The United Nations has failed the people of Syria. People are dying every day in Syria and the international community has conspired to ignore them. The UN General Assembly should be ashamed that it spent far too long debating what to do about the Syrian government’s chemical weapons and did not look at the ongoing war that has killed more than 100,000 people and displaced more than two million.
Though the Security Council unanimously passed a landmark resolution on Friday ordering the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, people continue to die in the country. People do not care if the threat to their lives is from a gun or from lethal gas. Their lives have been destroyed by endless fighting. The mother in Aleppo, the student in Homs and the worried father in Damascus do not care if the next threat to his or her family will be from a government helicopter gunship, unleashing high explosive rockets, or from a gun held by a freelance fighter, or from chemical weapons. These innocent people want the war to end and for their lives to return to some kind of normality.
The Russian and American governments should stop wasting their time over the details of how to react to the illegal and barbaric Sarin gas attack. They should put their energies into how to end the war and find a way to rebuild that sad country.
US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov may very well spend week after week trying to get an agreement on paper that will outline a plan to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons. Sadly, such an agreement will be almost impossible to implement in the middle of a civil war, with two sides who refuse to acknowledge the deal and have no interest in stopping the fight to allow UN weapons inspectors to carry out their task.
However, the chemical weapons issue is a massive distraction from the more serious task of ending the war itself. Kerry and Lavrov must find a way to get the Free Syrian Army and Bashar Al Assad’s generals to discuss how they will govern their country together.
