generalspeaking

Apportioning Success

"[Bashar al Assad had] committed many crimes against humanity.
"Therefore, I'm sure that there will be surely the process of accountability when everything is over.
"I believe the report will be an overwhelming report that the chemical weapons were used."
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

Regardless of whether direct instructions were given by Damascus for Syrian government forces to carry out the chemical arms attack near Damascus, its president is guilty of gross human rights abuses. Mr. Ban expects to have the UN investigative team report in his hands by Monday. The United Nations believes 1,400 people were killed in the Ghouta attack.

This is the gist of the speech that the secretary-general gave to the Women's International Forum. Evidently he was of the belief that this was an event that would remain private. But the event and his response to various questions posed to him were shown on UN television. This will not be the first time that Mr. Ban expressed his sincere belief in a subject matter of great delicacy and was embarrassed by its later reporting.

When he was addressing a student group at the Rishon Lezion College of Management's Model UN program at UN headquarters in Jerusalem he had spoken of his belief that Israel was consistently maltreated within the august auspices of the United Nations. Unfairly treated. And that it was his honourable belief that Israel merited treatment equal to all other 192 United Nation member states.

“Unfortunately, because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel has been weighed down by criticism and suffered from bias and sometimes even discrimination,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon admitted during his visit to Jerusalem, according to the European Jewish Press (EJP).

Human Rights Watch has accused the Syrian government forces and pro-regime miltias of engaging in human rights violations. Their mass killings of hundreds of people in two predominantly Sunni Muslim towns in May along the Mediterranean was cited as particularly heinous. Accounts of witnesses lent credence to government involvement as they witnessed government forces detain, then kill their relatives.

Ban Ki-moon abandoned the usual mealy-mouth diplomatic statements issuing from his knowledge of how matters work within the United Nations and his interpretation of the reports that come back to him, and that's to his credit. It seems that others don't mind taking up the slack in issuing hard-to-swallow statements of their own, cringingly adept at the kind of statesmanship that blemishes their own credibility.

"We are committed to trying to work together, beginning with this initiative on the chemical weapons, in hopes that those efforts could pay off and bring peace and stability to a wartorn part of the world. Much will depend on the capacity to have success here in the next hours, days, on the subject of the chemical weapons", cloyingly stated John Kerry, American secretary of state at a meeting with Lakhdar Brahimini, UN special envoy to Syria and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva.

Much satisfaction exprssed on all sides about placing Syrian chemical weapons under international control effectively averting American air strikes. The discussions were immensely "constructive". A victory, concludes Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for his government. A quietly supportive display of agreement on his position to continue bashing and smashing his own people in a sectarian divide which identifies them all as Islamist terrorists.

When it would, in fact, be most helpful if he directed his troops and his Islamist Shia Hezbollah assistants to pitting the fury of their vicious attacks on the real Islamist jihadis, the Sunni radical psychopaths whose psychosis matches his own, in fighting pitched battles with them, and not helpless Syrian civilians. But he's been given the orange light to proceed with caution, and he'll likely once again abandon caution.

No problem, his great good friends in the Kremlin will bail him out again. And when it's all over they'll be able to turn their attention back to the other enemy sitting on the sidelines and offering the solace of medical assistance to wounded Syrians at impromptu Israeli field hospitals. They're the regional residents that hope those reports that a secretive military unit hadn't after all dispersed and removed some of those chemical stocks into Hezbollah's hands.

In the end the joke's on who, exactly?

Labels: Chemical Weapons, Conflict, Russia, Syria, United Nations, United States

posted by Pieface @ Monday, September 16, 2013