Chemicals inventory part of deal on Syria
U.S., Russia agree all to be secure by mid-’14
GENEVA — The United States and Russia reached agreement Saturday on a framework to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons by mid-2014 and impose U.N. penalties if the Syrian government fails to comply with it.
Marathon negotiations between U.S. and Russian diplomats at a Geneva hotel produced the agreement, one of the most ambitious arms-control efforts in history.
The deal involves taking an inventory and seizing all components of Syria’s chemical-weapons program, and imposing penalties if President Bashar Assad’s government fails to comply with the terms.
The agreement follows days of day-and-night negotiations between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and their teams.
The U.S. says Assad used chemical weapons in an Aug. 21 attack on the outskirts of Damascus, the capital, that killed more than 1,400 civilians.
That use of chemical arms crossed a line, said President Barack Obama, and he prepared American forces for airstrikes. Then last week-
end, he decided to hold off and asked Congress to authorize such a strike. In the meantime, Russia proposed a way to rein in Syria’s chemical weapons, and Obama subsequently asked Congress, which already mostly opposed military action, to delay its vote.
The deal is “an important, concrete step” toward the goal of destroying Syria’s chemical weapons, “which could end the threat these weapons pose not only to the Syrian people but to the region and the world,” Obama said in a statement Saturday.
Kerry and Lavrov said they agreed on the size of the chemical-weapons inventory, and on a speedy timetable and measures for Assad to do away with the toxic agents.
However, the joint announcement, on the third day of the talks in Geneva, also set the stage for a daunting undertaking.
“This situation has no precedent,” said Amy Smithson, an expert on chemical weapons at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “They are cramming what would probably be five or six years’ worth of work into a period of several months, and they are undertaking this in an extremely difficult security environment due to the ongoing civil war.”
The Syrian state news agency, SANA, voiced cautious approval of the Russian and U.S. deal, calling it “a starting point,” though the Moscow-allied government issued no immediate statement about its willingness to implement the agreement, while Obama made clear that “if diplomacy fails, the United States remains prepared to act.”
The U.S. and Russia are giving Syria just one week, until Sept. 21, to submit “a comprehensive listing, including names, types and quantities of its chemical weapons agents, types of munitions, and location and form of storage, production, and research and development facilities.”
International inspectors are to be on the ground in Syria by November. During that month, they are to complete their initial assessment, and all mixing and filling equipment for chemical weapons is to be destroyed. The inspectors must be given “immediate and unfettered” access to inspect all sites.
All components of the chemical-weapons program are to be removed from the country or destroyed by mid2014.
The deal may not do much to change the fighting on the ground, but it should ease the impasse in the international community over how to react to the use of the chemical weapons.
Also, the U.S. and Russia have agreed to immediately press for a U.N. Security Council resolution that will enshrine the weapons deal. But Russia, which already has rejected three resolutions on Syria, would veto a U.N. move toward military action to enforce the deal, and U.S. officials said they did not contemplate seeking any such authorization.
“The world will now expect the Assad regime to live up to its public commitments,” Kerry said at a news conference in Geneva. “There can be no games, no room for avoidance or anything less than full compliance by the Assad regime.”
Kerry and Lavrov emphasized that the deal sends a strong message not just to Syria but to the world that the use of chemical weapons will not be tolerated.
In an interview with Russian state television, Lavrov said the groundwork for the approach to Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile began in June 2012 when Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin met on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico.
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the negotiations, said the U.S. and Russia agreed that Syria has roughly 1,000 metric tons of chemical-weapon agents and precursors, including blister agents, such as sulfur and mustard gas, and nerve agents like sarin.
The officials said the two sides did not agree on the number of chemical-weapons sites in Syria.
U.S. intelligence officials believe Syria has about 45 sites associated with chemical weapons, half of which have “exploitable quantities” that could be used in munitions. The Russian estimate is considerably lower, but the U.S. officials would not say by how much.
U.S. intelligence agencies believe all the stocks remain in Syrian government control, officials said, and that there is no indication that any of Syria’s chemical stocks have been moved to Iraq or Lebanon, as the Syrian opposition had alleged.
The Russian disagreement on the number of weapons sites appears to reflect the larger disagreement as to who was responsible for the Aug. 21 attack.
If the Russians were to agree on the number of chemical-weapons sites and that the sites are all in government-controlled areas, that would suggest that the Assad government is culpable for the attack and not the rebel forces as the Russians have asserted.
As part of the deal, noncompliance by the Assad government or any other party would be referred to the 15-nation Security Council by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. That group oversees the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria agreed last week to join. The U.N. received Syria’s formal joining notification Saturday, and it is to go into effect Oct. 14.
The deal offers no specific penalties for noncompliance. Given that a thorough investigation of any allegation of noncompliance would be required by the Security Council before any possible military action, Moscow could drag out the process or veto measures it deems too harsh.
Kerry stressed that the U.S. believes the threat of force is necessary to back up diplomacy, and U.S. officials have said Obama retains the right to launch military strikes without U.N. approval to protect American national security interests.
“I have no doubt that the combination of the threat of force and the willingness to pursue diplomacy helped to bring us to this moment,” Kerry said.
Kerry plans to go to Paris on Monday for talks with the British, French and Saudi foreign ministers, after a stop today in Israel to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
MIXED REACTIONS
Republican U.S. Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who are among Obama’s harshest foreign policy critics and support greater U.S. assistance for Syria’s rebels, said the agreement announced Saturday would embolden enemies such as Iran.
“What concerns us most is that our friends and enemies will take the same lessons from this agreement: They see it as an act of provocative weakness on America’s part,” they said in a joint statement. “We cannot imagine a worse signal to send to Iran as it continues its push for a nuclear weapon.”
McCain and Graham also argued that Assad will use the time that the agreement gives him to delay and deceive the world.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California credited the president’s “steadfast leadership” for “making significant progress in our efforts to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction.” She also credited Obama’s “clear and credible” threats to use force against Syria for making the agreement possible.
McCain and Graham said the deal doesn’t do anything to solve a civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people and turned millions into refugees.
“Is the message of this agreement that Assad is now our negotiating partner, and that he can go on slaughtering innocent civilians and destabilizing the Middle East using every tool of warfare, so long as he does not use chemical weapons?” they said. “That is morally and strategically indefensible.”
U.N. inspectors are preparing to submit their report on the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday that he expected “an overwhelming report” that chemical weapons were indeed used.
Other nations also supported the agreement.
Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, called Saturday’s development “a significant step forward.”
Germany believes that “if deeds now follow the words, the chances of a political solution will rise significantly,” Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said.
France, which has committed to join the U.S. in a bombardment of Syria, saw the deal as a “significant step,” according to a statement by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.
In Cuba, former President Fidel Castro applauded the Russian-backed proposal to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons. In an article written by the 87-year-old leader and published Saturday by the Cuban media, Castro lauded Russia as a “brave country” that “stayed firm before the unusual pretension of the government of the United States, threatening to launch an overwhelming attack against the Syrian defenses.”
The article is signed by Castro and dated Sept. 10.
FEELINGS OF BETRAYAL
The commander of the Free Syrian Army rebel group, Gen. Salim Idris, said in Turkey that rebels will continue “fighting the regime and work for bringing it down.”
He said that if international inspectors go to Syria to inspect chemical weapons, “we will facilitate their passages, but there will be no cease-fire.” The Free Syrian Army will not block the work of U.N. inspectors, he said, and the “inspectors will not be subjected to rebel fire when they are in regime-controlled areas.”
Idris said Kerry told him by telephone that “the alternative of military strikes is still on the table.” Idris denounced the initiative to put international decision-making about Syria under the purview of Russia, one of Assad’s staunchest supporters and military suppliers.
“All of this initiative does not interest us. Russia is a partner with the regime in killing the Syrian people,” he told reporters in Istanbul. “A crime against humanity has been committed, and there is not any mention of accountability.”
The sense of betrayal among nominally pro-Western factions in the opposition has grown in recent days.
In the northern Syrian province of Idlib, a rebel stronghold, one commander said the agreement Saturday proved that the United States no longer cares about helping Syrians and is leaving them at the mercy of a government backed by powerful allies in Russia and Iran.
Maysara, a commander of a battalion in Saraqeb, said in an interview that he had paid little attention to the diplomacy.
“I don’t care about deals anymore,” he said. “The Americans found a way out of the strike.”
He added: “The Russians did what they want. The Americans lied, and the lie was believed — the U.S. doesn’t want democracy in Syria. Now I have doubts about the U.S. capacities, their military and intelligence capacities. The Iranian capacity is much stronger, I guess.”
In Iran, a state television report broadcast Saturday quoted Gen. Ghassem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, as saying his country’s support of Syria secures “Iran’s real national interests.” Iran considers Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — as well as Palestinian militant groups — as part of a “resistance axis” against Israel.
Last week, Soleimani promised that Iran would support Syria “until the end.”
In Istanbul, the main Syrian Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, voted Saturday to name Ahmad Saleh Touma, a dentist and longtime political activist, as interim prime minister.
Touma will be in charge of organizing governance in parts of Syria controlled by disparate rebel factions. He later said in a speech that he will work on returning Syria to a state that respects human life and rights.
“Syria will be the republic of humans where there will be no place for killers and criminals,” he said.
REBEL INFIGHTING
Also Saturday, al-Qaidarebels battled more-moderate Syrian opposition fighters in a town along the Iraqi border, killing at least five people in the latest outbreak of infighting among the forces opposed to Assad’s regime.
Clashes between rebel groups, particularly pitting alQaida-linked extremist factions against more-moderate units, have grown increasingly common in recent months, undermining the opposition’s primary goal of overthrowing Assad.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Saturday’s fighting took place in the town of al-Boukamal between the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant against more mainstream rebel groups.
Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman said the more-moderate rebels used mosque loudspeakers Friday to demand that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant leave Boukamal. When it was clear Saturday that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant had no plans to decamp, the mainstream groups attacked, Abdul-Rahman said. Three moderate rebels and two extremist fighters were killed in the clashes, he said.