Al-Jaafari: The Syrian People Want a Syrian-led Democracy but Not an Imposed One through Blood

Syria’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Bashar al-Jaafari, stressed that the Syrian people want to build a Syrian-made democracy based on a Syrian experience that meets the Syrians’ needs and is led by them, but not a bloody, sectarian and salafi democracy that is imposed from abroad through armed violence.

Al-Jaafari was speaking during a session of the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee discussing a draft resolution on Syria in the framework of item 69 of the agenda titled ‘The Promotion and Protection of Human Rights’.

The Syrian Ambassador stressed that the draft resolution doesn’t lie in the framework of goodwill and has nothing to do with transparency of the care for human rights in Syria as it holds the Syrian government responsible for all what happened in Syria without addressing any condemnation to the armed terrorist groups and the countries manipulating them.

He expressed regret that some delegations exploit the Third Committee’s work to impose their political and interventional goals which violate the provisions of the UN Charter, the principles of the international law and the international humanitarian law.

Al-Jaafari said that what is taking place today is considered a regrettable precedent that endangers the future of the international collective action in the field of promoting and protecting human rights.

He slammed the stances of the some member states of the Arab League (AL) as they accepted to be used as the ‘Horse of Troy’ by the western group through submitting in their name a draft resolution claiming care for human rights in Syria which was submitted last year by western delegations that are overtly interfering in Syria’s internal affairs.

He said this maneuver has unveiled that some Arab countries have turned into a destructive tool of the joint Arab action in the service of condemned interventional western agendas.

The Syrian Ambassador added that by submitting this draft resolution against Syria, the Arab countries, including Qatar, made Israel an invaluable favor in its aggression on Gaza at the same day when the Israeli warplanes were bombarding the Strip.

Al-Jaafari underscored that the Syrian people want to build a society where justice and equality prevail away from the foreign interference of some countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia which know nothing of human rights.

He highlighted how the rule in these two countries is monopolized by one family and how they lack the simplest rights of equality between genders and between the citizens and the non-citizens, in addition to the absence of parliament and the smothering of the opposition by the authorities of the two countries.

Al-Jaafari also referred to the fact that Qatar and the Saudi Arabia are not yet part of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which has become an international reference since 1976, nor are they part of many international agreements related to the issues of the promotion and protection of human rights, whereas Syria has joined the Covenant since 1969 before Qatar gained its independence from the British occupation.

He expressed great astonishment over justifying the crime and massacres committed by the armed terrorist groups against the Syrian people in the statement of the countries which submitted the draft resolution as “few separate violations”.

“Are homicide, cutting off dead bodies, decapitation, displacing inhabitants on sectarian bases and killing entire families according to sectarian affiliations considered, according to those who submitted the draft resolution, minor violations that are not worth even reference?” asked al-Jaafari.

He added that “Does this mean that there is a legitimate terrorism that is represented by the acts of the armed terrorist groups holding wahhabi, takfiri and salafi thinking…with Qatari, Saudi and Libyan funding and direct Turkish involvement and French and British sponsoring?”

Al-Jaafari wondered how the claim about protecting human rights in Syria goes in line with the imposition of packages of unilateral coercive economic and financial sanctions against the Syrian people by those who endorsed the draft resolution.

He expressed regret that the member countries of the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation were among the first to impose such inhumane sanctions transgressing against the rights of the Syrian citizens.

“It’s a shame that many of the financially rich countries in those two organizations have not offered a single dollar to help the Syrian people, while they are giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the mercenary terrorists and al-Qaeda members to shed blood in Syria and destroy the infrastructure of the Syrian state,” he added.

The Syrian Ambassador exposed the flagrant political hypocrisy of some countries in terms of adopting a Security Council resolution condemning the acts of the takfiri and ‘jihadi’ trends in Mali, while rushing to provide funds to send similar takfiri, wahhabi and ‘jihadi’ groups to practice terrorism in Syria.

He blasted the preparers of the draft resolution on Syria not only for being biased and non-transparent but also for neither calling even in one paragraph for the need to halt the violence and disarm the terrorist groups, nor hinting at the necessity of sitting around the national dialogue table to resolve the crisis according to the basics of peaceful solution based on Kofi Annan’s six-point plan, Geneva statement and the mission of the UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi.

He reminded those countries of hundreds of international and press reports which confirm that foreign terrorists are fighting in Syria, referring particularly to the report of the Head of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Paulo Pinheiro, which indicated the presence of foreign fighters in Syria and considered those gunmen as a dangerous element in increasing extremism.

He cited a statement by Pinheiro as saying in a press conference in New York last October that those foreign mercenary gunmen are operating in Syria having their own motives and not necessarily to build a democratic state and that they come from 11 countries and not only from the neighboring countries.

Al-Jaafari noted that few days ago he circulated on behalf of the Syrian government an official letter to the Security Council members, the UN Secretary General and the Head of the UN General Assembly which included the names of 143 foreign terrorists who had been killed in battles in Aleppo, among them were Libyans, Tunisians, Saudis and Qataris.

He stressed that the reform in Syria should be national and not in the form of draft resolutions of political brokerage, affirming that the optimal way to help Syria in the reform process is for some of the countries which adopted the draft resolution to halt funding, arming and sheltering the armed terrorist groups and smuggling them across the border, particularly across Turkey.

Syria’s Permanent Representative to the UN called on the member countries to show their respect to human rights by relying on facts away from intimidation, conspiring and politicization and through realizing that what the Syrian government is doing aims only to go ahead with the reform process and secure a decent life for the Syrian people in light of uncompromised sovereignty and political independence.