خبرگزاری جمهوری عربی سوریه Syrian Arab News Agency
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New York, SANA _Syria’s permanent Representative to the UN Dr. Bashar al-Jaafari criticized a statement of the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos, describing it as “out of context”.
Al-Jaafari was speaking during a United Nations’ Security Council session to discuss the implementation of the Security Council resolution no.2139 on humanitarian aid delivery in Syria.
Al-Jaafari particularly lashed out at using the term “armed opposition” in the report to refer to organizations that the UN Security Council designated as terrorist groups, describing it as scandalous.
Prior to Dr. al-Jaafari’s speech, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs had submitted a report in which she said “armed opposition” groups targeted infrastructures and destroyed facilities in Syria in a spate of attacks against civilians that have increased recently.
He said the report is full of “dangerous fallacies and gaps” that, he said “border on the scandalous.”
Al-Jaafari called into question the real intentions behind using the term which, he affirmed, was not “an unintended slip of the tongue or pen,” as the UN Secretary-General’s official spokesman has been using it despite “numerous official letters we addressed to the United Nations Secretariat.”
Al-Jaafari urged Amos to “call a spade a spade”, questioning the real motives as to why her report would stop short of calling these groups by their real names.
Syria’s permanent representative to the UN expressed bewilderment at the “magnified and exaggerated” numbers of the needy in Syria compared to previous reports, saying that their numbers have jumped out of the blue, according to the report, to become 10.8 million, up by one and a half million from the previous reports.
Al-Jafari indicated the Syrian government has notified the resident coordinator of the UN activities in Syria about its dissatisfaction over the way senior UN officials have come up with “astronomical, surreal and unverified” figures about the humanitarian situation in Syria which, he said, raises doubts about the real intensions behind it.
Al-Jaafari hit out at the report for touching on the issue of presidential elections in Syria. “Those who prepared the report have exceeded their humanitarian mandate by speaking about presidential vote, which has nothing to do with resolution no. 2139,” he said.
Syria’s UN representative lambasted as a glaring paradox the failure of the report to provide verified information about the presence of non-Syrian fighters and their activities in Syria despite hundreds of letters that the Syrian government has sent to the UN Secretary General and the UN Security Council, not to mention many western reports and statements in this regard.
The report, furthermore, ignores the root cause behind the worsening humanitarian situation in Syria which is, al-Jaafari said the emergence and rising terrorist activities.
“Terrorist groups have targeted civilian areas, displaced the locals, destroyed infrastructures and damaged the states’ service institutions,” he said, citing a need to address terrorism as being the root cause of humanitarian crisis in some hot spots in Syria.
Instead of questioning the presence of foreign terrorists and the workability of the Syrian government’s tackling of humanitarian needs, al-Jaafari said the report should have clearly named the countries supporting terrorism, including Israel, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
The fact that the report has refrained from mentioning that some countries had imposed illegal unilateral measures against the Syrian people is yet another paradox which, he went on to say, exposed the double standards of some UN secretariat’s officials.
Al-Jaafari said some countries which feign care for the Syrian people have chosen to pump large amounts of money to finance arms deals with terrorists and facilitate the entrance of terrorists to Syria that, he said, should have been otherwise dispended to finance the cash-strapped 2014 humanitarian response plan.
He defended the Syrian government’s efforts as it is responsible for the bulk of humanitarian aid distributed in Syria by 75 percent of the distributed aid.
“We find it reprehensible that the report ignored the primary reason behind a worsening of humanitarian situation in Syria, which is the stepped-up terrorist attacks,” al-Jaafari said, affirming that handling the crisis in Syria cannot be done through humanitarian assistance only, citing instead a pressing need to tackle the root cause of the problem being “foreign-backed terrorism.”
Syria’s permanent representative to the UN said the Syrian government has facilitated the access of UN organizations to some hard-to-teach areas, namely Aleppo, Idleb and Damascus countryside, an approach, he said, the Syrian government is committed to pursue for easing the humanitarian crisis of the Syrian people.
Al-Jaafari welcomed a UN positive role in delivering humanitarian assistance in Syria. “But,” he added, “we decisively reject using the UN for settling scores with certain states.”
Syria’s representative concluded by stressing that the Syrian government is fully committed to its duties and responsibilities to ease the humanitarian burden on the Syrian people and willing to leave no stone unturned for that end, provided that these efforts do not breach Syrian laws and sovereignty.
M. Ismael