3/30/12

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (L) greets visiting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the second day of his two-day official visit to Iran. Erdoğan voices Turkey’s support for Tehran’s controversial nuclear ambitions after the meeting. AA photo

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is mulling whether to boycott the Friends of Syria meeting on April 1 in Istanbul due to Turkey’s refusal to invite Greek Cyprus to the key meeting.

“Ashton is unlikely to be in Istanbul due to Ankara’s decision,” an EU diplomat told the Hürriyet Daily News yesterday. “Instead, her deputy, Pierre Vimont, will represent the European External Action Service.”

Contacted by the Daily News, Ashton’s office said they were not in a position to confirm that she would be in Istanbul on April 1. According to diplomatic sources, Ashton tried hard to convince Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to secure Greek Cyprus’ participation in the meeting alongside other EU countries, but she could not obtain a positive response in their last phone conversation March 27. The diplomat said talks between Ankara and Brussels that aimed to change the other’s mind were continuing, but there was little room for each side to back down from their positions.

Turkey has not recognized Greek Cyprus since the division of the island in 1974, which caused the formation of the Turkish Cypriot state in the northern part. The failure to reunify the island has produced many diplomatic crises between Ankara and Brussels, especially after Greek Cyprus became a full member of the European Union.

A Turkish diplomat confirmed that Greek Cyprus had not been invited to the meeting and said there was no obligation for Turkey to invite all EU countries. The EU countries discussed the matter at a meeting last week in Brussels where some members suggested downgrading the representation of all member countries at the meeting in a show of solidarity with Greek Cyprus. However, this plan was not endorsed by the majority due to the significance of the Syria meeting. The United Kingdom, France and Denmark, the current European Council president, will send their ministers to Istanbul, the Daily News has learned. In the meantime, Greek Foreign Ministry spokesperson Gregory Delavekouras said yesterday that Greece had decided to participate in the meeting at a reduced diplomatic level as a reaction to Greek Cyprus’ non-inclusion.

Syrian National Council may be ‘a principal representative’

Meanwhile, Turkey aims to raise the status of the Syrian National Council at the Friends of Syria meeting as “a principal representative” of the Syrian people, a Turkish official said, adding that efforts were still under way to reconcile the council and Kurdish groups.

“As the Syrian opposition agreed on a national pact in Istanbul, an important step has been taken in order to recognize the [council] as the principal representative of the people,” a Turkish official told the Daily News yesterday.

Participants at the Friends of Syria group’s meeting will discuss the issue on April 1, while Turkey will work on an agreement toward that goal, the official said.

The council was still holding talks with Kurdish groups in Istanbul in an effort to reconcile differences, he said. At the April 1 meeting, the Friends of Syria group is expected to lend support to U.N.-Arab League envoy for Syria Kofi Annan’s mission while also discussing fresh sanctions against Damascus and ways to deliver humanitarian aid.

Iran and countries which voted against a U.N. General Assembly resolution were not invited to the meeting.

Meanwhile, a visit by the Turkish Land Forces commander to regions bordering Syria was “routine,” Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz said yesterday. “We have no intention to threaten Syria. The only thing we want is the fulfillment of the Syrian people’s democratic demands.”

Turkish Ambassador to Syria Ömer Önhon, who was recalled after Turkey “temporarily” suspended the embassy’s operations, was set to meet with President Abdullah Gül late in the afternoon yesterday as the Daily News went to press.

“Russia enjoys good and strong military technical cooperation with Syria, and we see no reason today to reconsider it,” Antonov told reporters.

Russia has shielded Syria, its last ally in the Arab world, from U.N. sanctions over the Assad regime’s bloody suppression of an uprising against his government.

Moscow has been a steadfast ally of Syria since Soviet times, when the Middle Eastern nation was led by the current president’s father, Hafez Assad, and has long supplied Damascus with aircraft, missiles, tanks and other heavy weapons.

The Syrian port of Tartus is now the only naval base Russia has outside the former Soviet Union. A Russian navy squadron made a call there in January in what was seen by many as a show of support for Assad.

Also in January, a Russian ship allegedly carrying tons of munitions made a dash for Syria after telling officials in EU member Cyprus, where it had made an unexpected stop, that it was heading for Turkey. Turkish officials said the ship had instead charted course for Tartus.

Antonov said Russia’s supply of weapons to Syria is in line with international law and will continue. “Russian-Syrian military cooperation is perfectly legitimate,” he said.

“The only thing that worries us today is the security of our citizens,” Antonov said in a reference to Russian military personnel in Syria that are training the Syrians in the use of weapons supplied by Russia.

He declined to say how many of them are currently stationed in Syria.

“It’s part of our contractual obligations,” said Antonov, who oversees military technical cooperation with foreign countries. “When we supply weapons, we have to provide training.”

Antonov angrily dismissed allegations that Russia has sent special forces officers to assist government forces.

“There are no (Russian) special forces with rifles and grenade launchers running around,” he said.

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)

Time to take on Assad

According to a source in the U.S. government, one week ago, the Arab League Secretary-General, Nabil al-Arabi, told the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, that the Assad regime was breaking the terms of the Arab League initiative. If true, this quiet admission of failure preceded the high-profile resignation of Algerian League delegate Anwar Malek, who told Al Jazeera that his team had been unable to prevent the Assad regime’s “multiple crimes against humanity” and that the mission itself was a “farce”. More delegates are now said to be planning to quit.

When I asked a State Department spokesperson yesterday to confirm al-Arabi’s judgment, delivered in advance of the League report on Syria, he referred me to Hillary Clinton’s Wednesday interview with Qatari PM Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani, who said: “[W]hat is now obvious today is that attacks are still ongoing and it seems that the Government of Syria is still not ready to change its course.” Quite simply, a consensus is forming in Washington and Arab capitals that the “last chance” effort to broker an end to the violence in Syria is an embarrassing shambles.

So where does that leave the Assad regime? As first reported by Foreign Policy magazine, the Obama administration has begun the preliminaries of “internationalising” the response to ongoing Syrian crisis. They are weighing the option of some kind of humanitarian military intervention, most likely led by Turkey. Repeated attempts to get a UN Security Council resolution condemning the regime have failed chiefly because Russia will not give up its ally in Damascus. Cyprus, which is the Kremlin’s Mediterranean partner in money laundering and corruption, has just violated EU sanctions by allowing a Russian ship full of “35 to 60 tons of ammunition and explosives” to sail for Syria’s Russian-controlled port of Tartus.

Other options for legally pursuing a course of intervention include a little-used UN General Assembly resolution (377a) known as “Uniting for Peace” which licenses “collective measures” and the “use of armed force” for conflicts that the UNSC is too gridlocked to resolve itself. Notably, the General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution in late November, co-sponsored by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco, condemning the Assad regime for its brutality. Those same states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, will have to form the diplomatic vanguard for advocating any intervention scenario.

Meanwhile, Turkey will take the logistical lead role, likely in terms of providing a troop ground presence for establishing a safe area or buffer zone within Syria. A no-fly zone, at least over the western corridor of the country, which is where the regime’s air defence systems are mainly situated, could either be imposed by NATO or by the US, the UK and France. The Russian Security Council now claims to have information that Persian Gulf nations and NATO are planning to do exactly that.

This is more or less the blueprint I formulated, which the Syrian National Council Chairman Burhan Ghalioun endorsed last month and has now been advocating in interviews.

Of particular note, though, is what else my Washington source told me. Military defections in Syria have been occurring at a much higher rate than has been reported in the international press. For this and other reasons, Syria’s conventional forces are probably much weaker than previously assumed. As I blogged the other day, rebel forces composed of both civilians and military defectors are now taking the fight to the regime’s elite brigades all throughout the Damascus suburbs. Though under-armed and ill-equipped, they’re beginning to organise themselves to an impressive degree and have already launched several daring raids against regime personnel.

The US does not yet judge what’s happening on the ground to be a “sectarian war” although it believes that to be possible, especially as the regime has been trying to balkanize Syria since the start of its crackdown nearly a year ago. A serious worry, however, is that when Damascus falls, the regime will try to relocate to the coastal port city of Latakia, where much of the Assad family is from and where Bashar’s father Hafez is buried. Security forces have spent months assaulting protestors there. In the summer, 5,000 Palestinian refugees went missing after the Syrian navy shelled Latakia and activists have continued to be arrested and bused to sports stadiums, or transported in shipping containers to other parts of the country.

Latakia, which also has an airport, is where Assad and a hardcore of armed Alawite loyalists could well make their last stand: analysts now seem to agree that the Syrian dictator will, like his Libyan counterpart, only leave the country feet first.

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — A Russian ship, allegedly carrying tons of weapons, made a dash for Syria after Cypriot officials allowed it to leave their waters, Turkish officials said Thursday.

The ship had made an unscheduled stop in Cyprus Tuesday, technically violating an EU embargo on arms shipments to Syria, which has killed thousands in a crackdown on dissent.

Cypriot officials — told by the ship’s owners it was heading for Syria and Turkey — only allowed the ship to leave Wednesday after the owners said it had changed its destination for Turkey only.

But Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Selcuk Unal — citing information from the Turkish navy — said the ship had docked Thursday at the Syrian port of Tartus, which Russian warships use as a resupply stop.

The St. Vincent and Grenadines-flagged ship, the Chariot, had apparently turned off its tracking device and the information could not be independently verified.

The vessel, owned by St. Petersburg-based Westberg Ltd, had initially dropped anchor off the southern Cypriot port of Limassol due to high seas, drawing the attention of local officials who boarded to examine its cargo.

They could not open and inspect four containers in the hold because of “the confined space” they were stored in, the Cypriot Foreign Ministry said Wednesday, but officials nevertheless determined they were holding a “dangerous cargo.”

Cyprus state radio said the vessel was carrying “tens of tons of munitions” while Russian state news agency RIA Novosti quoted a Westberg spokesman as saying that the Chariot was ferrying cargo owned by Russia’s state arms trader Rosoboronexport.

The spokesman said the cargo was listed as “dangerous” in the ship’s manifest, but no further details were available.

No one answered phones Thursday evening at the company which owns the ship.

Turkey, which has become Syrian leader Bashar Assad’s strongest critic, has imposed a trade and arms embargo on its southern neighbor.

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.

By MENELAOS HADJICOSTIS
Associated Press

unscheduled stop in Cyprus while carrying tons of arms to Syria was technically violating an EU embargo on such shipments. But the vessel was allowed to continue its journey Wednesday after changing its destination, Cypriot officials said.

The cargo ship, owned by St. Petersburg-based Westberg Ltd., left that Russian port on Dec. 9 for Turkey and Syria, which is 65 miles (105 kilometers) east of Cyprus, the officials said.

Russia and Turkey are not members of the European Union, so such a route would not have violated the embargo the bloc imposed to protest Syria’s crackdown on the uprising against President Bashar Assad’s rule.

But the Chariot, a St. Vincent and Grenadines-flagged ship, dropped anchor off the southern Cypriot port of Limassol on Tuesday because of high seas, drawing the attention of Cypriot officials.

Customs officials boarded the ship to examine its cargo, but couldn’t open and inspect the four containers because of “the confined space” they were stored in, the Cypriot Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Nevertheless, the officials determined they were holding a “dangerous cargo.”

State radio in Cyprus went further, saying the vessel was carrying “tens of tons of munitions.”

Cypriot authorities then consulted with the ship’s Russian owners who promised to change the ship’s route, and the vessel was allowed to leave Cyprus on Wednesday, the statement said.

The statement didn’t say where the vessel is now headed. But an official with knowledge of the matter said the ship was allowed to leave after saying its final destination will be nearby Turkey. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, given the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue.

Turkey, which had once cultivated close ties with Syria, is now one of the Assad regime’s most vociferous critics. Turkey has imposed trade sanctions on Syria and is allowing its opposition groups to meet on its territory. Some 7,000 Syrians have taken refuge in Turkey.

Last summer, Cyprus suffered a disaster when it confiscated munitions aboard another cargo ship heading to the Middle East.

In February 2009, officials seized 85 gunpowder-laden containers from a Cypriot-flagged ship that was suspected of transporting them from Iran to Palestinian militants in Gaza through Syria.

Those containers, left piled in an open field at a naval base, blew up in July, killing 13 people and wrecking the island’s main power station in the island’s worst peacetime military accident.

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AP writer Suzan Fraser contributed from Ankara, Turkey.