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Sergei Ryabkov

MOSCOW. — Russia has dismissed a UN report on the August 21 sarin gas attack in Damascus as “biased and one-sided” and said Syria had given it evidence that rebels were responsible.The Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, said yesterday that his country was disappointed with the UN report published this week, saying it was selective and had ignored other episodes.

“We are unhappy about this report, we think that the report was distorted, it was one-sided, the basis of information upon which it was built is insufficient,’’ he said after talks with President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

“We are disappointed, to put it mildly, about the approach taken by the UN secretariat and the UN inspectors, who prepared the report selectively and incompletely.”

Ryabkov said the regime had given Russia new material implicating rebel groups in the August 21 attack.
“We were told that (it was) evidence that the rebels are implicated in the chemical attack,” Ryabkov said after talks with Walid al-Muallem, Syria’s foreign minister, late on Tuesday.

He said that Russia would “examine the Syrian materials implicating the rebels with the utmost seriousness” but had not drawn conclusions. It provided none of the evidence it said it had received.

The UN report, released on Monday, did not ascribe blame but detailed munitions and rockets used in the August 21 attack, their likely point of origin and their capacity.

One missile used could hold 56 litres of sarin gas. As little as 0.5mg of sarin can kill an adult. The US holds Assad responsible for the August 21 attack, which it says killed 1 429 people. The regime denies responsibility and its ally Russia maintains that there is no evidence implicating Assad.

France yesterday rejected Russia’s claim that the UN report was biased. “Nobody can question the objectivity of the people appointed by the UN,” Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said.

Meanwhile, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) group released its analysis of the UN report, saying that UN evidence showed two of the missiles fired on August 21 originated from a Republican Guard compound.

“Connecting the dots provided by these numbers allows us to see for ourselves where the rockets were likely launched from and who was responsible,” Josh Lyons, a satellite imagery analyst for HRW, said.

However, the evidence was “not conclusive”, he said. Ryabkov is on a visit to Damascus to present the Syrian regime with the results of the agreement between Russia and the US reached in Geneva, Switzerland, to rid Syria of its chemical weapons.

He said he emphasised to Muallem the importance of the Syrian side “strictly and swiftly” handing over details of its chemical weapons arsenal to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the first step in the agreement.

The Russia-US agreement is aimed at warding off the threat of US-led military action as retribution for the chemical attack. Ryabkov said he assured the Syrian side that there was “no basis” for a UN Security Council resolution on the chemical weapons agreement to invoke Chapter VII of the UN Charter that allowed the use of force and tough sanctions.

He said this could only be considered if the UNSC was able to confirm violations of the convention on chemical weapons. “This is a hypothetical situation.” — Al Jazeera.