SYRIAN President Bashar al-Assad has accused the UK government of bullying and hypocrisy in its bid to militarise the conflict in his country.
In an interview with the Sunday Times newspaper, Assad declared: ‘Syria has been fighting adversaries and foes for two years; you cannot do that if you do not have public support. People will not support you if you are detached from their reality.
‘A recent survey in the UK shows that a good proportion of British people want “to keep out of Syria” and they do not believe that the British government should send military supplies to the rebels in Syria.
‘In spite of this, the British government continues to push the EU to lift its arms embargo on Syria and to start arming militants with heavy weapons.
‘That is what I call detached from reality – when you are detached from your own public opinion!
‘And they go further in saying that they want to send “military aid” that they describe as “non-lethal.” The intelligence, communication and financial assistance being provided is very lethal. . .
‘The British government wants to send military aid to “moderate” groups in Syria, knowing all too well that such moderate groups do not exist in Syria; we all know that we are now fighting Al-Qaeda or Jabhat al-Nusra which is an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, and other groups of people indoctrinated with extreme ideologies.
‘This is beyond hypocritical! What is beyond hypocrisy is when you talk about freedom of expression and ban Syrian TV channels from the European broadcasting satellites; when you shed tears for somebody killed in Syria by terrorist acts while preventing the Security Council from issuing a statement denouncing the suicide bombing that happened last week in Damascus, and you were here, where three hundred Syrians were either killed or injured, including women and children, all of them were civilians.
‘Beyond hypocrisy when you preach about human rights and you go into Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and kill hundreds of thousands in illegal wars.
‘Beyond hypocrisy is when you talk about democracy and your closest allies are the worst autocratic regimes in the world that belong to the medieval centuries. This is hypocrisy! . . .
‘To be frank, Britain has played a famously unconstructive role in our region on different issues for decades, some say for centuries.
‘The problem with this government is that their shallow and immature rhetoric only highlights this tradition of bullying and hegemony.’
Hague responded to Assad’s statement by confirming the Syrian president’s position that the UK is pressing to arm counter-revolutionaries in Syria.
Hague said that Britain cannot rule out providing arms to the Syrian opposition in the future.
He told the Andrew Marr Show the situation in Syria now is ‘too dangerous to the peace and security of that entire region, and thereby to the world, to ignore it’, and accussed Assad of being ‘delusional’.
