Iranian Ambassador to the UK Hamid Baeidinejad has blasted the US, UK and France for a waging a “unilateral assault” on Syria, warning of “destabilizing” consequences of the trio's assumption to be beyond the law.
Baeidinejad said Saturday that the three Western countries' attack on Syria shows their willingness “to resort to unilateral policies to enforce disarmament obligations despite there being an internationally verifiable treaty in place.”
“This is quite worrisome,” he wrote in an article for British online newspaper The Independent.
He was referring to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), an arms control treaty that outlaws the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons and their precursors.
Syria, which is a signatory to the CWC, surrendered its chemical stockpile in 2013 to a mission led by the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the UN.
However, Western states blamed the Damascus government for an alleged chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburb town of Douma on April 7.
One week after the Douma incident, the US, Britain and France launched a coordinated missile attack against sites and research facilities near Damascus and Homs with the purported goal of paralyzing the Syrian government’s capability to produce chemicals.
Syria's Foreign Ministry denounced the tripartite strikes as a “brutal, barbaric aggression” aimed at blocking a probe by the OPCW into the suspected gas attack in Douma.
“Unfortunately, the US, the UK and France acted in total disregard of the terms of the CWC and resorted to a unilateral assault on Syria, without authorization from the UN, which is a clear violation of the UN Charter and against international law,” Baeidinejad said.
“The fact that a few countries consider themselves above the law, and are prepared to put themselves in the position of prosecutor, inspector and judge, without any legitimate mandate, in order to launch an attack on a UN member is destabilizing to say the least,” he added.
The Iranian ambassador to London further questioned “why the US and its allies could not postpone their action until the [OPCW] inspectors … could reach Douma and start their inspection activity.”
After repeated delays, the OPCW experts finally visited the site of the Douma attack on Saturday and collected samples and other items.
Russia had earlier accused foreign-backed terrorists in Syria of preventing the OPCW inspectors from reaching Douma.
Baeidinejad concluded that the tripartite action on Syria “undermines global and multilateral efforts against the development and use of weapons of mass destruction; it also endangers global and regional peace and security. Civilization is based on a simple principle that the use of force should be contained by the rule of law, and that the rule of law should be applied to all without exception.”