SYRIA’S CHEMICAL STOCKPILES
The United Nations set deadlines for Syria to remove its chemical weapons. At first, the country cooperated. But as time has gone on Syria’s promise of removing its deadly chemical stocks appeared to stall, triggering concerns it would drag its feet as the regime of Bashar al-Assad became more confident of prevailing in the civil war. Its response in general terms to the UN’s decree has never been easy to read. Some of those fears, though, have now been allayed and to some extent seem exaggerated. The complex and difficult process, being overseen and supervised by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), has gone in fits and starts. The process has involved transporting toxic and dangerous materials from some 23 sites through a war-torn country to the port of Latakia. The target for getting most of the dangerous stockpiles onto waiting cargo ships by the end of April has now been met.
A week ago, on April 22, the OPCW declared that 86.5% of all chemicals and 88.7% of the most deadly ‘Priority 1 substances’, such as sulphur mustard and precursors for sarin nerve gas, had been boarded and removed. According to reports, six consignments have been delivered to Latakia since early April, leading to the OPCW to declare that a ‘significant acceleration’ has occurred following a long gap when very little had happened.
A pictogram highlighting sites previously attacked using Syria’s chemical weapons.
The chemicals are destined for a container terminal at Gioia Tauro, in southern Italy. Most of it is then expected to transfer to an American ship, the MV Cape Ray, which is equipped with two mobile hydrolysis units for neutralising the chemicals. The Cape Ray will then head into international waters with a ten-country security escort, and begin its work. The director of American naval operations in Europe and Africa, Rear-Admiral Bob Burke, says that if the sea is fairly calm some 60-days of round-the-clock processing will be needed to neutralise the chemical agents. That makes it just about possible for the June 30 deadline to be met, a date in which all of Syria’s chemical weapons must be destroyed.
Anxieties persist, however. The first is the continuing disagreement between Syria and the OPCW over the destruction of production and storage sites. The issue is of setting bad precedent because, whilst the Syrians are arguing only for ‘destruction by inactivation’, which merely implies just locking some doors, the OPCW has a completely different interpretation as to what destruction of structures means. Because the Chemicals Weapons Convention (CWC) does not specifically define what that is, the OPCW has reverted to using a ‘common law’ standard which implies structures being ‘taken down to the foundations’. A compromise may be possible, but the setting of an inappropriate international legal precedent will be something the OPCW will wish to avoid.
For Syria to be certified as being entirely free of chemical weapons, a mechanism for future ‘challenge’ inspections will be needed. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the OPCW has never previously carried out such an inspection. It remains possible, of course, that the regime has hidden stocks, which on past form it might use (and then, later, blame the rebels for). The status of one chemical-weapons site, in an area the regime says is too dangerous for decommissioning purposes, remains ‘unresolved’.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the regime has not changed its ways. Reports earlier this month showed that helicopters dropped bombs filled with industrial chlorine gas on the rebel held village of Kfar Zita, injuring and terrifying dozens of civilians.
The use of chlorine gas is always hard to prove. It is not banned under the CWC and it does not linger, making the extraction of evidence from soil samples almost impossible. That is one reason why no signatory to the convention has asked the OPCW to investigate. If its use, however, was intended to maim or kill, and that would have to be established, it would be a clear breach of the convention.
A further requirement of the convention is that signatories give a full history of their chemical-weapons inventories and programmes, accounting for those scientists who worked on it and other countries that may have assisted it – in Syria’s case, probably Russia and Egypt with Iranian proxy support. But we should doubt that, with the architect of the programme still in power, the regime would reveal anything that might incriminate it in the killing of more than 1,000 people by sarin nerve gas in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta exactly 12 months ago, a crime for which it still denies all responsibility.
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SYRIA’S CHEMICAL WEAPONS
Reviving the Geneva peace talks is urgently needed…
Last autumn, America (along with France) came within hours of launching military strikes on Syria in punishing the regime of Bashar al-Assad for killing at least 1,400 people in sarin gas attacks. Had those air strikes gone ahead Syria’s stockpiles and reserves of sarin would have been degraded along with other nerve agent stocks. Under an agreement brokered by the United States and Russia, Syria agreed to hand over its stocks of chemical precursors and weapons by February, a deadline which was later extended and which has just past. Yet, despite this added leeway, the evidence suggests that Damascus has still not surrendered its entire arsenal. UN monitors and observers believe that up to eight per cent of stockpiles remain.
Intelligence suggests that, even if the Assad regime had handed over its full inventory, it would not have mattered – for the regime has continued to use chemical weapons in rebel held areas. Tests on samples of soil taken after three recent attacks show definite and unambiguous traces of chlorine and ammonia, the first independent scientific confirmation of what has long been suspected: that the Syrian army has been fitting helicopter-borne barrel bombs with chlorine gas, and then dropping them on towns and villages. Chlorine gas reacts with moisture in the throat and lungs, which in turn forms into hydrochloric acid, leaving victims exposed to fits of coughing, choking and, ultimately, gasping for breath. Several people have died.
Using chemicals in this way is a clear breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria signed last year. It is also an infringement of the international norms that have regarded the use of chlorine as monstrously barbaric since the First World War, when it was used to asphyxiate men in the trenches. Although the gas has many industrial uses, it is not a banned substance. Using it as a weapon, however, is strictly prohibited under the convention’s general purpose criterion.
With international attention having been clearly focussed on Ukraine in recent weeks, Assad has seemingly calculated that he can continue to carry out gas attacks with relative impunity, even though he pledged to end their use. He has come to realise there is little or no appetite in the West to intervene militarily in this savage civil war that has now claimed more than 150,000 lives. But he cannot be allowed to think there are no consequences for such ruthless actions.
A fresh effort to revive the stalled Geneva peace process is needed. Securing a diplomatic settlement in Syria remains the best way of ending the internecine warfare and the continued misery that are being suffered by its people. Pressure needs to be applied to Damascus to grant unfettered access to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is sending a fact-finding mission to investigate the most recent attacks.
Syria’s protectors must also examine themselves. Vladimir Putin, in particular, must ask himself whether, despite his continued belligerence, he is really happy to sit and watch as his ally in Damascus gasses his own people.
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