The 3 lines of our cooperation with France on Syria

The subject we’ve been working very closing with the French on in the last few weeks has been Syria, which has of course been very prominent in the media. And it’s a terrible human disaster: apart from its dangerous regional implications, we believe that 80,000 people may have been killed over the last two years. The whole international community is trying to find a way of sorting the problem out and getting the violence stopped.

Written version (continued)

With France we’ve been working on three lines. First of all, lifting the European arms embargo as it relates to the Syrian moderate opposition parties. We have not taken the decision as the UK to supply arms to the opposition, but we wanted to have at least that option and to send a signal to the Assad regime, that we were in a position to start supplying arms if the peace process does not get under way. And we succeeded in that, Britain and France leading the way at a European meeting a couple of weeks ago.

The second leg of our policy has been to get the negotiation going. In the end, this crisis can only be solved politically with a negotiated settlement. The Russians and the Americans are now working hard to get an international conference (the “Geneva Conference”) under way between the parties with the aim of reaching a political settlement which will have to involve the transition to a new government, not the Assad government. We don’t yet have a date for that and for the UK, we are pressing hard to get the conference together as soon as possible.

The third leg, which has been much in the media recently, has been the issue of chemical weapons. Like France, the UK has clear evidence that the sarin gas has been used in Syria. We have samples in the UK of that, we can’t yet say for sure that it was the regime which was responsible, we think very probably it was, we’ve given all our information to the UN investigating commission, so has France. It’s now up to the commission to do its work and we are pressing hard for the commission to be allowed to operate inside Syria to gather the evidence needed.

All of this goes to show the importance and the urgency of getting this conflict settled as soon as possible, and Britain and France are working very closely together.