UNITED NATIONS – Britain’s U.N. ambassador says key powers have reached agreement on a resolution to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.
Mark Lyall Grant tweeted that the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – Britain, France, the U.S., Russia and China – agreed on a “binding and enforceable draft ... resolution.”
He says Britain will introduce the text to the 10 other members of the Security Council at a meeting Thursday night.
The U.S. and Russia had been at odds on how to enforce the resolution.
In Moscow, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov offered to provide troops to guard facilities where Syria’s chemical weapons would be destroyed.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters that a few subjects needed to be refined in the draft resolution but expressed optimism about a deal. “Things have advanced,” he told reporters.
Fabius said Wednesday he thought the five veto-wielding permanent Security Council members – the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France – known as the P-5 would agree on text by today, a prediction echoed by Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov.
The P-5 have been discussing for weeks what to include in a new resolution requiring that Syria’s chemical weapons be secured and dismantled. The U.S. and Russia had been at odds on how to enforce the resolution.
The flurry of diplomatic activity is in response to an Aug. 21 poison gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians in a Damascus suburb.
After Kerry said Assad could avert U.S. military action by turning over “every single bit of his chemical weapons” to international control within a week, Russia, Syria’s most important ally, agreed. Kerry and Lavrov signed an agreement in Geneva on Sept. 13.
President Bashar Assad’s government quickly accepted the broad proposal, but there have been tough negotiations on how its stockpile will be destroyed.
Gatilov told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the resolution will not include an automatic trigger for measures under Chapter 7, which means the council will have to follow up with another resolution if Syria fails to comply.
Fabius reiterated Thursday that the P-5 had reached agreement on three difficult issues that France pushed for: the inclusion of a sentence saying the use of chemical weapons in Syria and anywhere else is a crime; the inclusion of a reference to Chapter 7 that contains the same wording as in the U.S.-Russia agreement reached in Geneva; and the inclusion of a statement saying those responsible for using chemical weapons must be held accountable.
The Security Council has been paralyzed in dealing with the 2 1/2-year Syrian conflict, which has killed more than 100,000 people, because of differences between Russia and China, who back Assad’s government, and the U.S., Britain and France, who support the opposition. Russia and China have vetoed three Western-backed resolutions aimed at pressuring Assad to end the violence.
But Kerry said Thursday that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had “strong agreement on the need for a mandatory and binding U.N. Security Council resolution.”
The U.S. and Chinese ministers “discussed the value of unity among the P-5, and both felt it is important to act quickly” at their meeting Thursday morning, a U.S. official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the talks.
But, the official added, the Chinese gave no indication about whether they would support a resolution agreed to by the U.S. and Russia.
Work on the resolution continues while the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the body that will be in charge of securing and destroying the stockpile, is working on its own document to lay out its exact duties. The U.N. resolution will include the text of the OPCW’s declaration and make it legally binding – so the OPCW must act first.
Associated Press writer Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed.
