United Nations diplomats carried out last-minute negotiations Friday in an effort to avoid a Russian veto and adopt a resolution implementing a 30-day cease-fire across Syria and lift sieges on towns, including in the rebel-held eastern Ghouta district.
U.N. Security Council members were due to vote at 11 a.m. in New York, but delayed until at least 2:30 p.m. as they tried to find consensus.
Russia had expressed objections to the draft on Thursday and diplomats were continuing to work intensively to try to hammer out a compromise.
“We are still working on language on some of the paragraphs, but we are almost there,” council president Kuwaiti Ambassador Mansour al-Otaibi told reporters mid-day Friday.
He addressed the press flanked by the other nine elected members of the Security Council. “The whole E [elected]10 members, we are here just to show that we are all united and we want the draft to be adopted today at 2:30 p.m.,” he said.
“We’ve really taken our responsibility,” Netherlands Ambassador Karel van Oosterom told reporters of the elected members. “We’ve tried to cross the bridge of the different interests that are there.”
The text, drafted by Sweden and Kuwait, demands at least a 30-day cessation of hostilities to allow in aid and evacuate the critically ill and injured. It also calls for the lifting of sieges in four specific locations, including eastern Ghouta.
Earlier Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent a joint letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, appealing to him to support the draft resolution and saying it is now time to act.
U.N. Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura also called for an immediate cease-fire to stop both the "horrific" bombing of besieged eastern Ghouta and indiscriminate mortar shelling on Damascus.
U.S. State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters Thursday that Russia has a “unique responsibility” for the more than 400 people “horrifically killed by the Syrian regime” in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta.
Meanwhile, Syrian government warplanes supported by Russia pounded the rebel-held enclave of eastern Ghouta for a sixth straight day Friday, killing at least five people, opposition activists and a war monitor reported.
Fighting has escalated in the enclave as the Syrian military and its allied forces appear to be launching an all-out operation to re-take the area, which is one of the last near Damascus still under control of the armed opposition.
Read More UN Security Council Works to Hammer Out Syria Cease-fire : http://ift.tt/2omiXA2
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