Russia, China reject UN move to rebuke Syrian president

Russia, China reject UN move to rebuke Syrian president
By NBC, msnbc.com and news services


Updated at 12 p.m. ET: Amid fresh bloodshed in the Syrian city of Homs, the U.N. Security Council on Saturday failed to pass a resolution calling on the Syrian president to step down.

Russia and China vetoed the resolution endorsing an Arab League call for Bashar Assad to leave power. The other 13 council members, including the U.S., France and Britain, voted in favor of the resolution.

The vote took place as Syrian forces pummeled the city of Homs with mortar and artillery fire that activists say killed more than 200 people in one of the bloodiest episodes of the uprising against Assad's regime. The U.N. says more than 5,400 people have been killed over almost 11 months in a Syrian government crackdown on civilian protests.

<snip>

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it had not been possible to work constructively with Russia ahead of the vote. "I thought that there might be some ways to bridge, even at this last moment, a few of the concerns that the Russians had. I offered to work in a constructive manner to do so. That has not been possible,'' she told reporters at a security conference in Munich.

If a date needs to fixed marking the end of "post-Soviet era" in world politics, it might fall on February 4, 2012. Russia and China's double veto of the Arab League resolution on Syria in the United Nations Security Council constitutes a watershed event.

Curiously, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Anders Fogh Rasmussen chose the same day as the veto in New York to snub Russia; saying that that the alliance would have the first elements of the US's missile defense system (ABM) up and running in Europe by the alliance's summit in May in Chicago, no matter Moscow's objections.

The first double veto by Russia and China on the Syrian issue in the United Nations Security Council last October was a coordinated move that sought to scuttle a resolution that might be seized by the Western alliance to mount a military operation in Syria. But the repeat double veto on a motion pressing Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to abandon power conveys a much bigger meaning.