Paris draws red line

France sees a war crime in Aleppo bombing and calls on Russia to abandon Assad's support

In the last month, French diplomacy began a new decisive “offensive” on the Syrian front. After the armistry named after Lavrov -Cerry was violated in mid -September for several days, the French president proclaimed from the UN rostrum: “Enough!” - And he said that the Syrian tragedy will go down in history as “shame of the international community”, “if we do not stop it, and urgently.”

The history of the reaction of the leadership of France to the Syrian war is a history of gradual concessions while maintaining a position occupied from the very beginning: Assad is a criminal who kills his own people. And only the firm position of Russia, as well as the “flexible” position of the United States, allowed the Syrian regime to preserve and continue this war-this is how Hollande thinks, who in August 2013 was already preparing with the Americans to “punish” Assad ...

France for all these years was the main and most loud “reverend” of the Assad regime, with which even Sarkozy ceased to flirt after the spring-2011 Bashar fluttered the protests of the opposition with the first rivers of blood. In September of the same year, at a meeting of the Russian-French council of security cooperation, Alain Juppe, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, said: “The Syrian regime committed crimes against humanity ... That is why we believe that the Safety Council of the UN must send a serious warning to stop these repressions, and we are ready to talk about this with Russia <...>, even if today we have different points of view.”

In February 2012, the President of the Sarkozy said that the Russian-Chinese Veto in the UN Security Council on Syria ( these veto will then be repeated-Yu. S. ) “encourages” the Assad regime to continue violence, and the French Minister of Defense Long called the position of Russia and China “shameful”. He also showed confidence that Moscow could not “endlessly” the Syrian regime.

During the first meeting of the new French president Hollande with Putin (Paris, June 2012), the Syrian question became the main point of negotiations. Hollande said that it is possible to solve the Syrian problem only after Assad left. The French journalist invites Putin to provide Assad as “refuge in Russia”. Putin jokes in response: “As for the arrival of Assad to Moscow, he was still more often in Paris” ( the couple Assad really loved the French capital-so far they were allowed ).

Soon Hollande, not having achieved a compromise from Russia, goes into an open attack on the Syrian Front.

11/14/2012 in Doha - with the persistent support of France, the United States and the Gulf countries - the National Coalition of the Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces is created.

In March 2013, Hollande at the EU summit in Brussels asks to remove the embargo for the supply of weapons to Syria since 2011. By the evening of the first day of Debatov, the French president states that in case of refusal, France is ready to supply the rebels in unilaterally. The European embargo was shot on 05/29/2013, but later Hollande, - according to Xavier Panon, the author of the book “behind the scenes of French diplomacy: from Sarkozy to Hollande,” France began to supply weapons to Assad’s opponents back in 2012.

In the spring of 2013, the UN Secretary General announces the start of an audit of the received chemical weapons by Assad, and soon Mond publishes the results of a journalistic investigation: according to the newspaper, Assad crossed the Red Linius, designated by Barack Obama, as well as France and Great Britain.

Following this, Laurent Fabius, the Foreign Minister of France, states that the Syrian chemical weapons are “finding more and more confirmations” to the Syrian use of the Syrian regime.

08/27/2013, six days after the infamous chemical attack in Guta (suburb of Damascus), Hollande during the annual speech before the French ambassadors states that France is “ready to punish the perpetrators”, and the issue of a possible invasion of Syria should be decided in the coming days. A little earlier, the possibility of the beginning of the military operation of the Western coalition in Syria was announced in the USA and the UK. US Secretary of Defense Chuck Heigel said that only Obama’s order was waiting.

Oollande was also waiting for Obama.

The British parliament 08/30/2013 abandoned military interference, but Obama gave Holland the hope that the operation would begin without the British: the forces of the Franco-American Alliance. On the same day, John Kerry’s “encouraging” statement appears: “We understand that after a decade of conflicts, the Americans were tired of the war. <...> But fatigue does not exempt us from responsibility. " Obama condemns the UN impotence in Syria and promises Assad a “inevitable answer”. News about the accumulation of the forces of the Navy and the Air Force of the United States and France "in the eastern sector of the Mediterranean Sea." Later it will become known [1] that the French even made a schedule for launching missiles and only waited for the lifting of Hollande. Which, in turn, was waiting in the Champs Elysees Palace of Obama. ( Hollande himself told about this to reporters Mond, who wrote the book “The President should not have said this ...” - 2016 )

But late in the evening of August 30, Obama made his “U -turn over the Atlantic”: he called Hollande and said that he decided “for legitimacy” to raise a question for the vote of the congress.

On Monday, October 2, French newspapers will write that Hollande, having gone wa-bank, “got into a Syrian trap,” lost ... and “remained alone”. Obama agreed with Putin behind Hollande.

On September 14, Russia and the United States conclude an agreement on Syria: Assad repents of mistakes, promises to destroy the entire arsenal of chemical weapons and begin political negotiations. The French Foreign Minister Fabius is forced to welcome the “achieved success”, but notes that the UN resolution on chemical disarmament (09/28/2013) will not stop the civil war in Syria. Fabius calls for the speedy completion of peace negotiations at the Geneva-2 International Conference, which should begin in November (then they were transferred to January ...).

But the “speedy completion of peaceful negotiations” has not yet happened-according to official Paris, due to the criminal persistence of Bashar Assad, who receives massive support from Russia and Iran, has not happened.

The cancellation of the American-French invasion of Syria, Hollande still considers (expressed by the terms familiar to us) the largest geopolitical disaster. Olland spoke about this in September 2014, when a conference was held in Paris to create an “International Anti-Terrorism Coalition” [2] (where Russia was also called, but we refused). Hollande spoke about this from the UN rostrum in September-2016. ( A year before, right on the eve of the opening of the Session of the UN General Assembly, at which Putin was supposed to declare the beginning of the Russian military operation in Syria, Olland gave a command to apply air strikes on the Syrian positions of the IG - Yu. S. terrorist group prohibited in Russia ). Obama also performed there, who devoted to the main international error of his presidential career ( the opinion of numerous French media ) only a few words in a 50-minute speech.

After this meeting, the Mond newspaper came out with the heading: “Syria: the US Silence and the powerlessness of France at the UN General Assembly.” The newspaper also claimed that Kerry's traveling to Lavrov’s trips to London and Paris, but also by some employees of the US State Department, due to “Kerry’s naivenia” in his relations with the Kremlin, have been causing a trip to Lavrov.

This statement was actually confirmed on September 28 by the French Foreign Minister Jean-Mark Airo, speaking at Sciences Po: “Those who tell us for several months, that to solve the Syrian problem it is enough to“ build ”after Moscow, I answer: you are mistaken. Look at the result of the efforts of John Kerry, who tried, tirelessly and with all sincerity, to agree with Sergey Lavrov about the ceasefire <in Syria> in exchange for cooperation in the struggle against Jabhat An-Nusra ( the organization is prohibited in Russia ). This truce was observed only a few days ... "

On September 29, in an interview with EUROPE1, Airo, in response to the assumption that “all” can become “accomplices” of a massacre in Aleppo, granted the right to carry the load of guilt to the “Bashar al -Assad regime”, which chose the strategy of the total war “with the support of Russia”. And he said that Russia in Syria is not limited to bombing: "5 thousand of its soldiers are fighting on earth."

Both Assad and Russia called the French minister "responsible for war crimes." “What I say very definitely is that France is now working with Great Britain and the USA> in order for the resolution of the UN Security Council to be approved, and in order for the Russians and Chinese, regular members of the Council of Security, without which, of which, it cannot be accepted.

The resolution applies to new facts of the use of chemical weapons: Assad regime and ISIS terrorists.

A month before, on August 30, when Hollande made a traditional statement for the French ambassadors in the Champs Elysees, he began his performance with Syria.

The only country that Hollande directly turned to this issue was Russia. He said that it is better for Moscow to take advantage of the case (i.e., published on August 24, a report on the use of chemical weapons in Syria in 2014 and 2015) - to condemn the Assad regime, stop the bombing in his support and “return to the political resolution of the conflict”. And together with the international coalition, take up the only worthy task in Syria: the fight against terrorists.

Then Hollande once again said all this in a personal conversation with Putin “on the fields” of the Chinese Summit “Big Twenty” on September 4. There was also a meeting of Putin with Obama, who called their conversation about Syria “productive”: this conversation was followed by the same agreement of Lavrov and Kerry - about a truce. The agreement, grossly violated by Damascus with the participation of Moscow, is at least that is what they think in Paris.

“No one could take responsibility for war crimes, for the support of these war crimes,” said the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of France on September 28 in the EUROPE1 radio station mentioned above. “So I urge the Russians <...> to condemn the bombing of Aleppo” and “Application of“ Assad> Chemical Weapons ”.

Under the text
Jean-Mark Airo, Foreign Minister of France:

"If the Syrian war does not stop, it will affect Russia itself"

“The war in Syria led to a massive stream of refugees, which became our problem. It contributed to the creation of an unprecedented hearth of international terrorism, which serves as a rear base and an ideological source for the attacks of terrorist attacks around the world.

Today, the war in Syria serves Russia in order to assert itself as a powerful power and show its ability to resist the "Western" coalition - coalition, the actions of which, however, are in no way directed against Russia. Meanwhile, Russia, supporting and encouraging Assad, takes the risk of not only becoming an accomplice in war crimes, but also contributes to destabilization in the Middle East, Turkey, in Europe. And all this can affect Russia itself ... Syria can no longer wait. We can no longer wait. We need to stop the war and start with Aleppo ... "

From a speech in the Paris Higher School of Political Research (Sciencespo)

09/29/2016.