Moscow slams West’s ‘double standards’-based Syria policy

File Photo of Bashar al-Assad and Sergei Lavrov

(Interfax – MOSCOW, July 8, 2013) Moscow has again slammed the West for a policy on the Syrian conflict based on “double standards.”

“We deplore the position of our Western partners in the UN Security Council – in debating the Syria issue, they continue to observe double standards. Moreover, this is far from the first instance of such non-objective and biased assessments of the situation in the Syrian Arab Republic, which is in line with the continued reluctance to condemn terrorist attacks in the country with attempts to justify the actions of armed militants,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Monday.

“Early in July some of the non-permanent members of the UN Security Council initiated the approval of a statement by the president of the UN Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Syria. The statement expressed concern over the fate of 2,500 civilians trapped in Homs as a result of fierce hostilities between government troops and armed opposition groups,” the ministry said.

“Unlike the statement by the UN secretary-general, the abovementioned draft was patently one-sided. The main addressee of its appeals for putting an end to the violence was the Syrian government, whereas there was effectively no condemnation of the actions of the armed opposition, which uses civilians as a human shields,” the ministry said.

“Despite this, Russia expressed its willingness to work on the draft, proposing that its text be balanced in its expression of concern over the population of two Shiite villages that were mentioned in the UN secretary-general’s statement and are effectively under siege because of the opposition militants who are operating in that area,” it said.

“However, our proposals were ignored. Instead, the authors of the draft further distorted the nature of the events, supplementing the text with additional demands that the government of the Syrian Arab Republic provide humanitarian organizations access to other sites of armed conflict as well. At the same time, the Syrian Foreign Ministry’s statement the day before asking that the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Society of the Red Crescent deliver humanitarian aid to the population of Homs blockaded by the militants and its expression of readiness to provide humanitarian corridors for this was totally disregarded,” the Russian ministry said.

Russia “calls on all interested parties to actively concentrate on looking for a political and diplomatic way to settle the Syrian crisis, including as part of the Russian-American initiative of May 7 this year to call an international conference on Syria with the aim of launching a wide-scale inter-Syrian dialogue,” it said.

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