Syria and UN Security Council Decision

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seayakin

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seayakin
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I'm trying to understand why China and Russia would block the Security Council Decision to sanction Syria see Russia and China Block U.N. Action on Crisis in Syria.

It doesn't seem they would offend anyone in the Arab world since the Arab league has already spoken out against Syria and Syria doesn't have any natural resources they are particularly interested in so the only thing I can think of is that China and Russia don't want to set a precedence whereby the UN Security Council could sanction either of them.

Am I missing something?
 
DC said:
not sure, but maybe you missed China's and Russia's human right violation record?
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I don't disagree with that nor did I miss it but it seems like they have had more sophisticated diplomacy than that. I've been trying to find evidence but I'm under the impression that they do not universally veto every action (although one article indicates that the council was fairly useless during the Soviet era (History Channel). For instance, Russia didn't veto resolutions in Bosnia (see on efforts of the UN Protection Force to ensure implementation of Security Council resolutions on safe areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I grant also that Russian politics was a lot different in 1994.

There are probably others but this is what I found quickly. (Or under Putin, are we returning to a Soviet like period where Russia and China use their veto power to make the Security Council virtually useless.)
 
I think your initial thought might be right. I think both Russia and to a (much) lesser extent China have similar problems with anti-government/pro-democracy protests. They may employ similar techniques as Syria to oppress them, or commit other human rights violations. If they say that's a bad thing in Syria, it might set a precedence. If they say that you shouldn't mess with the internal affairs of any country, they effectively say: and leave us alone as well.
 
They sell arms to Assad and are dictatorships themselves.
 
Virus said:
They sell arms to Assad and are dictatorships themselves.
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That, and setting a precedent, and making themselves indispensble friends for tinpot little dictators to cozy up to - gives China and Russia influence over beholden client states.

It makes sense as long as you ditch the assumption that Russia and China care at all about morality and assume that they will follow their amoral self interest ruthlessly.
 
Virus said:
Good thing you showed up to support your favourite mass-murdering totalitarian state.
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Sure.

Pepe Escobar said:
[...] Essentially, the GCC created an Arab League group to monitor what's going on in Syria. The Syrian National Council - based in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries Turkey and France - enthusiastically supported it. It's telling that Syria's neighbor Lebanon did not.

When the over 160 monitors, after one month of enquiries, issued their report ... surprise! The report did not follow the official GCC line - which is that the "evil" Bashar al-Assad government is indiscriminately, and unilaterally, killing its own people, and so regime change is in order.

The Arab League's Ministerial Committee had approved the report, with four votes in favor (Algeria, Egypt, Sudan and GCC member Oman) and only one against; guess who, Qatar - which is now presiding the Arab League because the emirate bought their (rotating) turn from the Palestinian Authority.

So the report was either ignored (by Western corporate media) or mercilessly destroyed - by Arab media, virtually all of it financed by either the House of Saud or Qatar. It was not even discussed - because it was prevented by the GCC from being translated from Arabic into English and published in the Arab League's website.

Until it was leaked. Here it is, in full.

The report is adamant. There was no organized, lethal repression by the Syrian government against peaceful protesters. Instead, the report points to shady armed gangs as responsible for hundreds of deaths among Syrian civilians, and over one thousand among the Syrian army, using lethal tactics such as bombing of civilian buses, bombing of trains carrying diesel oil, bombing of police buses and bombing of bridges and pipelines.

Once again, the official NATOGCC version of Syria is of a popular uprising smashed by bullets and tanks. Instead, BRICS members Russia and China, and large swathes of the developing world see it as the Syrian government fighting heavily armed foreign mercenaries. The report largely confirms these suspicions. [...]
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Virus said:
Pepe Escobar is a truther.
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Pfffft. The report is there for you do digest, crusader.

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Why do you make excuses for the mass-murder of a totalitarian state?
 
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Childlike Empress said:
The mass-murder of a totalitarian state? Sounds vicious, but i'm not sure what you mean by that. Glass carpet? No excuse for that, crusader. Think of the children.
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Didn't the Assad regime kill 300 people this weekend alone?

How would you call such a regime?
 
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Pardalis said:
Didn't the Assad regime kill 300 people this weekend alone?
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Based on which information? What kind of people were killed, if any? We don't know. Based on the experience of the last years, we should not swallow information brought to us by questionable sources, which includes the corporate media parroting some "rebels" based in Paris or London. Which deliberately keeps us uninformed of the results of investigations like the report linked above. Didn't we just learned what that led to in Libya where Al-Qaeda types are now running the business, Pardalis?
 
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