The United States and Russia began high-stakes talks on Thursday on Moscow’s plan for Syria to surrender its chemical weapons after Damascus formally applied to join a global poison gas ban, but Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated that US military force may still be necessary if diplomacy fails.
“This is not a game,” Kerry said in an appearance with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after opening talks in Geneva aimed at fleshing out Russia’s plan to secure and dispose of Syria’s stockpile of chemical arms.
The talks were part of a diplomatic push that prompted President Barack Obama to put on hold plans for US air strikes in response to a chemical weapons attack on civilians near Damascus on August 21.
The United States and its allies say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces carried out the attack with sarin nerve gas, killing more than 1,400 people, including 400 children. Russia and Assad blame rebel forces.
The United Nations said it received a document from Syria regarding the country joining the global anti-chemical weapons treaty, a move Assad promised as part of a deal to avoid US air strikes.
The move would end Syria’s status as one of only seven nations outside the 1997 international convention that outlaws stockpiling of chemical weapons. Other holdouts include neighbours Egypt and Israel, as well as North Korea.
The United States immediately warned Syria against stalling tactics to avoid military strikes. Assad told Russian state television in an interview broadcast on Thursday he would finalise plans to abandon his chemical arsenal only when the United States stops threatening to attack him.
Kerry expressed some optimism about the talks in Geneva - expected to last two days - saying, “We do believe there is a way to get this done” and that the United States was “grateful” for ideas put forward by Russia to resolve the crisis.
But he and Lavrov differed sharply on US military threats.
“We proceed from the fact that the solution of this problem will make unnecessary any strike on the Syrian Arab Republic,” Lavrov said during the appearance with Kerry.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been Assad’s most powerful backer during the civil war, which has killed more than 100,000 people since 2011, delivering arms and - with China - blocking three UN resolutions aimed at putting pressure on Assad.
“President Obama has made clear that should diplomacy fail, force might be necessary to deter and degrade Assad’s capacity to deliver these weapons,” Kerry asserted.
“Only the credible threat of force - and the intervention of President Putin and Russia based on that - has brought the Assad regime to acknowledge for the first time that it even has chemical weapons and an arsenal, and that (it) is now prepared to relinquish it,” Kerry added.
Kerry said any agreement must be comprehensive, verifiable, credible and implemented in a “timely” manner - “and finally, there ought to be consequences if it doesn’t take place.” Kerry said a peaceful resolution was “clearly preferable” to military action.
A version of the Russian plan which was leaked to the Kommersant newspaper described four stages: Syria would join the world body that enforces a chemical weapons ban, declare production and storage sites, invite inspectors, and then decide with the inspectors how and by whom stockpiles would be destroyed.
