defuse the worst weapons of war.” Kerry said the destruction of Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile will begin in November and be completed by the middle of next year.
For the first time, the council endorsed the road map for a political transition in Syria adopted by key nations in June 2012 and called for an international conference to be convened “as soon as possible” to implement it.
Ban said the target date for a new peace conference in Geneva is mid-November.
As a sign of the broad support for the resolution, all 15 council members signed on as co-sponsors.
The resolution calls for consequences if Syria fails to comply, but those will depend on the council passing another resolution in the event of noncompliance. That will give Assad ally Russia the means to stop any punishment from being imposed.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that the resolution does not automatically impose sanctions on Syria.
The vote came just hours after the world’s chemical-weapons watchdog adopted a U.S.-Russian plan that lays out benchmarks and timelines for cataloging, quarantining and ultimately destroying Syria’s chemical weapons, their precursors and delivery systems.
The Security Council resolution enshrines the plan approved by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, making it legally binding.
The agreement allows the start of a mission to rid Syria’s regime of its estimated 1,000-ton chemical arsenal by mid-2014, significantly accelerating a destruction timetable that often takes years to complete.
“We expect to have an advance team on the ground [in Syria] next week,” Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons spokesman Michael Luhan told reporters at the organization’s headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands, immediately after its 41-member executive council approved the plan.
The recent flurry of diplomatic activity followed the Aug. 21 poison-gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians in a Damascus suburb and President Barack Obama’s threat of U.S. strikes in retaliation.
After Kerry said Assad could avert U.S. military action by turning over “every single bit of his chemical weapons” to international control within a week, Russia quickly agreed. Kerry and Lavrov signed an agreement in Geneva on Sept. 13 to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international control for later destruction, and Assad’s government accepted.
Tough negotiations, primarily between Russia and the United States, followed on how Syria’s stockpile would be destroyed.
The U.N. resolution’s adoption was assured when the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council - Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain - signed off on the text Thursday.
Lavrov told the council that his country will participate in the destruction.
Russia and the United States had been at odds over the enforcement issue. Russia opposed any reference to Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which allows for military and nonmilitary actions to promote peace and security.
The final resolution states that the Security Council will impose measures under Chapter 7 if Syria fails to comply, but this would require adoption of a second resolution.
It bans Syria from possessing chemical weapons and condemns “in the strongest terms” the use of chemical weapons in the Aug. 21 attack, and any other use. It also would ban any country from obtaining from Syria chemical weapons or the technology or equipment to produce them.
Kerry stressed that the resolution for the first time makes a determination that “use of chemical weapons anywhere constitutes a threat to international peace and security,” which sets a new international norm.
The resolution authorizes the U.N. to send an advance team to assist the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ activities in Syria. It asks Ban to submit recommendations to the Security Council within 10 days of the resolution’s adoption on the U.N. role in eliminating Syria’s chemical-weapons program.
It also requires the council to review compliance with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ plans within 30 days, and every month after that.
Meanwhile, a group of U.N. inspectors already in Syria investigating the purported use of chemical weapons said Friday that they are probing seven suspected attacks, including in the Damascus suburb where hundreds were killed last month. That number was raised from three sites previously.
BOMBING AT MOSQUE
Attacks with conventional and makeshift weapons continued unabated.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group that monitors the civil war, said a car bomb struck as worshippers were leaving the al-Sahel Mosque after Friday prayers in Rankous, 25 miles north of Damascus, killing at least 30 people, the latest victims of a conflict that has claimed more than 100,000 lives and driven another 7 million - around a third of the country’s prewar population - from their homes since March 2011.
Funerals were held quickly for some of the bombing victims in line with Islamic tradition of quickly burying the dead. At one funeral, several rockets fired by government troops fell nearby, wounding some of the mourners, activist Mohammed Saeed said.
Car bombs, shelling and airstrikes have become common in Syria’s civil war, heavily damaging cities and Syria’s social fabric as the conflict has taken on increasingly sectarian overtones that pit a primarily Sunni Muslim rebel movement against a regime dominated by Assad’s Alawite sect.
Amateur video posted online showed civilians and men with guns sorting through the smoldering wreckage of Friday’s bombing. Smoke still hung over the blast site, and a part of the mosque’s roof had collapsed. The video’s narrator accused Assad’s regime of carrying out the bombing and used a pejorative term for Shiites.
The video appeared genuine and corresponds to other Associated Press reporting of the events depicted.
The Syrian state news agency accused the opposition of being behind the blast, saying “terrorists” detonated the bomb after a disagreement over divvying up weapons and ammunition. The government calls those trying to overthrow it “terrorists.”
The unrelenting violence led a group of international-law experts to call for the creation of a war-crimes court in Damascus to try top-ranking Syrian politicians, soldiers or rebels when the civil war ends.
Professor Michael Scharf of Case Western Reserve University said that draft statutes for such a court have been quietly under development for nearly two years.
Scharf said the group is going public now to push the issue of accountability for war crimes in Syria in hopes that will deter combatants from committing further atrocities.
Syria is not a party to the International Criminal Court - the permanent war-crimes tribunal in The Hague - so the court has no jurisdiction over crimes there unless the court is referred to it by the Security Council. Russia would almost certainly block such a move in the case of Syria, and diplomats said Moscow had blocked references to the court from the draft Security Council resolution.
RIGHTS VIOLATIONS CONDEMNED
In Geneva, the U.N.’s top human-rights body Friday condemned what it called “systematic and widespread” rights violations by Syrian government forces.
The Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva, voted 40-1 with six abstentions to approve a resolution condemning “continued gross, systematic and widespread violations of human rights … by the Syrian authorities and affiliated militias” and “any human rights abuses” by opposition groups.
Diplomats attending the council said that an immediate aim was to increase pressure on Syria to allow the access it has so far denied to members of the 2-year old Commission of Inquiry monitoring human-rights violations to ensure that those responsible for human-rights crimes are brought to justice.
Assad has accused the commission of selectivity and bias, but “if he has nothing to hide, he should let the commission in,” Karen Pierce, Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said after the vote. “This resolution tells the authors of the crimes, whoever they are, wherever they are: ‘You will be held to account, and you will not remain unpunished.’”
A second aim of the resolution, diplomats said, was to support international agencies that are seeking to deliver aid to more than 6 million people in the face of bureaucratic obstacles and restrictions on visas as well as the risk of violence from all sides.
Some states criticized the resolution for not adopting stronger language and measures against Syria, but diplomats in Geneva saw the convergence between Russia and the United States on chemical weapons as providing an opportunity to achieve broad support. In the end, only one country, Venezuela, voted against it. Information for this article was contributed by Mike Corder, Ryan Lucas, Edith M. Lederer, Matthew Lee, Toby Sterling and Albert Aji of The Associated Press; and by Nick Cumming-Bruce of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/28/2013