Syrian UN Resolution Turns on Russia’s Power of Veto in Security Council

The United Nations Security Council risks a Russian veto today by voting on a resolution backing an Arab League plan to end the bloodshed in Syria a day after one of the deadliest days of protests in the 11-month uprising.

As the 15-member body prepared to meet at 10 a.m. in New York to vote on a draft resolution that supports a decision by the Arab League to “facilitate a Syrian-led political transition,” Al Jazeera reported that shelling by security forces in the Syrian city of Homs killed at least 200 people.

Looming over the meeting is the threat that Russia may again block action against its Middle East ally. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said yesterday that his country won’t support the text, without making clear whether Russia would veto it or abstain if pushed to vote.

Almost a year after the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began, the UN is concluding a weeklong debate on how to stop a conflict that it says has killed more than 5,400 people and is evolving into a civil war. At stake is how much support to give the Arab League, which imposed economic sanctions on the regime and has called on Assad to step aside.

“We are witnessing a genocide in Homs,” Al Jazeera cited Abu Jaffar, from the city’s Al Khaldiya neighborhood, as saying. “More than 300 mortar shells fell on Homs, most of them in Al Khaldiya.”

The Syrian authorities are attacking because “they think they won’t have time to kill and use violence if the Security Council votes,” Burhan Ghalioun, president of the main opposition coalition, the Syrian National Council, said in an interview yesterday with Al Jazeera from Paris.

Resolution Blocked

Russia blocked a Security Council resolution once before, in October, when Western powers sought to hold the Syrian president responsible for violence.

In a final effort to win Russian acceptance, Arab and European Union negotiators made concessions in response to objections that the proposal endorsed regime change.

The new draft says there should be no “prejudging the outcome” of the political process and “nothing in this resolution authorizes” military action, responding to Russian concern over last March’s UN authorization of a no-fly zone over Libya that was interpreted to justify NATO military strikes that helped bring down Muammar Qaddafi’s regime.

Sticking Point

Arab and EU diplomats refused to barter on the degree of support to give for the Arab League plan, a sticking point in four days of negotiations that Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin described as “a roller coaster.”

Pakistan’s Ambassador Abdullah Haroon said on Feb. 2 that the council was “two words away” from agreement, referring to requests by Russia to substitute less stringent language for “fully supports” in regard to the Arab League.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov yesterday to discuss the draft, according to the State Department spokesman Mark Toner.

A vote was scheduled without any shift in positions after a fresh round of meetings yesterday in New York failed to produce a new text.

“Some of our concerns and the concerns of those who share our view were taken into account but, nonetheless, that’s not enough for us to support it in its current form,” Gatilov told the Interfax news agency.