US fails to bully China, Russia into hasty dangerous vote on Syria

Moscow slams Western “hysteria” over its Syria stance
06 February, 2012 – By Nastassia Astrasheuskaya, Alissa de Carbonnel – Reuters

MOSCOW: Western anger at Moscow’s decision to block a U.N. resolution on Syria had approached hysteria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday, a day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it a travesty.

Lavrov plans to travel to Damascus along with Russia’s foreign intelligence chief on Tuesday for talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who faces pressure from the West, Arab states and opponents at home to step down.

Defending Moscow’s decision to veto a Western-Arab draft in the Security Council that had urged Assad to give up power, Lavrov said Russia had asked for the vote to be delayed until after his visit. He had announced plans for the Syria trip just hours before the vote on Saturday.

“It is sad that the co-authors decided to hastily put the resolution to a vote, even though we appealed to them with a request to give it a few more days, including to make it possible to discuss the situation after (the trip),” he said.

The veto, in which Russia was joined by China, sparked expressions of outrage in the United States and Europe as well as among protesters and opponents of Assad in Syria, who say Syrian forces killed more than 200 people in Homs on Friday and continued bombarding the opposition stronghold since.

“Some of the voices heard in the West with evaluations of the results of the vote in the U.N. Security Council on the Syria resolution sound, I would say, improper, somewhere on the verge of hysteria,” Lavrov said.

“This brings to mind the saying, ‘He who gets angry is rarely in the right’,” he said at a news conference following talks with Bahrain’s foreign minister.

Lavrov said Western nations’ refusal to postpone the vote “means it was more important to them to put the blame on somebody for what is happening … than to reach a consensus in the Security Council, which was completely realistic.”
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