US,
Britain, and France call for Emergency UN Meeting over Syria
Russia
accused of war crimes in Syria at UN security council session
Accusations
centre on widespread use of bunker-busting and incendiary bombs on
civilians in rebel-held eastern Aleppo
the
Guardian,
25
September, 2016
Russia
has been directly and repeatedly accused of war crimes at the UN
security council in an unusually blunt session, as hopes of any form
of ceasefire were flattened by the scale and ferocity of the Syrian
regime’s assault on eastern Aleppo.
The
war crimes accusations centred on the widespread use of
bunker-busting and incendiary bombs on the 275,000 civilians living
in the rebel-held east of the city, weapons that Moscow’s accusers
say were dropped by Russian aircraft.
“Bunker-busting
bombs, more suited to destroying military installations, are now
destroying homes, decimating bomb shelters, crippling, maiming,
killing dozens, if not hundreds,” Matthew Rycroft, the UK
ambassador to the UN said during the emergency security council
session on Syria on Sunday.
“Incendiary
munitions, indiscriminate in their reach, are being dropped on to
civilian areas so that, yet again, Aleppo is burning. And to cap it
all, water supplies, so vital to millions, are now being targeted,
depriving water to those most in need. In short, it is difficult to
deny that Russia is partnering with the Syrian regime to carry out
war crimes.”
Rycroft
later walked out of the chamber with his US and French counterparts
before the Syrian government representative began speaking, in
protest at the regime’s bombing campaign.
Earlier
in the day, the UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, said: “Putin’s
regime is not just handing Assad the revolver; he is in some
instances firing the revolver. The Russians themselves are actually
engaged.”
Save
the Children quoted doctors in Aleppo on Sunday as saying that about
half the casualties in the city were children.
At
the security council meeting, Rycroft’s French counterpart,
François Delattre, agreed the use of bunker-busters and incendiaries
on urban residential areas was a war crime.
“They
must not be unpunished,” he said. “Impunity is simply not an
option in Syria.”
“Aleppo
is to Syria what Sarajevo was to Bosnia, or what Guernica was to the
Spanish war,” the French envoy said. “this week will go down in
history as the one in which diplomacy failed and barbarism
triumphed”.
The
US ambassador, Samantha Power, highlighted the targeting of three out
of four centres in eastern Aleppo used by the volunteer emergency
services – the White Helmets – with the consequence that
lifesaving equipment had been destroyed and “those buried in rubble
in Aleppo are much more likely to die in the rubble”.
She
said while Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, had been
talking about restoring peace in Syria at council meetings last week,
incendiary bombs were being loaded on to Russian planes in
preparation for the new offensive.
“What
Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counter-terrorism. It is
barbarism,” Power said, urging other national representatives to
speak out. “History will not look kindly on security council
members who stay silent in the face of this carnage,” she said,
adding that it was also not the time to use the passive voice and
observe that Aleppo was being bombed. It was time, she said, to say
who was doing the bombing.
In
response, the Russian envoy, Vitaly Churkin, blamed the breakdown of
a week-long, US-Russia-brokered ceasefire on rebels, including the
“moderate opposition” backed by the west. Extremist groups in
eastern Aleppo were holding its population hostage, Churkin claimed,
stopping them from leaving and using them as human shields.
He
praised the Assad regime in Damascus for its “admirable restraint”,
claiming it was in fact Syrian government forces that were surrounded
and were only firing on eastern Aleppo when they had been fired upon.
“The Syrian regime only uses air power to get terrorists out of the
city with minimal civilian casualties,” Churkin said, as he
dismissed reports of mass killing in eastern Aleppo as fake, using
footage from government-held western Aleppo.
The
UN special envoy on Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said the ceasefire had
significantly reduced the level of fighting, allowing Aleppo
residents to “come out of their shelters and houses to celebrate
Eid on the streets”.
He
said: “People started to become cautiously optimistic,” but added
the ceasefire was broken by bombing a day before the end of its first
week “when five districts were hit reportedly with five severe
airstrikes” following the Syrian government’s unilateral
declaration of an end to the truce.
“Since
that fateful day, we have seen the situation in eastern Aleppo
deteriorate to new heights of horror,” de Mistura said. He said the
airstrikes were reported to have killed 213 people in Aleppo
province, 139 of them in eastern Aleppo.
De
Mistura said: “We heard the word ‘unprecedented’ – in
quantity and also in scale and type – in [descriptions of] the
types of bombing. We have seen reports, videos and pictures of
reported use of incendiary bombs that create fireballs of such
intensity that they light up the pitch darkness in eastern Aleppo, as
though it was actually daylight. We now hear of bunker-busting bombs
being used and see pictures of large craters in the earth much larger
than in previous aerial bombings.
“If
it is confirmed, the systematic indiscriminate use of such weapons in
areas where civilians and civilian infrastructure are present may
amount to war crimes.”
De
Mistura said he had been asked why, in the face of such an onslaught
and failure of diplomacy, he did not resign. He said he would not do
so “because any sign of me resigning would be a signal that the
international community is abandoning the Syrians, and we will not
abandon the Syrians, and neither will you”.
Tom
Fletcher, the UK’s former ambassador to Lebanon, said the change in
tone used at the security council on Sunday marked a new phase in the
west’s response to the conflict, jettisoning residual hopes of
making a deal with Russia.
“Normally
diplomatic language is cautious: even the Syria contact group’s
statement yesterday only spoke of patience with Russia being ‘not
unlimited’. But today’s statements in the security council from
France, the US and UK are more raw, and more angry. They show that
the recent policy – admittedly more in hope than expectation – of
trusting Russia to restrain Assad is now buried in the rubble of
Aleppo. This signals a new phase. Assad has calculated that US
elections give him a free hand to massacre. We will now see whether
or not he has underestimated US readiness to protect the most
vulnerable.”
The
US Ambassador to the United Nations claims that Russia is responsible
for the horrors that have descended upon Syria, but remained silent
about the 1.5 million civilians whose water was shut off by US-backed
rebels.
British ambassador walks out on UN Security Council meeting, accusing Russia of war crimes
Matthew Rycroft, along with his US and French counterparts, demanded a halt to the offensive in Aleppo
Russia
to agree on no further unilateral steps to cease hostilities in Syria
Accusations
centre on widespread use of bunker-busting and incendiary bombs on
civilians in rebel-held eastern Aleppo
25
September, 2016
(TASS) Russia
will agree on no further unilateral steps to cease hostilities in
Syria after the United States’ tactical tricks that gave terrorist
groups time to regroup and reinforce, Russia’s Permanent
Representative to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin said on Sunday at
an extraordinary meeting of the Security Council.
"Requests
for ceasefire — now for 48 hours, then for 72 hours — have become
a routine practice," he said. "We have always been making
concessions, at least tried, and reached agreements with the Syrian
government. In the long run, it all ended in militants’ regrouping,
receiving reinforcement and staging new offensives."
Then,
he said, a demand followed that the Syrian government unilaterally
stop flights of its warplanes as a preliminary condition. "First
they said for three days. We agreed. Then they said, ‘No, the
US president has changed his mind, we need seven days.’ No one
knows why. Such tactical tricks cannot go on endlessly. We will agree
on no further unilateral steps," he said.
He
said the Russia-US talks yielded a detailed plan which, if duly
implemented, will help "ease the situation on the ground,
cardinally improve the humanitarian situation and give a start to
resumption of the United Nations-brokered intra-Syrian talks,"
Churkin said, adding that the deal had many opponents and "it
looks like their non-constructive position has outweighed the drive
for peace and common sense."
The
American side, in his words, "has actually acknowledged its
inability to influence the groups it controls and honestly implement
the agreements," first of all, to separate moderate groups from
terrorists and "draw relevant division lines on the ground."
"It
is written in black and white in all documents. Nothing has been
done. Even in what concerned listing terrorist groups, we saw only
groping prompting one to think that the key goal is still to retain
combat potential of the Syrian government’s opponents, whoever they
might be," he said.
"What
we need is a serious process, without fooling around. Conditions
should not be changed every other day because we have a deal. What
must be done is to implement it," Churkin continued.
However
he said he doesn’t think the Russia-US agreements could be
given up for lost. "I don’t think so, but the situation is
extremely difficult. I don’t think it (the deal) is dead,"
he stressed.
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