By Louis Charbonneau
UNITED NATIONS, March 5 (Reuters) – Syria is stonewalling
members of the global chemical weapons watchdog and refusing to
seriously negotiate on the destruction of its facilities used to
produce poison gas, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations said on
Wednesday.
The sharp criticism of the government of Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad came after the Organization for the Prohibition
of Chemical Weapons in The Hague said Syria has shipped about a
third of its chemical weapons stockpile, including mustard gas,
for destruction abroad.
“OPCW trying to reach agreement to destroy CW production
facilities-#Syria refusing to seriously negotiate & is (about)
to miss another deadline,” U.S. Ambassador Samantha Powers said
on her Twitter feed.
Last year Syria had asked the OPCW for permission to convert
for peaceful use some of the facilities declared under its
weapons program, but Western diplomats said they were loath to
accept such a plan as it could leave Syria with a residual
chemical weapons capability.
“#Syria must accelerate process to comply with @OPCW
deadlines-only 20% of priority 1 chemicals removed so far.
Delays are dangerous,” Power said. Priority 1 chemicals are the
deadliest precursors for poison gas.
Syria’s U.N. envoy Bashar Ja’afari to did not respond to a
request for comment. The State Department announced on Wednesday
that Ja’afari will from now on be confined to a 25-mile radius
from central New York City.
Power’s Tweets followed a briefing that Sigrid Kaag, the
head of the joint OPCW/U.N. mission overseeing the destruction
of Syria’s chemical arsenal, gave to U.N. Security Council
members behind closed doors on progress on eliminating Syria’s
poison gas stocks.
Kaag spoke to reporters after her briefing. She was more
upbeat than Power in her assessment, saying that continued
cooperation by the Syrian government “has been assured by the
authorities at the highest level.”
Assad agreed to destroy his chemical weapons following
global outrage over a sarin gas attack in August that killed
over 1,000 people, many of them children. The world’s deadliest
chemical attack in 25 years, it drew a U.S. threat of military
strikes that was averted after Assad pledged to give up his
chemical arms.
Kaag declined to comment on a U.N. human rights
investigators’ report that said chemical weapons used in two
incidents in Syria last year appear to have come from the
stockpiles of the Syrian military.
The Syrian government and the opposition have accused each
other of using chemical weapons, banned under international law,
and both have denied it. More than 130,000 people have been
killed in Syria’s three-year-old civil war.
The head of a U.N. chemical weapons investigation team, Ake
Sellstrom of Sweden, said in January that Syrian authorities who
blamed the opposition for the August sarin attack have failed to
present a plausible theory for how the rebels could have
obtained the nerve agent.
(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
