BRITISH Foreign Secretary Hague yesterday tried to get the EU to lift its arms embargo on the Syrian terrorist ‘rebels’ and to stoke up war against the Syrian regime.
European Union foreign ministers were meeting yesterday in Brussels to discuss the British and French calls for sanctions on the supply of weapons into Syria to be lifted.
A belicose Hague demanded an unfettered licence to supply British-manufactured weaponry to the ‘rebels’.
‘In our view it’s important to show that we are prepared to amend our arms embargo so that the Assad regime gets a clear signal that it has to negotiate seriously.’
However, Hague was unable to convince the EU member states, including Denmark, the Czech Republic, Austria, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden who are alarmed that such weapons would fall into the hands of Islamic extremist groups.
As the arms embargo deal expires at midnight on 31 May, most EU states are preparing to support the planned international Geneva peace conference, called by US and Russia for next month and they warned against jeopardising this current initiative.
Syria’s foreign minister confirmed on Sunday that the government would ‘in principle’ attend the conference.
At the talks in Brussels yesterday, several foreign ministers and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said it was vital to give the planned Geneva talks next month a chance.
Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said first and foremost the EU had to ‘do everything to support, as Europeans, the American and Russian initiative’.
Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger said the EU should remain as ‘a peace community by not being involved in such a conflict’.
Oxfam warned of ‘devastating consequences’ if the embargo ends.
‘There are no easy answers when trying to stop the bloodshed in Syria, but sending more arms and ammunition clearly isn’t one of them,’ the aid agency’s head of arms control, Anna Macdonald, said in a statement.
‘International efforts should be focused on halting arms transfers to all sides and finding a political solution to the crisis.’
Meanwhile, member countries in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) yesterday affirmed their strong opposition to the illegitimate attempts to militarise the crisis in Syria, voicing support for a political solution for the crisis.
Their statement said that the members oppose the arming of opposition combatants in Syria and condemned all forms of terrorism and violence which target peaceful civilians, particularly those which are based on religious or national backgrounds.
They called for overcoming the crisis in Syria as soon as possible by halting violence, launching dialogue without pre-conditions between the government and the opposition, and continuing reforms.
In the same context, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the CSTO foreign ministers supported the Russian initiative for holding an international conference on Syria.
