On April 21 representatives attending the 25th meeting of the Conference of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention voted 87-15 to suspend Syria’s participation in the Organization To Prohibit Chemical Weapons, thus ratifying the now well-exposed fraud by the U.S., U.K. and France to use the OPCW itself as a weapon against governments of which they don’t approve. According to an OPCW statement, the decision “condemns the use of chemical weapons as reported by the OPCW’s Investigation and Identification Team (IIT), which concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the Syrian Arab Republic has used chemical weapons. It also expresses deep concern that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Arab Republic establishes that the Syrian Arab Republic failed to declare and destroy all of its chemical weapons and chemical weapons production facilities.”
“The Conference of the States Parties reaffirmed that the use of chemical weapons is the most serious breach of the Convention there can be, as people’s lives are taken or destroyed,” said OPCW director general Fernando Arias. “By deciding to address the possession and use of chemical weapons by a State Party, the Conference has reiterated the international community’s ethical commitment to uphold the norm against these weapons.”
Leaks of internal emails and investigative documents from within the OPCW’s investigations of alleged gas attacks in Syria over the last three years have shown that the organization’s leadership systematically suppressed evidence turned up by on-the-ground investigators that tended to exonerate the Syrian government. This was done in order to not contradict a predetermined conclusion that the Syrian military was responsible. Both the previous Trump Administration and the current Biden Administration have been involved in promoting the narrative that only the Syrian government could have been responsible. In the case of the Trump Administration, accusations of Syrian military culpability in alleged gas attacks were used to justify punishment strikes using cruise missiles and other precision-guided munitions before there was any investigation.
Russia’s representative to the OPCW, Alexander Shulgin, told TASS that the West is turning the OPCW into an instrument of political pressure on unwanted countries. “This is an absolutely disastrous decision, which makes the work of the organization even more politicized and unpredictable,” he said. Shulgin recalled that OPCW was “originally technical in nature, designed to help destroy existing stocks of chemical weapons in the world and create the necessary conditions for the non-reproduction of this type of WMD in the future.”
Currently, according to Shulgin, “the Western community, in which the United States, France, Great Britain and other countries play ‘the first fiddle,’ is turning the OPCW turning into an instrument of political pressure on unwanted countries in order to achieve its geopolitical interests.”
“It is a very dangerous trend, fraught with unpredictable consequences,” the diplomat stressed. “In fact, the Westerners sent a clear signal: whoever is not with us, we will turn them into a criminal regime, an outcast.”
“Next time Syria may be replaced by any other country whose authorities, for some reason, will turn out to be objectionable to the watchmen of the world order, which is based not on the international law, but on their own rules,” the diplomat said.