In a speech last Tuesday US Secretary of State John Kerry accused the Syrian government of delaying inspections by the UN chemical weapons team in Damascus, while destroying evidence by shelling the areas where the attacks took place. Mr. Kerry repeated the accusation in his remarks at the State Department last Friday.
But when asked to comment on those allegations in an interview with Swedish Radio's programme Ekot on Saturday, UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson described the discussions with the Syrian government to gain access to the relevant areas as one of the quickest negotiations he had been involved in.
The attack occurred on August 21, I believe it was the night between Wednesday and Thursday. I delivered the formal request on Thursday. And we sent our special representative Angela Kane to Beirut and then on to Syria. She met with the deputy foreign minister on Saturday evening and on Sunday we had the agreement. So I would say that this is one of the quickest negotiations we have had in order to carry out the tests, Mr. Eliasson said.
Mr. Eliasson also disagreed with US allegations that the UN inspection is meaningless because it is not part of its mission to determine who carried out the attacks, but only to establish if chemical weapons were used. He described the UN teams visits to the sites of the attacks as very productive and hinted that the evidence collected by the inspectors could show who is responsible for the attack.
We will see what these samples show, if they perhaps can tell us more about the direction and what is behind these attacks, if the attacks were carried out using chemical weapons, Mr. Eliasson said.
