Advertise On EU-Digest

Annual Advertising Rates

10/12/13

The Netherlands: Chemical Weapos: Weapons body OPCW pressures US, Russia after Nobel award - by Peter Cluskey

The global chemical weapons watchdog whose inspectors are monitoring the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – with an admonishment to both the United States and Russia that they must follow suit and eliminate their own stockpiles.

Experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were dispatched to Syria last month after a sarin gas attack in a Damascus suburb killed some 1,400 people, a last-minute deployment that helped to prevent a US missile attack on President Bashar al-Assad.

The OPCW mission in Syria is unprecedented because the civil war there has already killed as many as 100,000 people, but also because its fast-track aim is to destroy Mr Assad’s chemical weapons production capability by November 1st and the stockpiles themselves by the mid-2014.

The Peace Prize Committee praised the OPCW for creating an environment in which it might be possible “to eliminate an entire category of deadly weapons”, adding: “The conventions and work of the OPCW have defined the use of chemical weapons as a taboo under international law.”

The committee’s chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, singled out the US and Russia – ironically, the two countries that brokered the Syrian chemical disarmament plan – for having failed to meet a deadline of April 2012 for completing the destruction of their own remaining chemical agents.

Mr Jagland said both countries now had a moral obligation to complete their destruction programmes “especially because they are demanding that other countries, such as Syria, should do the same”.

Read more: Weapons body pressures US, Russia after Nobel award - European News | Latest News from Across Europe | The Irish Times - Sat, Oct 12, 2013

No comments: