The United States and Britain stepped up pressure on Syria on Sunday, calling for foreign ministers of the United Nations security council countries to meet to consider urgent measures that might include demanding that senior Syrian officials give face-to-face evidence on the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.
After a United Nations report pointed a finger at Damascus last week, Syria faces more embarrassment this week from a second UN report into its compliance with demands that it stop interfering in Lebanon.
President Bashar al Assad withdrew his forces from Lebanon this spring, hoping this would satisfy his critics, but a forthcoming report by Terje Roed-Larsen, a UN envoy charged with assessing compliance, is expected to say Syria has not properly implemented resolution 1559.
It will charge Syria with keeping indirect military control of Lebanon through its agents in the army, intelligence organisations and the Lebanese administration.
The double blow from the UN reports is bound to increase Syria’s isolation, although western states are not united on how far to go in pressing Assad and no threat of sanctions is imminent.
”The Unites States wants regime change. France doesn’t want to see the regime fall for fear of chaos or civil war, and the Brits are not sure because they don’t know what will follow,” Nadim Shehadi, acting head of the Middle East programme at Chatham House, said on Sunday.
The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, declined to specify on Sunday what measures they wanted from their colleagues, but the decision to summon foreign ministers ”will send out a very sharp message indeed to the Syrians”, Straw told the BBC.
The ministers will arrive later in the week, an official said later.
Any proposal for sanctions on Syria is unlikely to be supported by China and Russia. But the security council will probably insist that Syria allow its top officials to be interviewed by Detlev Mehlis, the UN-appointed German prosecutor, who said in his interim report on Friday that the decision to kill Hariri ”could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials”.
Mehlis was given only written answers to questions to senior Syrians. When he and his team did interview a few lower-ranking officials directly, they were accompanied by unidentified men who appeared to be intelligence agents.
Syria has rejected the Mehlis report, saying it is ”based on prejudices and reaches conclusions that bring Syria into the circle of blame, spreading slander without any proof”.
The call for foreign ministers to meet in the security council gives the US, Britain and France more time to find a common position on whether to threaten sanctions and refer the case to the international criminal court. The president of Romania, Traian Basescu, hinted on Sunday that the threat of sanctions was not on the agenda. Romania holds the rotating presidency of the security council.
After meeting the US national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, in Bucharest, he said on Sunday: ”The first step should be continuing investigations and the second one should be a very serious warning to Syria to cease being a factor of instability in the area”. Syria should be given a chance to show good faith, he said.
Since the Mehlis report came out, Syria has softened its position and hinted that it may let some top officials meet Mehlis’s investigators.
Analysts believe Damascus will try to give enough co-operation to minimise pressure from the three western countries, but not so much as to cause splits or mutinies in its own ranks.
The case increasingly resembles the pressure Libya faced after it was implicated in the explosion of a passenger plane over Lockerbie in Scotland. The Libyan leader prevaricated for years before handing over two suspected officials for trial abroad.
”The option for Syria is either be treated like Iraq, or like Libya with a Lockerbie-style offer to be let off the hook in return for certain services. The United States is more concerned about Syria’s role in Iraq. The French are more concerned about Lebanon,” said Shehadi. – Guardian Unlimited Â