U.N.'s Ban Calls on China to Use 'Influence' in Syria Dispute
إقرأ هذا الخبر بالعربية
U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Saturday appealed to China's foreign minister to use his "influence" to help bring pressure on Syria's President Bashar Assad to end conflict, a U.N. spokesman said.
China is a key player in a U.N. Security Council dispute over sanctions against the Syrian leader. It has backed Russia in rejecting western demands for international action to press Assad.
Ban and Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi discussed Syria in telephone talks ahead of the U.N. secretary general's visit to China on Monday, said U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky.
The U.N. leader "called on China to use its influence to ensure the full and immediate implementation" of the peace plan of U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan and an international communique which China agreed on June 30 calling for a political transition in Syria, said the spokesman.
They discussed "the imperative need for the violence to stop at once" and the massacre in the village of Treimsa on Thursday in which at least 150 people died.
Ban highlighted that the fighting involved "the use of heavy weapons in violation of the Syrian government's obligations" under Security Council resolutions on Syria passed in April.
The Security Council has to pass a resolution by July 20 to renew the mandate of the U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS). Britain, the United States, France, Germany and Portugal want sanctions added to the resolution if Assad does not pull back his heavy weapons in line with Annan's peace plan.
Russia, Assad's key ally, rejects the threat of sanctions.
Russia and China have twice used their powers as permanent members of the Security Council to veto resolutions which just hinted at sanctions.
15 July 2012, 20:39
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Mr. Ban mentioned that the Syrian rebels had not ceased their attacks as the agreement had stipulated, but noted that, inasmuch as the rebels had many powerful friends in the West, it was not reasonable at this time to expect the rebels to do anything just or courageous.
A spokesperson for the UN Secretary General's New York office later clarified Mr. Ban's remarks, saying that Mr. Ban did not view all Westerners as corrupt. The spokesperson explained that Mr. Ban's childhood in South Korea under a quasi-fascist regime born in the collaboration of southern Korean elites in a half century of Japanese occupation had engendered in him an unreasoning hatred of all things Western, since it was the West, led by the US, which had insisted that the former collaborators with the Japanese Empire should form the government of the new (post WWII) South Korea, while the former guerilla fighters opposing Japanese rule had formed the government of the new North Korea.
