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Syria’s latest atrocityBashar al-Assad kills at least 72 with chemical weapons
A dictator defies the world
Middle East and Africa
| Beirut
ON APRIL 4th a chemical attack struck the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib, a province in northern Syria currently controlled by an alliance of rebel groups, including a powerful faction linked to al-Qaeda. At least 72 people, including 20 children, died, according to doctors and a Syrian monitoring group. The World Health Organisation said victims appeared to display symptoms that tally with the use of a deadly nerve agent such as sarin (as opposed to, say, a less powerful one such as chlorine).
One young boy was filmed slowly suffocating on the ground, his chest heaving and his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. Photographs show dead children lined up in rows on the floor or piled in heaps in the back of a vehicle, their clothes ripped from them by rescuers who used hoses to try to wash the chemicals from their bodies. Other images show victims foaming from their mouths or writhing on the ground as they struggle for air. Hours after the attack began, witnesses say regime warplanes circled back over the area and dropped bombs on a clinic treating survivors.
After six years of war, international reaction to the attack followed a predictable pattern. The Syrian government swiftly denied dropping chemical weapons. Russia, its ally, said a Syrian air strike had hit a rebel held weapons stockpile, releasing deadly chemicals into the air. Leaders in the West condemned the regime, issuing hollow statements about the need for “accountability” while avoiding any suggestion of how that might be achieved. The probable passivity of the West ought not to come as much of a suprise. When the Syrian government gassed to death more than 1,400 of its own people on the outskirts of Damascus in August 2013 it seemed inevitable that America would respond by launching air strikes against the regime. One week after the attack—the deadliest use of chemical weapons since Saddam Hussein gassed Iraqi Kurds in 1988—John Kerry delivered one of his most bellicose speeches as secretary of state, arguing the case for American military action in Syria. “It matters if the world speaks out…and then nothing happens,” Mr Kerry said.
Yet nothing, at least militarily, is what happened. Instead, working with the Americans, the Russians brokered a deal that saw the Syrian regime supposedly dismantle its chemical weapons programme. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) destroyed about 1,200 tonnes of Syria’s chemical stockpile. Barack Obama hailed the deal as a triumph for diplomacy over force.
Yet chemical attacks by regime forces continued, experts believe. Last year, American and European officials began to voice growing fears that Damascus might have held onto nerve agents and other lethal toxins, in defiance of the deal cooked up by Mr Obama and Vladimir Putin. “Syria has engaged in a calculated campaign of intransigence and obfuscation, of deception, and of defiance,” Kenneth Ward, America’s representative to the OPCW, said in July. “We…remain very concerned that [chemical warfare agents]…have been illicitly retained by Syria.”
All these fears now appear to have been borne out. As part of the deal in 2013 to end Syria’s chemical weapons programme, both America and Russia promised to punish the Syrian regime should it use chemical weapons again. Despite evidence of the regime’s repeated use of chlorine gas since then, neither side has honoured this promise. In February, Russia once again blocked efforts at the UN Security Council to sanction military and intelligence chiefs connected to the country’s chemical weapons programme. A similar fate doubtless awaits the latest attempt by Britain, France and America at the Security Council. Hours after the attack, the three countries demanded a resolution ordering the Syrian government to hand over all flight logs, flight plans and the names of air force commanders to international inspectors. Russia called the resolution “unacceptable”.
Barring a significant shift in American policy towards military action, the latest use of chemical weapons is unlikely to alter much the war’s trajectory. The rebels are increasingly weak. They lost their enclave in the city of Aleppo, the opposition’s last big urban stronghold, in December. Pockets of resistance remain around Damascus, north of Homs city, and along the southern border with Jordan; but these areas grow ever more isolated. In Idlib an alliance led by a group linked to al-Qaeda has gained strength, allowing America to argue that there are few appropriate rebel partners left to work with on the ground.
Indeed, now that Donald Trump is in charge, removing Bashar al-Assad from power is no longer a stated aim of American policy in Syria. In recent weeks, senior American officials have said for the first time in public that they are willing to live with Mr Assad as they concentrate on defeating Islamic State. Ironically, this approach is in fact more likely to fuel further extremism in Syria as jihadists seek to take advantage of the vacuum that America’s political disengagement now presents them with. It also means that, with Mr Assad at the reins, the Syrian regime will continue to drop gas on its own people. There is nothing to stop it.
O diplomata americano John Bolton é um mentiroso contumaz, e um dia vai se conhecer todos os dados desse ato brutal de decapitação de um diretor muito independente para o gosto do Império.
Não havia muito que o governo brasileiro pudesse fazer, a não ser escarcéu...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
To Ousted Boss, Arms Watchdog Was Seen as an Obstacle in Iraq
Serge Ligtenberg/Associated Press
José Bustani, front, before a special session in 2002 that called for his removal as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
PARIS — More than a decade before the international agency that monitors chemical weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize, John R. Bolton marched into the office of its boss to inform him that he would be fired.
John R. Bolton in 2005. Mr. Bolton disputed José Bustani’s account of why he lost his job, saying it was for incompetence.
“He told me I had 24 hours to resign,” said José Bustani, who was director general of the agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. “And if I didn’t I would have to face the consequences.”
Mr. Bolton, then an under secretary of state and later the American ambassador to the United Nations, told Mr. Bustani that the Bush administration was unhappy with his management style.
But Mr. Bustani, 68, who had been re-elected unanimously just 11 months earlier, refused, and weeks later, on April 22, 2002, he was ousted in a special session of the 145-nation chemical weapons watchdog.
The story behind his ouster has been the subject of interpretation and speculation for years, and Mr. Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat, has kept a low profile since then. But with the agency thrust into the spotlight with news of the Nobel Prize last week, Mr. Bustani agreed to discuss what he said was the real reason: the Bush administration’s fear that chemical weapons inspections in Iraq would conflict with Washington’s rationale for invading it. Several officials involved in the events, some speaking publicly about them for the first time, confirmed his account.
Mr. Bolton insists that Mr. Bustani was ousted for incompetence. In a telephone interview on Friday, he confirmed that he had confronted Mr. Bustani. “I told him if he left voluntarily we would give him a gracious and dignified exit,” he said.
As Mr. Bustani tells the story, the campaign against him began in late 2001, after Iraq and Libya had indicated that they wanted to join the Chemical Weapons Convention, the international treaty that the watchdog agency oversees. To join, countries have to provide a list of stockpiles and agree to the inspection and destruction of weapons, as Syria did last month after applying. Inspectors from the agency were making plans to visit Iraq in late January 2002, he said.
“We had a lot of discussions because we knew it would be difficult,” Mr. Bustani, who is now Brazil’s ambassador to France, said Friday in his embassy office in Paris. The plans, which he had conveyed to a number of countries, “caused an uproar in Washington,” he said. Soon, he was receiving warnings from American and other diplomats.
“By the end of December 2001, it became evident that the Americans were serious about getting rid of me,” he said. “People were telling me, ‘They want your head.’ ”
Mr. Bolton called on Mr. Bustani a second time. “I tried to persuade him not to put the organization through the vote,” Mr. Bolton said.
But still Mr. Bustani refused, and his fate was sealed. The United States had marshaled its allies, and at an extraordinary session, Mr. Bustani was ousted by a vote of 48 to 7, with 43 abstentions. He was reportedly the first head of an international organization to be pushed out of office this way, and some diplomats said the pressure campaign had made them uneasy.
Mr. Bolton’s office had also circulated a document that accused Mr. Bustani of abrasive conduct and taking “ill-considered initiatives” without consulting with the United States and other member nations, diplomats said.
But Mr. Bustani and some senior officials, both in Brazil and the United States, say Washington acted because it believed that the organization under Mr. Bustani threatened to become an obstacle to the administration’s plans to invade Iraq. As justification, Washington was claiming that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, possessed chemical weapons, but Mr. Bustani said his own experts had told him that those weapons were destroyed in the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf war.
“Everybody knew there weren’t any,” he said. “An inspection would make it obvious there were no weapons to destroy. This would completely nullify the decision to invade.”
Mr. Bolton disputed that account. “He made that argument after we invaded,” he said. Twice during the interview, Mr. Bolton said, “The kind of person who believes that argument is the kind who puts tin foil on his ears to ward off cosmic waves.”
But diplomats in The Hague said officials in Washington had circulated a document saying that the chemical weapons watchdog under Mr. Bustani was seeking an “inappropriate role in Iraq,” which was really a matter for the United Nations Security Council.
Avis Bohlen, a career diplomat who served as Mr. Bolton’s deputy before her retirement, said in a telephone interview from Washington on Saturday that others besides Mr. Bolton believed that Mr. Bustani had “stepped over some lines” in connection with Iraq and other matters. “The episode was very unpleasant for all concerned,” she said.
Speaking from São Paulo, Brazil, on Saturday, Celso Lafer, the former Brazilian foreign minister, said that in early 2002, he was asked to meet privately with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who a year earlier had praised Mr. Bustani’s leadership in a letter.
Mr. Lafer said Mr. Powell told him, “ ‘I have people in the administration who don’t want Bustani to stay, and my role is to inform you of this.’ ”
“It was a complicated process,” Mr. Lafer recalled, “with the United States and particularly John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld wanting the head of Bustani.”
“My view,” he continued, “is that the neocons wanted the freedom to act without multilateral constraints and, with Bustani wanting to act with more independence, this would limit their freedom of action.”
Getting Mr. Bustani fired took some doing. Washington failed to obtain a no-confidence motion from the chemical weapons watchdog’s executive council. Then the United States, which was responsible for 22 percent of the agency’s budget at the time, threatened to cut off its financing and warned that several other countries, including Japan, would follow suit, diplomats have said.
Mr. Bustani recalled that the ambassador from Britain, one of the agency’s most committed member nations, told him that London had sent instructions to vote with Washington. With the United States and Japan covering almost half the budget, the organization ran the risk of collapsing, Mr. Bustani said.
On Friday, while fielding a flow of messages in his office, Mr. Bustani said he felt gratified about the Nobel Prize news and did not regret his days at the agency. “I had to start it from the beginning, create a code of conduct, a program of technical assistance,” he said. “We almost doubled the membership.”
He reflected on the contrast between Iraq and Syria. Inspectors from the agency are there now, cataloging the government’s stockpiles of chemical weapons as a step forward in Syria’s civil war, now in its third year.
“In 2002, the U.S. was determined to oppose Iraq joining the convention against the weapons, which it did not even have,” he said. “This time, joining the convention and having the inspectors present is part of the Syrian peace plan. It is such a fundamental shift.”
