Richard Perry/The New York Times
Angela Kane, the United Nations high representative for disarmament affairs, helped get weapons inspectors sent into Syria.
By RICK GLADSTONE and SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: October 2, 2013
UNITED NATIONS — Locked in a disagreement with the Syrian government over access, the United Nations missed an opportunity six months ago to investigate the first suspected chemical weapons attack in that country’s civil war, the organization’s top disarmament official said in an interview on Wednesday.
The official, Angela Kane, said that the missed opportunity now haunted her.
If United Nations inspectors had been able to visit the site, in the northern town of Khan al-Assal, and confirm that chemical weapons had been used on March 19, she said, the findings might have deterred further attacks, like the one Aug. 21 that killed hundreds in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta.
Each side in the Syrian conflict blamed the other for the Khan al-Assal attack, and the Syrian government wanted the United Nations to investigate that site alone. But the United Nations insisted on investigating other sites of suspected chemical attacks, and Syria refused, leading to what Ms. Kane described as a standstill that lasted months.
“In hindsight, I think I regret that,” said Ms. Kane, the high representative for disarmament affairs, who helped broker an agreement to allow investigators into Syria, just before the August attack. “It would have been good if we had investigated. Maybe by having conclusive proof the first time when it was really used on a larger scale, it might have prevented the others.”
Even so, she said, the chemical weapons crisis — and the international inquiry into it — has accelerated diplomatic efforts, including the possible convening of a peace conference next month in Geneva. Last Friday, the Security Council unanimously passed a breakthrough resolution aimed at pressuring the Syrian government to keep its new promise to give up all chemical weapons. On Wednesday, the Security Council unanimously urged all sides in the conflict to allow unfettered access to humanitarian aid. I
n an interview at the United Nations, Ms. Kane, a veteran United Nations diplomat from Germany who is an expert in peacekeeping and disarmament issues, offered a glimpse of the painstaking, perilous work her team, comprising chemical weapons specialists and doctors, undertakes as it seeks to establish whether and when banned weapons were used.
On their first visit to Syria in August, she said, team members came under sniper fire in a buffer zone between government- and opposition-held areas in the Damascus suburbs. Already encumbered by hazardous materials suits, they worked in triple-digit summer temperatures and spoke to victims in Ghouta just days after they had been poisoned by what the investigators eventually determined was the nerve agent sarin. This sort of investigation had never been done before, Ms. Kane said.
“It was emotionally very draining,” she said.
Last week, the team, which returned to Syria to look into other suspected chemical attacks, faced a security threat that forced it to postpone its work a day, she said, declining to give details.
On both visits, following precise protocols meant to guarantee the authenticity of the evidence, investigators packed samples of blood, hair, soil and weapons fragments into special containers. Because hazardous chemicals are barred from private planes, Ms. Kane called on friendly governments — she would not identify them — to fly the samples on their official planes to Europe for testing.
Ms. Kane had pulled the team out at the end of August, over the objections of the Syrian government and only after promising that the team would return. On its second visit, which ended Monday, it looked into six other instances of suspected chemical munitions use, including three that the Syrian government said had occurred after Aug. 21 in the Damascus area.
On Tuesday, an advance group of weapons inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons arrived. That team, charged with carrying out the dismantling of Syria’s chemical stockpiles under the Security Council resolution, expects the Syrian government to deliver a detailed list of stockpile sites, materials and equipment, and supply information.
Ms. Kane’s team’s final report, covering all seven suspected episodes, is due at the end of October. Its initial report, on Sept. 16, focused only on the Ghouta attack and was the first independent accounting of what had happened; the forensic information it contained appeared to implicate the Syrian government.
So worried were the investigators that their findings would be leaked and cast doubt on their credibility, they delivered their report personally to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, in New York.
Parts of that report were contested by Russia, which is Syria’s principal ally and which has contended that rebels were responsible for the Ghouta attack. Ms. Kane said she had instructed the team on its second visit to review those objections. She declined to give details.
She also said that both Syria and Russia had done their own investigations into the Khan al-Assal assault and sought to have her team accept their findings as evidence. But she said that was impossible, because of strict protocols for the integrity of the evidence. Her team only uses samples it has collected itself.
There is no chance of that now, she said, because the area is controlled by Islamic extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda. The team’s final report will include an entry on Khan al-Assal, without benefit of direct evidence.
While that attack drew global attention, it was the Aug. 21 assault, with video evidence of a mass atrocity, that precipitated a worldwide crisis. By then, the conflict had killed an estimated 100,000 and uprooted millions. T
he Obama administration expressed outrage, blamed the government of President Bashar al-Assad and threatened a missile strike, only to be dissuaded by Russia. In turn, Russia persuaded Syria to join a global treaty to ban chemical weapons. The Assad government then agreed to allow its chemical weapons stockpile to be identified and destroyed by mid-2014.
What has dogged Ms. Kane’s team from the start is the limits of its mission: to establish whether chemical weapons were used, not by whom. This has been an abiding source of criticism, but United Nations officials have said it is for others to interpret the findings and seek accountability.
Ms. Kane said she was not in the least frustrated. She expressed confidence that the team’s findings would be used to hold the perpetrators accountable, even though nothing the United Nations has done yet would automatically lead to criminal prosecutions.
“You work this long in the U.N., you know that there are sometimes gray areas you just have to live with,” she said.
A version of this article appears in print on October 3, 2013, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Missed Opportunity in Syria Haunts U.N. Official.
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