China yesterday said it would send a senior diplomat to Syria as it steps up efforts to mediate in the Syrian crisis after being scolded by the West and many in the Arab world for vetoing a UN resolution calling for Syria’s president to step down.
China and Russia this month blocked a draft UN Security Council resolution backing an Arab plan urging President Bashar al-Assad to give up power after 11 months of bloodshed between Syrian forces and protesters demanding reform.
China said it was simply trying to prevent more violence and was acting in accordance with the UN charter, but it later sent two junior envoys to the Middle East to explain its position and was now sending a more senior diplomat.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhai Jun (翟俊) will travel to Syria today and tomorrow, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Liu Weimin (劉為民) told a regular briefing.
“The details of the trip are still being arranged. The message is that China hopes to push for a peaceful, appropriate resolution to the Syria crisis,” Liu said.
“China is willing to continue playing a constructive, mediation role in resolving the crisis,” he said, without providing further details.
He did not say if Zhai would also meet Syrian opposition representatives. Zhai met a Syrian opposition delegation in Beijing last week.
The trip comes days after China warned that Western powers should tread carefully at the UNs in dealing with Syria, or risk worsening violence.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) vowed this week to work through the UN to seek an end to the strife.
Zhai’s trip follows one by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who days after the veto traveled to Damascus as the US shut its embassy and European countries recalled their envoys.
Meanwhile, meddling in Syria by foreign powers risks stirring up a hornets’ nest of bloodshed and instability in the Middle East that could shock markets and derail the weak global economy, a commentary in the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist, said yesterday.
“The political ecology in the Middle East is extremely frail, a tangled mess of thousands of years of ethnic and religious conflict,” the paper said.
World powers must realize this and handle bloodshed in Syria and Middle East tensions with a sense of realism, the paper said, saying that the spread of conflict would be a “catastrophe” in a crucial phase of global economic recovery.
“The Middle East is the world’s most important fuel depot. If gripped by chaos, oil prices would skyrocket, shocking the stock market, financial systems and economies,” the paper said.
A weak political equilibrium in the region has emerged, but if broken, all manner of latent problems will emerge, which no single superpower can control, the paper said.
The author used the pen name “Zhong Sheng,” which can mean “voice of China” and is often used to give Beijing’s position on foreign policy.
The People’s Daily said Washington’s aim was to establish a friendly government in Syria to counter the influence of its “old enemy” in the region, Iran.
“Once Syria sets up a pro-Western regime, Iran will loose important backing in the region,” the commentary said.
Al-Assad on Wednesday promised a referendum in two weeks on a new constitution leading to elections within 90 days, but made clear he was still intent on crushing the uprising with tanks and troops.
A Syrian opposition group yesterday rejected the proposal, urging voters to boycott a referendum and to step up efforts to oust President Bashar al-Assad.
”The Local Coordination Committees calls upon our people to reject and boycott the alleged referendum to confirm the lack of public support for this criminal regime,” the opposition group said in a statement.
It added that Assad’s regime had lost its constitutional and social legitimacy and there was no alternative, but to topple it.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.