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