U.S. vexed as Syria takes turn at arms-forum helm

GENEVA — The Syrian government of President Bashar Assad has been accused of using chemical weapons, barrel bombs and torture against its own people during a seven-year civil war.

On Monday, it took up the rotating presidency of the United Nations-backed Conference on Disarmament.

The move was met with anger from Western governments, but there was little they could do to prevent Syria from taking over the world’s only permanent multilateral body for negotiating arms-control agreements for four weeks.

The head of the conference changes every four weeks among U.N. member countries in alphabetic order.

The leadership structure was set up to prevent major powers from dominating the forum, and with Syria following Switzerland in the alphabetical list of member states, the path was cleared for what the U.S. ambassador to the conference, Robert Wood, condemned as “one of the darkest days” in the forum’s history.

“The [international] community must not be silent,” he wrote on Twitter.

Matthew Rowland, the British ambassador to the organization, said it “deplores the fact that Syria will assume the presidency of the Conference on Disarmament, given the regime’s consistent and flagrant disregard of international nonproliferation and disarmament norms and agreements.”

“The Syrian regime has caused immeasurable suffering — through massive bombardment, oppression, starvation and repeated use of chemical weapons,” a German Foreign Ministry spokesman said in Berlin. “Therefore, the regime has no credibility whatsoever to carry out the presidency in a substantive and adequate manner.”

The conference was created in 1979, and one of the most significant treaties it negotiated was the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the production, stockpiling or use of chemical weapons.

Syria formally submitted to the convention in September 2013, less than a month after a sarin attack in Ghouta killed 1,400 people. Under a deal brokered by the United States and Russia, it surrendered stocks of chemical agents used in the production of sarin gas and other weapons, but subsequent attacks by the Syrian military hardened suspicions that it had not handed over its entire arsenal.

U.N. investigators said they had documented more than 30 chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government since the start of the civil war, including an attack with sarin-like agents in April 2017 that killed at least 83 people.

That attack prompted President Donald Trump to launch dozens of Tomahawk missiles against the Syrian military air base from which the attack was carried out.

Last month, the United States, in coordination with its European allies, carried out another round of airstrikes, after what it said was a chemical weapons attack in a rebel-held Damascus suburb.

Syria’s Geneva envoy, Hussam Eddin Ala, has denied the charges.

Ala said it was important that his country leads the conference, “despite the opposition of the U.S. and the failure of the Israeli media campaigns that have worked in recent weeks to cast aspersions on Syria’s new role,” he told the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency.

Ala said Syria’s disarmament priorities include making the Middle East a nuclear weapon-free zone and fighting against chemical and biological terrorism.