10/31/12

MOSCOW — Russia is in contact with Turkey to recover a cargo confiscated by Ankara from a Moscow-Damascus passenger plane but so far no progress has been made, a senior foreign ministry official said Wednesday.

Turkey scrambled fighter jets earlier this month to intercept the Syrian Air passenger jet, forcing it to land at Ankara’s Esenboga airport and seizing the cargo before the plane was allowed to continue its journey.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the plane was carrying “war equipment” but according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov it was carrying a legal cargo of radar equipment that Moscow wants back.

“The contacts (with Turkey for the return of the cargo) are continuing,” Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said, quoted by Russian news agencies.

“As far as I know, no practical action has so far been taken,” he added.

Russia is the main supplier of arms to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and has been bitterly criticised by the United States, the European Union and Turkey for refusing to cut its military cooperation.

Moscow denies it is siding with Assad in the conflict that activists say has claimed over 36,000 lives and in turn accuses the West of fuelling the violence by assisting the rebels who are battling his regime.

Russia’s Kommersant daily had reported the day earlier that Russia and Turkey were in talks about the return of the cargo but said the Russian side was not confident that this would ever happen.

It said the cargo was 12 crates containing parts for radar used in missile defence systems that were being delivered by a sub-contractor rather than the original Russian manufacturer.

According to Kommersant, Russia chose to deliver the cargo on a civilian airliner to avoid attracting attention.

It said the original plan had been to put the cargo on an Aeroflot flight but the Russian flag-carrier then stopped flying to Syria so the cargo was sent on the Syrian Air flight.

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has now almost completed its investigation into the source of the leak that prompted Turkey to intercept the plane. “Most likely, it was the Syrian side,” a source told the newspaper.

(Reuters) - A cargo ship now moving off the north-west coast of Scotland is believed to be carrying Russian weaponry to Syria, according to an insurer which says it has withdrawn coverage for the vessel.

Britain said it was aware of a consignment of refurbished Russian-made attack helicopters heading for Syria, but did not say if it was referring to the same vessel.

Ship tracking data showed on Tuesday that the Curacao-flagged cargo ship Alaed set off from the Russian port of Baltiisk in the province of Kaliningrad on June 11.

London-headquartered ship insurer Standard Club said it had been contacted about the vessel it had been covering, but did not say by whom.

“We were made aware of the allegations that the Alaed was carrying munitions destined for Syria and have already informed the ship owner that their insurance cover ceased automatically in view of the nature of the voyage,” the insurer said.

Moscow-based Russian ship management and operator group Femco, operating the Alaed, offered no comment when contacted several times by Reuters about the ship and its cargo. But it said it would post comment on its website later in the day with “true information”.

Insurers would be obliged to withdraw coverage for any shipments violating European Union sanctions, including an arms embargo on Syria. Without insurance, the vessel could be forced either to dock at a port, drop its run to Syria or find a provider outside the European Union.

The Alaed was last seen off the coast of Scotland and declared as heading for the Russian port of Vladivostok where it was due to arrive on July 24, tracking data showed on Tuesday.

A British Foreign Office spokeswoman said London was aware of “a ship carrying a consignment of refurbished Russian-made attack helicopters heading to Syria”, but did not say whether she was referring to the Alaed.

“We are working closely with international partners to ensure that we are doing all we can to stop the Syrian regime’s ability to slaughter civilians being reinforced through assistance from other countries.”

A Moscow-based defence analyst said the Alaed was carrying helicopters that were bought by Syria during the Soviet era and had been sent back to Russia for repair in the Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad.

“I am sure based on open source material that the ship is carrying 12-15 helicopters that were repaired in Kaliningrad and are on their way to Syria,” said Ruslan Aliyev, who works at defence think tank CAST, referring to an order of M-25 helicopters.

“They were old helicopters bought by (Assad’s late father and predecessor) Hafez al-Assad, I believe at the end of the 1980s.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on June 12 that the United States was “concerned about the latest information we have that there are attack helicopters on the way from Russia to Syria.” She said such a sale “will escalate the conflict quite dramatically.”

The accusation angered Moscow, which says it is fulfilling existing contracts for air defence systems, for use against external attacks, and not delivering offensive weapons. Under pressure over continuing arms trade with Syria, President Vladimir Putin said earlier this month that the weapons its sends could not be used in civil conflicts.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said last week that Russia had sent no new helicopters to Syria but had repaired helicopters delivered to its government “many years ago”. It gave no specifics about when any helicopters were repaired or sent back to Syria.

SHIPMENT HALT URGED

A source close to Russia’s arms exporting monopoly Rosoboronexport said last week that Clinton may have been referring to helicopters that were sent to Russia in 2009 for repairs and may have been on the way back to Syria.

The source said at least nine Mi-25 helicopters were sent to Kaliningrad to be repaired by Oboronservis, owned by the Defence Ministry.

A spokesman for insurer Standard Club said the company informed about termination of cover was Femco.

A rights group reported that the Professor Katsman ship had docked at the Syrian port of Tartous last month with a cache of heavy weapons for Assad.

Der Spiegel quoted shipping agent Torsten Lueddeke of Hamburg-based CEG Bulk Chartering as saying: “We stopped the ship after we received information on the weapons cargo.”

Neither CEG nor the ship’s owner were immediately reachable. The German Economy Ministry said it looks into all suspected embargo breaches but did not yet have details of the case.

To read the full report click here.

By LIAM STACK

Published: February 21, 2012

The presence of the vessels had been seen as adding to international tension over the nearly yearlong crackdown by the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and an Iranian official called it “a clear message against the United States’ possible adventurism.”

State media in Iran quoted the defense minister, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, would continue to “beef up” its presence in international waters.

It was not clear whether the vessels unloaded cargo or had docked in the port as a symbolic display of Iranian support for Syria, a critical regional ally whose government it has supported against the uprising that started in March, 2011.

So acute has the confrontation become that, as government forces continued to pound opposition strongholds in the central city of Homs and elsewhere on Tuesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it was trying to negotiate a brief pause in the violence to deliver aid to the most devastated areas.

I.C.R.C. officials at their headquarters did not respond to calls on Tuesday seeking to establish whether their the organization’s efforts toward a ceasefire had been successful. But news reports from Syria, speaking of continued barrages directed at the beleaguered Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs, suggested that the fighting was continuing unabated.

On Monday, activist groups said the government’s inability to eradicate the opposition in Baba Amr despite weeks of bombardment could be preventing the military from striking deeper and harder into other parts of the country where armed resistance and rebellion are believed to be growing, including Hama and Idlib Province to the north.

“The biggest challenge in Homs is Baba Amr,” said Wissam Tarif, of the activist group Avaaz. “They cannot move military power to Idlib or Hama without finishing Homs first. They cannot leave any pockets of resistance behind them.” He said 16 people were killed in Homs on Monday. Such reports are impossible to verify.

A video posted on YouTube showed an artillery strike on Baba Amr that sent a plume of dark smoke into the clear, sunny sky. “God is my only and best guardian,” muttered the panicked videographer. “The world remains silent. Today is Feb. 20, 2012.”

Armed rebels have provided a measure of security to some protesters in places like Hama, which was leveled 30 years ago as Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, put down an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood, killing at least 10,000 people. In a video posted on YouTube on Monday, several hundred people jumped and danced in Halfaya, a neighborhood of Hama, in what the video described as a regular “morning protest.”

Still, more than 50 checkpoints divide up the city, said the Local Coordination Committees, a grass-roots group that organizes and documents protests, and security forces have detained more than 500 people there in the past three weeks.

The living situation in Hama, Homs and other hard-hit areas, including two suburbs of Damascus, Zabadani and Madaya, has become increasingly grim. In Homs, supplies of food, baby formula, medicine and potable water are all running out, said a spokeswoman for the committees.

“About two weeks ago, we sent 200 cans of baby milk into Homs, and they said they could not even meet 10 percent of their needs,” said the spokeswoman, Jasmine, who asked to use only one name for security reasons. “Now, no one can get in or go out.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had begun negotiations with Syrian authorities for a pause in the fighting of as little as a few hours.

“The I.C.R.C. is exploring several possibilities for delivering urgently needed humanitarian aid,” Reuters quoted a spokeswoman, Carla Haddad, as saying. “These include a cessation of fighting in the most affected areas to facilitate swift Syrian Arab Red Crescent and I.C.R.C. access to the people in need.”

The Iranian ships arrived in the Syrian port, Tartus, days after the sharpest international rebuke to Mr. Assad so far: the passage of a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly condemning the crackdown and calling for him to step aside.

The current escalation of attacks on Homs and other areas began early this month, after the same resolution was vetoed in the Security Council by Russia and China. Russia recently sent ships to the same Syrian port, activists said. Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency called the ships “a serious warning” to the United States, and quoted a senior Iranian lawmaker’s denunciations of comments by Senator John McCain a day earlier in support of arming the Syrian opposition.

“The presence of Iran and Russia’s flotillas along the Syrian coast has a clear message against the United States’ possible adventurism,” said Hossein Ebrahimi, a vice chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, Fars reported on Monday.

Iran’s Press TV satellite broadcaster said the two ships had docked in Tartus on Saturday “to provide maritime training to naval forces of Syria under an agreement signed between Tehran and Damascus a year ago.”

The two vessels were a destroyer and a supply ship which had been given permission by Egypt’s interim military rulers to sail through the Suez Canal, Press TV said.

Reuters reported on Tuesday that the two vessels entered the Suez Canal from the Mediterranean Sea early on Tuesday, heading south toward the Red Sea.

“In case of any U.S. strategic mistake in Syria, there is a possibility that Iran, Russia and a number of other countries will give a crushing response to the U.S.,” said Mr. Ebrahimi, according to Fars.

Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican who was in Afghanistan on Sunday, told reporters there that he was in favor of arming the Syrian opposition, while stressing that no direct American involvement was necessary. In Cairo on Monday, he repeated that position.

“I am not calling for direct supply of weapons to Syria,” Mr. McCain said. “We have seen in Libya that there are ways to get weapons to people so that they can defend themselves. It is time that we gave them the wherewithal to fight back and stop the slaughter.”

A cargo of diesel, which can be used to fuel army tanks or as heating fuel, was expected to arrive at Syria’s Mediterranean port of Banias this week, according to two traders and shipping data. The cargo could be worth up to $50 million.

Chavez is a vociferous advocate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who face pressure from Western sanctions. Few leaders on the world stage have polarized opinion as sharply as the Venezuelan president.

Chavez, who still defends the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, has repeatedly backed Arab leaders who have faced a year-long wave of popular protests, which have already toppled four governments.

Asked on Thursday about the shipments to Syria and whether they could be used for military purposes, Chavez said Venezuela never asked the United States what it did with the fuel that Venezuela sold it, and that no one could dictate to Caracas.

“We are free. We are a free country,” he said, standing with his friend Sean Penn, the U.S. actor, who is visiting Venezuela.

Venezuelan state oil firm PDVSA shipped the cargo aboard the Negra Hipolita vessel, according to AIS tracking data on the Reuters Freight Fundamentals Database and trade sources. The same tanker carried the first such shipment in November, the sources said.

PDVSA could not immediately be reached for comment.

“The aggressions against Syria are continuing,” Chavez said in a speech last month. “It’s the same formula they (the West) used against Libya: inject violence, inject terrorism from abroad and later invoke the United Nations to intervene.”

The South American OPEC nation has also tried to aid Iran with fuel supplies amid sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Rights groups say close to 6,000 people have been killed in attacks by Syrian security forces against civilian demonstrators and an increasingly powerful rebel insurgency.

The United States and Europe are pressuring Assad to leave power. Russia and China this month vetoed a United Nations resolution calling on Assad to step aside.

SATELLITE TRACKING

The Venezuelan tanker was last seen off the coast of Cyprus with a destination of Banias and the estimated arrival date of Wednesday, AIS ship tracking on Reuters showed. The satellite tracking has been switched off since Wednesday.

The shipment comes at a critical time for Syria, which has faced worsening energy shortages this winter after Western sanctions all but halted imports, which are needed to meet half the country’s diesel demand.

Diplomats blame the power and fuel shortages on increased demand from the military, while the government says attacks on power stations and refinery pipelines are reducing supply.

The PDVSA shipments appeared to be carried out under a 2010 agreement between the governments of the two nations in which Venezuela provides diesel in exchange for food and commodities such as olive oil.

Syria’s oil minister spoke about the possibility of Venezuelan imports in January, and traders said the Negra Hipolita diesel shipment to Syria was the second delivery in the past three months.

The vessel can carry 47,000 tones, which if fully loaded would be worth around $50 million. It was not clear how much diesel the ship was carrying.

While there is no blanket embargo on supplying fuel to Syria, its state-owned oil firm Sytrol, responsible for organizing fuel imports and exports, was placed on a U.S. blacklist last summer, and the European Union followed suit in December.

It was not clear whether the recent reported fuel transactions were done via Sytrol.

The EU has stopped short of banning product deliveries for humanitarian reasons, but oil traders said most deliveries have stopped anyway as traditional suppliers are increasingly reluctant to do business with Syria.

Normally an exporter of crude oil even in peacetime, Syria has relied on imports for more than half of its annual consumption of 5 million tones of diesel because of a shortage of domestic refining capacity. International sanctions have stopped Syrian oil exports since September last year, drastically stretching government budget revenues.

A growing number of military attacks involving armored vehicles and tanks may be spurring diesel consumption, while a severe winter is driving up heating demand.

“Given the risk that (refining) capacity could be cut due to sabotage, fuel shortages are likely to force the government to rely on costly imports supplied by a shrinking pool of political allies,” risk group Business Monitor International wrote in a recent report.

Due to the sanctions, the Negra Hipolita will not be able to dock at ports in the United States nor in Europe, one of the sources said. In the past the vessel has been primarily used to transport crude between production facilities and refineries within Venezuela.

The United States previously imposed sanctions on PDVSA over sales of gasoline-blending components to Iran in violation of a U.S. ban.

(Additional reporting by Himanshu Ojha in New York, Jonathan Saul in London, and Daniel Wallis in Caracas; Writing by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Dmitry Zhdannikov, James Jukwey and Dale Hudson)

11 January 2012 NICOSIA, — Cypriot authorities released on Wednesday a cargo ship carrying tonnes of munitions after receiving a pledge the vessel would not proceed to unrest-swept Syria as originally scheduled.

The foreign ministry said the Saint Vincent-flagged cargo ship Chariot was allowed to refuel and set sail from the port of Limassol after its Russian owners agreed to change the destination.

The ship, which set sail from Saint Petersburg on December 9, called into Limassol on Tuesday following bad weather, said government spokesman Stefanos Stefanou.

During a check of the ship’s documents it was “determined the ship was carrying dangerous cargo destined for Syria and Turkey” and prevented from setting sail, the foreign ministry said.

The ministry said it was unable to physically check the four containers on board due to a lack of space to manoeuvre, but after consultations with the owners the vessel was given the green light.

However, the media said the ship carried tonnes of munitions and explosives and was put under guard.

The Chariot was reportedly carrying between 35 and 60 tonnes of munitions and explosives bound for the port of Latakia in Syria, where thousands of people have been killed since March in a government crackdown on dissent.

“The rules and decisions of the Council of the European Union governing restrictive measures in relation to the situation in Syria were taken into account. It was ascertained no EU measures were violated,” the ministry said.

Stefanou told state radio it was decided the vessel would be released after the ship agreed to change its destination and “not go to Syria,” in keeping with “all international regulations.”

The new destination was not disclosed.

The incident comes exactly six months after seized Iranian munitions exploded at a Cypriot naval base on July 11, killing six firemen and seven military personnel.

The containers had been at the base since their seizure in 2009 when Cyprus intercepted, under pressure from the United States and other Western nations, a Cypriot-flagged freighter bound from Iran for Syria.

The explosion of the containers, which had been stored in the open air, also knocked out the island’s main power plant. Criminal charges against those deemed responsible are expected to be filed next week.