Turkey's prime minister sharply criticized the U.N. Security Council on Saturday for its failure to agree on decisive steps to end the 19-month civil war in Syria.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan told an international conference in Istanbul that the world was witnessing a humanitarian tragedy in Syria.
“If
we wait for one or two of the permanent members … then the future of
Syria will be in danger,” said Erdogan, according to an official
translator.
Russia and China — two of the five permanent members
of the Security Council — have vetoed resolutions that sought to put
concerted pressure on Damascus to end the conflict and agree to a
political transition.
Erdogan called for a reform of the Security
Council, which he called an “unequal, unfair system” that didn’t
represent the will of most countries.
He spoke as Turkish Foreign
Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was meeting with Arab and European leaders amid
growing tensions between Turkey and its southern neighbor Syria.
Davutoglu
held talks early Saturday with Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby and was
due to meet later with German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle and the
U.N.’s envoy on Syria Lakhdar Brahimi.
On Wednesday, Turkey
intercepted a Syrian passenger plane en route from Moscow to Damascus
and seized what it said was military equipment on board.
Syria denounced the move as air piracy, while Russia said the cargo was radar parts that complied with international law.
Activists
said Saturday army troops have clashed with rebel units on several
fronts around the country where a peaceful uprising against the regime
of President Bashar Assad last year became a bloody civil war. More than
32,000 people have been killed since the revolt started in March 2011,
according to activists. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled the
fighting that has devastated whole neighborhoods in Syria’s cities and
towns.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,
which relies on a network of activists on the ground, said Saturday
regime forces were pounding the rebel stronghold of Homs in central
Syria with mortars and artillery. The southern province of Daraa, the
birthplace of the revolt, also sustained shelling by the Syrian army
throughout Saturday. Fighting between army troops and rebels raged
around Idlib province and in and around the northern city of Aleppo,
Syria’s largest city and a former business hub.
Earlier, Syria’s
state-run news agency reported that Damascus supported a proposal by
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to find a “mechanism of direct
security communication between Syria and Turkey.”
SANA reported that Syrian
government officials and Russia’s ambassador in Damascus discussed ways
to establish a joint Syrian-Turkish security committee that would
“control the security situation on both sides of the border in the
framework of respecting the national sovereignty of the two countries.”
Turkey has made no comment on the proposal, and it is unclear whether Moscow has presented it to the Turkish government yet.
