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Seeking to mollify international officials impatient with Syria for missing deadlines to destroy its chemical weapons, Russia said on Tuesday that the Syrian government planned to send a large shipment out of the country this month and to export its ...
Russia Says Syria Will Export Chemicals by March 1
Seeking
to mollify international officials impatient with Syria for missing
deadlines to destroy its chemical weapons, Russia said on Tuesday that
the Syrian government planned to send a large shipment out of the
country this month and to export its entire stockpile by March 1.
Russia’s
deputy foreign minister, Gennady Gatilov, who conveyed the new pledges,
also defended the Syrian government’s explanations for the missed
deadlines, arguing that security dangers posed by the Syrian civil war
had created enormous problems in transporting the chemicals to the port
of Latakia, where an international flotilla awaits them.
“There really are difficulties linked to the need to provide security for this operation,” Mr. Gatilov said in an interview with the official RIA news agency.
Mr. Gatilov’s remarks appeared to be in response to the exasperation expressed last week
by the United States over Syria’s slow pace in exporting about 1,200
tons of chemical material, half of it considered especially dangerous.
American officials had asked Russia to use its influence with President
Bashar al-Assad of Syria to compel him to fulfill his pledges.
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Mr.
Assad promised in September, when Syria agreed to join the global
treaty that bans the production and use of chemical weapons, that his
government would destroy the munitions. Despite a negotiated timetable,
Syria missed a Dec. 31 deadline to export the most dangerous chemicals
and will miss a second deadline on Wednesday to export all the
chemicals. Diplomats say that only two small shipments, 4 percent of the
total, have been removed from the country so far.
The
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a group based in
The Hague that is collaborating with the United Nations to oversee the
destruction of the Syrian stockpile, added its voice to the criticism on Friday, when Ahmet Uzumcu, its director general, said, “The need for the process to pick up pace is obvious.”
The
group cautiously welcomed Mr. Gatilov’s assertions, a response that
appeared to reflect a wait-and-see attitude. “The O.P.C.W. looks forward
to receiving such a plan from the Syrian authorities and will have
something to say at that time,” Michael Luhan, a spokesman for the
organization, said in an email.
After
decades of denying that it even possessed chemical weapons, the Syrian
government reversed itself after a chemical attack on Aug. 21 that
created a global uproar, including from Mr. Assad’s principal allies,
Russia and Iran. The government and the opposition seeking to topple it
have blamed each other for the attack.
Under
a Russian-American agreement that averted a United States military
strike on Syria, Mr. Assad promised to destroy the entire arsenal by
June 30.
Russia
has been a major participant in the effort to export the chemicals,
providing armored vehicles for the overland transport convoys and naval
escorts to vessels supplied by Denmark and Norway to carry the chemicals
from Syria. Under the agreement, the vessels are to transfer the
chemicals at the Italian port of Gioia Tauro to an American ship, the
Cape Ray, which is equipped with technology to render the stockpile
harmless.
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