Ankara to call on UN to share Syria burden

ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News

Turkey will call on the United Nations and the world to share the growing burden stemming from the massive refugee influx from Syria and discuss plans to create safe havens in the Arab republic during today’s U.N. Security Council meeting.

However, reports that key members of the Security Council will not be represented at the meeting at the ministerial level have created question marks over the success of today’s meeting of the U.N. body.
While Turkey and France are sending their foreign ministers, Ahmet Davutoğlu and Laurent Fabius, respectively, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as her Russian and Chinese colleagues will likely be absent at the meeting. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is currently in Tehran to attend to the Non-Aligned Summit, will also not attend the meeting.

France, as the rotating term president of the UNSC, has long tried to secure the participation of the aforementioned foreign ministers, diplomatic sources told the Hürriyet Daily News.

The meeting was slated to gather the foreign ministers of 15 permanent and non-permanent UNSC countries and Syria’s neighbors to examine the growing refugee problem in depth. Two other countries hosting refugees, Jordan and Lebanon, will also attend the meeting, but Iraq rejected the invitation. Davutoğlu will make a comprehensive presentation at the meeting, detailing all dimensions of the refugee problem, as well as the current situation inside Syria.

Concrete results

“We are expecting the U.N. to take action for the protection of refugees and, if possible, for sheltering them in the camps inside Syria,” Davutoğlu told reporters ahead of his departure for New York early yesterday.

Urging the U.N. and the international community to act before the refugee crisis grows further, he said Turkey was determined to take all steps at the U.N. basis and was expecting concrete results from the New York meeting.

Slamming the Syrian administration over the continued aerial bombardments of residential areas, which are pushing more Syrians to flee the country, Davutoğlu said the situation represented a humanitarian tragedy and urged Russia and China to give priority to this aspect of the problem.

Within this framework, Turkey is proposing the establishment of safe havens in Syria and a no-fly zone that would protect refugees from potential aerial attacks by Syrian air forces. However, it is not thought that Turkey has much chance of convincing its counterparts given the position of the international community.