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UN resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons passed
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The UN Security Council unanimously passed a landmark resolution on Friday ordering the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons and condemning a murderous poison gas attack in Damascus.
The major powers overcame a deadlock to approve the first council resolution on the conflict, which is now 30 months old with more than 100,000 dead.
UN leader Ban Ki-moon, who called the resolution “the first hopeful news on Syria in a long time,” said he hopes to convene a peace conference in November.
Resolution 2118, the result of bruising negotiations between the United States and Russia, gives international binding force to a plan drawn up by the two to eliminate President Bashar Assad’s chemical arms.
The plan calls for Syria’s estimated 1,000 tons of chemical weapons to be put under international control by mid-2014.
International experts are expected to start work in Syria next week. Britain and China offered to finance to the disarmament operation.
“Should the regime fail to act, there will be consequences,” US Secretary of State John Kerry warned the 15-member council after the vote sealing a US-Russian agreement.
Kerry hailed the resolution. “The Security Council has shown that when we put aside politics for common good, we’re still capable of doing big things,” he said.
Russia has rejected any suggestion of sanctions or military force against Assad. It has already used its veto power as a permanent Security Council member to block three Western-drafted resolutions on Syria.
There are no immediate sanctions over a chemical weapons attack, but the resolution allows for a new vote on measures if the Russia-US plan is breached.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the council would take “actions commensurate with the violations, which will have to be proven 100 percent.” The resolution also applies to the Syrian opposition, Lavrov said.
The resolution “condemns in the strongest terms any use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic, in particular the attack on August 21, 2013, in violation of international law.”
Should Syria not comply with the resolution, the Security Council agreed to “impose measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.”
The charter can authorize the use of sanctions or military force, but action would require a new vote, and Russia would likely oppose force against its ally.
Ban told the Security Council he wanted to hold a new Syria peace conference in mid-November, and said that foreign ministers from Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States agreed to make sure that each side negotiates in “good faith.”
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