UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday said the world should be ashamed that, three years after major powers approved a blueprint in Geneva to bring peace to Syria, the suffering of its people is reaching new depths and the country is “on the brink of falling apart.”
More than 220,000 Syrians have died in the conflict, now in its fifth year, almost half the population has been forced to flee their homes and civilians still face attacks by barrel bombs and “horrendous” human rights violations, including torture and the prolonged detention of tens of thousands, Ban said.
At the same time, different parts of Syria are increasingly controlled by a patchwork of violent players including the extremist Islamic State group and the al-Nusra Front, while the country’s cultural heritage “is under assault,” Ban said.
“It is time to find an exit from this madness,” Ban said. “The international community, and in particular the Security Council, cannot afford to waste any further time in ending the cycle of violence.”
He issued the statement on the third anniversary of the June 30, 2012, agreement in Geneva on a road map to peace in Syria.
The plan, approved by the Action Group for Syria, calls for a political process that would start with the establishment of a transitional governing body for Syria vested with full executive powers and end with elections.
The Action Group included representatives of the UN, Arab League, EU, Turkey and all five veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council — the US, Russia, China, France and Britain.
Ban appealed “in the strongest possible terms” to the international community to work with his special envoy, Staffan de Mistura, to implement the Geneva agreement “before further irreparable damage is done to Syria, its people and the region.”
While there was unanimous agreement for the Geneva communique, Russia and China, close allies of the Syrian government, vetoed a Security Council resolution supporting the document weeks later because it threatened to put pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad if the fighting did not end.
Beijing and Moscow had previously vetoed two other resolutions for similar reasons — and the division in the Security Council remains to this day.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
RSS