U.N. leader admits failure to halt Syrian atrocities

Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, said Wednesday that the organization was responsible for a “collective failure” to halt more than two years of atrocious violence in Syria, and he expressed hope that the crisis over that country’s chemical weapons stockpile would be a catalyst toward a diplomatic solution.

Mr. Ban’s remarks, in a speech at a United Nations conference, came as diplomatic energy was intensifying over a Russian proposal to secure Syria’s chemical munitions, which has averted, for the time being, an American military strike threatened by President Obama, who said in a speech on Tuesday night that he would give diplomacy more time.

Diplomats at the United Nations said that the five permanent members of the Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — held what they described as initial consultations on Wednesday and that the text of a resolution was not discussed.

The so-called P3 — Britain, France and the United States — also held separate talks about reaching common positions in advance of offering a resolution that would place Syria’s chemical munitions under international control, ensure that users of those munitions were held accountable and include an enforcement provision for noncompliance. But the Russians, the Syrian government’s most powerful backers, have said they will present their own plan and have expressed opposition to any resolution with the threat of military force.

It was unclear when any resolution would be put to a full vote by the 15-member Council, and in any event their deliberations were not expected to advance significantly until Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, meet in Geneva on Thursday.

“The parties are very far apart,” said one diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are in the early stages. “It’s too early in the game.”

The remarks by Mr. Ban came in his opening speech to a General Assembly meeting on the “responsibility to protect” principle adopted by the United Nations in 2005, which asserts that the organization has an obligation to prevent mass atrocities. The principle grew out of the United Nations’ failure to avert the Rwandan genocide and the mass killings and ethnic cleansings in the Balkans conflict.

Despite the adoption of that principle, Mr. Ban said, “atrocities continue to be committed, and we continue to face challenges in our efforts to protect people from them.”

Mr. Ban cited the Syrian conflict as a case in point, declaring, “Our collective failure to prevent atrocity crimes in Syria over the past two and a half years will remain a heavy burden on the standing of the United Nations and its member states.”

He expressed hope that the “current discussions related to safeguarding Syria’s chemical weapon stocks will lead to the Security Council playing an effective role in promoting an end to the Syrian tragedy.”

Samantha Power, the new American ambassador to the United Nations, also made Syria the theme in her remarks to the conference, reinforcing the Obama administration’s contention that Syrian forces were responsible for an Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of the Syrian capital, Damascus. The attack killed hundreds and led to the American threat to punish those forces with missile strikes. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has denied culpability, asserting that insurgents must have carried out the attack.

The responsibility to protect clause, Ms. Power said, “should have compelled Assad to protect his people rather than attack them, and it should have compelled his partners in the international community to step in earlier, lend advice and assistance, and prevent the situation from reaching its current metastatic proportions.”

Earlier Wednesday in Geneva, a four-person United Nations rights panel presented detailed evidence in a quarterly update of what it said were war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by pro-government forces and, to a lesser extent, rebels in the 30-month-old Syrian conflict.

The panel, a Commission of Inquiry that was expanded last fall, said in the report that Syria’s government and rebel forces had committed murder, torture, rape and indiscriminate attacks on civilians without fear of punishment. The findings are to be formally presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday.

Denounced by Mr. Assad’s government as one-sided, the panel has not been allowed to enter Syria. The panel bases its findings largely on interviews with refugees and defectors. While its latest report was careful to hold both sides responsible, the unevenness of the conflict — with heavily armed government forces battling rebels with scanty, sometimes homemade arsenals — was evident.

Of the nine mass killings the panel investigated for the report, eight were attributed to the government side. “Relentless shelling has killed thousands of civilians and displaced the populations of entire towns,” the report said, leaving government responsibility implicit. “Massacres and other unlawful killings are perpetrated with impunity. An untold number of men, children and women have disappeared. Many have died in detention.”

The panel’s new report tracks investigations conducted over three months, ending in mid-July. It is dated Aug. 16, five days before the chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburb.