WSJ
MAY 14, 2011
By JAY SOLOMON
WASHINGTON—The U.S. and its European allies, seeking to pressure Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to end his violent crackdown on protesters, are lobbying the United Nations nuclear watchdog to formally accuse Damascus of covertly building a nuclear reactor.
Such a declaration by Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, could lead the U.N. Security Council to censure and perhaps penalize Syria in the coming months if it fails to provide information on its alleged nuclear activities, including at a suspected reactor site bombed by Israel in 2007, said U.S. and European officials.
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"It is our longstanding view that the Syrian facility...was a nuclear reactor configured for plutonium production," said a senior U.S. official involved in the discussions.
The U.S. and European Union have been seeking ways to further isolate Damascus in the wake of a brutal offensive by Mr. Assad's security forces. Both Washington and Brussels have announced unilateral economic sanctions on senior Syrian officials in recent weeks, although not on Mr. Assad himself.
But the Obama administration and its allies have so far been stymied in their attempts to pressure Mr. Assad through the Security Council, according to diplomats involved in the discussions. Russia, in particular, has resisted U.N. action to punish Syria, a decades-long ally of Moscow. The IAEA is viewed as a separate channel through which to put pressure on Damascus, said these officials.
"We're looking to increasingly isolate Assad," said a European official briefed on the talks. "The IAEA is one of the routes."
Syria's ally, Iran, has been hit with four rounds of U.N. economic sanctions since 2006 as a result of Tehran's own standoff with the IAEA.
For more than three years, the IAEA has been seeking access to at least four Syrian sites the U.N. agency suspects of being part of a covert nuclear program. The facility in eastern Syria destroyed in late 2007 by Israeli fighter jets, Dair Alzour, was a nearly operational nuclear reactor built in collaboration with North Korea, U.S. intelligence agencies believe.
Damascus has repeatedly denied the charges. It has refused to allow IAEA inspectors to visit the suspect sites after an initial mission went to Dair Alzour.
Mr. Amano in recent months has publicly talked about the possibility of utilizing a special power of his office to demand immediate access to Syria. But IAEA officials worry privately that Syria could again refuse to comply, making Mr. Amano's office look weak.
The U.S. and Europe, subsequently, have advised the IAEA to declare in its quarterly report on Syria, due out next month, that its inspectors have concluded that the bombed facility was a reactor. Such a move could lead the IAEA's 35-member board to issue a resolution declaring Damascus in noncompliance with its commitments to the agency. Syria's case could then be referred to the U.N. Security Council.
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Thousands of Syrians demonstrated after weekly prayers on Friday keeping up a two-month-old campaign of calls to end the autocratic rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Video courtesy of Reuters.
Mr. Amano, in a speech earlier this month, suggested he might go this route. In Paris, he told a conference that "the facility that was ... destroyed by Israel was a nuclear reactor under construction," his most definitive comment to date on the nature of the Syrian facility. Mr. Amano's representative in Vienna, however, subsequently stated that the IAEA hadn't reached a firm conclusion on the Syria case and wouldn't comment on what action the agency might take.
Syria is proving an increasingly complex diplomatic challenge for the Obama administration and its allies as Damascus continues its crackdown on protesters.
Upon taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama sought to engage Mr. Assad in a bid to stabilize the Middle East and promote a broader Arab-Israeli peace process. The U.S. has taken a more cautious response to the Syrian political rebellion than it has to similar uprisings in Egypt and Libya, refusing so far to call for Mr. Assad to step down or to formally question his legitimacy.
Human-rights groups and U.S. lawmakers have pressed the administration to call on Mr. Assad to step down. U.S. officials, in private, fear Mr. Assad's overthrow could lead to widescale sectarian violence similar to the bloodletting that consumed Iraq after Saddam Hussein's fall.
Still, the scale of the violence inside Syria is forcing Washington to take an increasingly hard line. On Friday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said: "Absent significant change in the Syrian government's current approach, the U.S. and its international partners will take additional steps to make clear our strong opposition to the Syrian government's treatment of its people."
Both U.S. and European officials have said Mr. Assad himself could be a target for future sanction measures. And some European officials have said it is possible their governments could change tack and formally announce that they think Mr. Assad should stand down in the coming weeks. One growing fear in Washington and Brussels is that Mr. Assad might survive, but so weakened that he could even further strengthen his military alliance with Iran.
"We used to think we could break Syria's relationship with Iran through diplomacy," said a European official. "Now we'll need to do so through pressure."
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