By Salwa Jandoubi
UNITED NATIONS, May 3 (KUNA) -- Joint Special Envoy of the Arab League and United Nations for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi has resigned, orally, and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is not planning to replace him but will instead appoint a senior aide in his entourage to handle the Syria crisis, a senior UN diplomat has confirmed.
"Mr. Brahimi has resigned. When will he send in his letter of resignation? I don't know. Every week we are told that he is going to resign the next day, that he can't stand it anymore. But now, ... it seems he will send his letter later this month," the senior diplomat told a group of reporters, including Kuwait News Agency, KUNA, late on Thursday.
He said the UN would look "silly" if it sends to Syria one politician after another, first the former secretary-general Kofi Kofi Annan, then Brahimi.
Russia and China want the Secretary-General to quickly appoint a UN special envoy for Syria, and not a joint envoy, to make it look like Brahimi's resignation is in a way a criticism of the Arab League decisions taken during the Arab League Summit in late March, he added.
"I guess the Secretary-General is not leaning towards appointing a new special envoy for Syria for the moment, but rather to appoint somebody in his entourage who is following the situation in Syria, and weighing whether we really need a special envoy," the diplomat said, adding that Brahimi will remain "behind the curtain as Ban's adviser for the region." The diplomat criticized Brahimi for missing a lot of opportunities. He recalled that when opposition leader Muaez Al-Khatib said he was ready to negotiate with the government, Brahimi did not rush and invite him to Geneva. "He did not react, which gave time to people around Al-Khatib to launch a counter offensive." "To be frank, Mr. Brahimi has not been very active. He is of the old school, his predecessor Kofi Annan too, when they said we can't act if the P5 are not united. It is not convincing," the diplomat argued.
He said even if the Council's permanent five were united, "I don't see what difference it would make, frankly. The people are fighting ... The Saudis, the Qataris are involved ... I asked Brahimi what the Turks are saying, and he said 'I don't know. I haven't discussed it with them.' He should have gone to the providers of weapons and say 'stop it.' Brahimi didn't do any of this." He said he told Ban that the Syrian crisis is the crisis of his mandate. His legacy will be defined by Syria, so "you should invest yourself much more in this crisis." The diplomat admitted that the P5 are still more divided than ever on Syria, but at least there is agreement on the Geneva communique of last June, which calls for a provisional government leading to elections.
"So may be the time has come to try to operationalize that communique," he urged.
But, he added, Russia and China want to immediately have a Geneva 2, but France and the UK want to wait until all the Syrian parties are around the table.
In the meantime, he noted, US Secretary of state John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will meet very soon, and the opposition will also meet in the near future to elect a new president of the coalition. "Hopefully something positive will come out of it," he said.
On the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria, the diplomat expressed hope that Damascus will allow the investigation team to inspect the sites in Syria. If the mission is not allowed to get in, he indicated, "there won't be any dramatic consequences, but there will be a report to the Security Council, and it won't go anywhere because Russian will block it." He said that the Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin is now using in the Council consultations the same terms the Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar Ja'afari used lately in his news conference. On the Jordanian address to the Council earlier this week and its request to the Council to visit the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, the diplomat said Jordan did not want the other countries hosting the Syrian refugees, namely Lebanon and Turkey, to join in the deliberations. He said the battle over this request has already begun between Russia and the US. Moscow insists that if the Council visits Jordan, it should also visit Palestinian refugee camps. The US said "no way," and now they blame each other for blocking the visit to Jordan.
Besides, he argued, the Russians and the Chinese know perfectly well they cannot go to refugee camps in Jordan or elsewhere. "They will be killed" by the frustrated refugees, the diplomat predicted, because of the three vetoes they cast since the beginning of the crisis which began in mid-March 2011 and resulted in over 70,000 deaths and millions of displaced civilians.
If the Council goes to Jordan, it has to go to Lebanon and Turkey too," he noted. "The bottom line, there won't be a visit to Jordan. Russia is going to kill the idea," he predicted. (end) sj.rk KUNA 030959 May 13NNNN