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Amanpour

Russia's Syria Plan: The Next Step; "The Litany of Suffering"; Capturing an Atrocity on Camera

Aired September 13, 2013 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST: Hello, everyone, I'm Christiane Amanpour and welcome to the special weekend edition of our program where we bring you the big stories that we covered this week.

But of course this week, there was only one story, and that is Syria. The news came fast and it changed quickly. Some of it had even veteran diplomats and political scientists scratching their heads.

In a matter of days the Obama administration plans to strike Syria went from full court press to full stop when a seemingly offhanded remark that was picked up by the Russians produced a potential solution that all sides welcome.

The U.S. would put the brakes on a strike if Syria agreed to put its chemical weapons under international control. President Barack Obama, who had booked TV time before the proposal arose, still addressed the nation, but his message was somewhat muddled.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.

The Russian government has indicated a willingness to join with the international community in pushing Assad to give up his chemical weapons.

I have, therefore, asked the leaders of Congress to postpone a vote to authorize the use of force while we pursue this diplomatic path.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: So where this goes from now is far from clear. What will such a plan look like? And can it really work? The United States has been calling for Assad's ouster for years, and yet now they are partnered with him, counting on the Syrian president and his Russian patron, President Vladimir Putin, to hand over and eventually destroy his chemical weapons.

Meanwhile, Assad continues to pound the opposition with conventional weapons and the catastrophic humanitarian disaster only gets worse in Syria.

Later in the program former British foreign secretary David Miliband, now head of the International Rescue Committee, tells me about the failure of humanitarian intervention. And that has cost 100,000 lives and displaced 6 million people.

But first, after butting heads for years over Syria, the U.S. and Russia seem to be joined at the hip now over the current proposal to secure and destroy Syria's chemical weapons stockpile.

Can it ever happen? And who's really won this round? Obama or Putin and Assad?

I asked Vladimir Chizhov, Russia's ambassador to the European Union, when he joined me this week from Brussels.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Ambassador, welcome to the program. Thanks for joining me.

What is the plan as you know it?

What is the plan that your foreign minister has already presented to Secretary Kerry in person?

CHIZHOV: Well, the plan has been outlined not only to Secretary Kerry but to the international community and made public. It envisages placing the chemical weapons stockpile of Syria under international supervision and also addressing the issue of accession of the Syrian Arab Republic to the convention on banning (ph) chemical weapons, which it has not been a party to until now.

AMANPOUR: Part of what has been said publicly is that not only will these weapons be declared, be shown to Russia and other states at the United Nations, but also that they will be transferred to international control.

Many thought that that would be transferring them out in some way to destroy eventually this chemical stockpile. But a cabinet minister in Damascus has told the Associated Press that there's no talk of transferring out these weapons, only to put them under international control.

What does Russia understand?

Aren't these meant to be, you know, gotten rid of?

CHIZHOV: Well, you see, the ultimate aim is to have these weapons destroyed. Where exactly that will be taking place is a secondary issue.

But the initial plan is, of course, to place the existing stockpiles under international supervision in the territory of Syria.

AMANPOUR: Now what do you think ,when it comes to doing that and, in fact, eventually destroying them?

Is that even possible in any kind of reasonable timeframe, given that there's a war going?

What is going to be asked, therefore, of the Assad government, of the opposition, presumably, in terms of creating a space to actually carry out this work by the inspectors?

I mean, does a cease-fire have to be put in place? What's necessary?

CHIZHOV: Well, I don't think anybody in the world would imagine that this would be an easy task to do. But it takes resolve, political will and, of course, agreement by all parties concerned.

Actually what I am personally worrying about is what the opposition forces might do in this situation.

AMANPOUR: Ambassador, you know a lot of talk has gone on around how on Earth did this whole plan, this diplomatic initiative come into the open to begin with.

Was it really just an off-the-cuff remark by Secretary Kerry that then Sergey Lavrov jumped on and everybody else jumped on board?

Or has this been something that has been discussed between the principles for a long time?

Can you tell me about the genesis of what they hope to be a successful diplomatic initiative in this regard?

CHIZHOV: Well, I think I should first refer to a statement by Minister Lavrov, who said that the plan stems out of contacts that had been held between the Russian Federation and the United States at different levels and in different quarters, I would say.

So you know, it's not an issue of claiming fatherhood as some third countries are doing at the moment. The popular saying is that success has many fathers, but failure is always an orphan.

AMANPOUR: Success, then, in this regard, must surely be due to the credible threat of U.S. military force.

I mean, you're not going to tell me that this all happened just because suddenly everybody got lovey-dovey about a diplomatic initiative. This must have been because of the threat of military force on the table.

CHIZHOV: Well, anybody can have one's own view on this. But I can only repeat my previous remark on this.

AMANPOUR: OK.

Do you therefore think what many skeptics in the United States believe, that in fact President Putin and the Russian government is coming to the rescue of President Assad, that this, in fact, would involve him in the future diplomatic resolution of this issue, this chemical weapons issue, and that therefore he's going nowhere?

CHIZHOV: Actually many people in my own country and here in the European Union think that President Putin and Minister Lavrov are actually coming to the rescue of President Obama ,who was facing a possible defeat in the U.S. Congress.

So it's not an issue of who's rescuing whom. But it's an issue to rescue a political settlement, which in the case of military strikes, would have become hardly possible.

AMANPOUR: Well, that actually was going to be my next question; you answered it, you previewed it and guessed what I was going to ask you about that rescue mission.

But do you strongly or do you really believe that this has a chance --

(CROSSTALK)

CHIZHOV: It's called --

AMANPOUR: -- of success?

CHIZHOV: -- it's called telepathy, telepathy.

AMANPOUR: All right. Use your telepathic powers to tell me whether you think --

CHIZHOV: Well --

AMANPOUR: -- this is really going somewhere or is it a stalling and delaying tactic?

CHIZHOV: Certainly -- I'm certainly convinced that there is a chance of a progress along the track (ph) of political settlement. It would have been much more difficult had this opportunity not appeared.

AMANPOUR: Ambassador Chizhov, thank you so much for joining me from Brussels.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: And as we take a break, see this haunting glimpse of what child labor looks like in Syria's civil war.

This is Esa (ph). He's 10 years old and he's from war-ravaged Aleppo. He no longer goes to school. Instead, he works, helping his father, repairing weapons for the beleaguered Free Syrian Army.

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(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the special weekend edition of our program.

The current diplomacy over Syria effectively ring fences the chemical weapons threat, but it leaves the conventional civil war to rage on with no end in sight and no real effort to stop it. The U.N. secretary-general this week called this the world's moral failure, a collective failure that will burden us for years.

It most certainly marks a pause, if not an end to the idea of humanitarian intervention that the West has successfully deployed from Kosovo to Sierra Leone and elsewhere.

In 2.5 years since Syrians rose to demand freedom, democracy and reform, the U.N. says 100,000 of them have been killed. More than 2 million refugees have fled the violence and another 4 million Syrians have been displaced within their own country.

So what does this latest proposal for the chemical weapons mean for a crisis that's been described as, quote, "unprecedented in recent history"?

Former British foreign secretary David Miliband is now president of the International Rescue Committee. His younger brother, Ed Miliband, is leader of the British opposition Labour Party and he was instrumental in defeating Prime Minister David Cameron's call for military intervention in Syria.

I talked about all of this and its consequences with David Miliband this week. It's his first interview since taking up his new position at the IRC.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Welcome.

DAVID MILIBAND, PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE: Thank you, Christiane. Good to be here.

AMANPOUR: Thank you for being here. I obviously want to get to the desperate plight of the people, because that is what we've been looking at for the last 2.5 years. But first I want to ask you, as a former foreign secretary, what do you make of Syria now saying that it will stop production and it will put its chemical weapons in the -- or at least show them to Russia, the U.N. and other states?

MILIBAND: Well, my instinct on this is very simple: it's that when they met at the end of last week, President Obama and President Putin, I think President Obama convinced President Putin, Prime Minister Putin, that he was carrying a very big stick, that the seriousness with which he was approaching this issue, that the determination to ensure that the use of chemical weapons didn't go unpunished, was real.

And I think the Russians have taken that seriously. It would be wrong to describe Syria purely as a client state of Russia, but Russia is clearly a very influential ally of President Assad. And I think they've realized that the game was up. And I think that basically explains the shift that you're seeing.

AMANPOUR: So you don't think that President Obama is getting played?

Obviously in a lot of different quarters, people are saying, ah, it's just a stalling; you know, if force is taken off the table, this is just going to go back to where it was a week ago.

MILIBAND: It's almost tempting in politics to commentate (sic) on the process, on the tactics. What matters is whether or not you're achieving your goals. And it's a very, very important goal to eradicate the chemical weapons that President Assad now admits that he's have -- he's got.

If that can be done, through peaceful diplomatic means, then that is obviously a step forward.

But the point that you've rightly highlighted, the use of chemical weapons is the tip of the humanitarian iceberg in this Syrian crisis. And it's not just a Syrian crisis; it's a regional crisis.

And given that the Middle East is central to the values, interests and alliances of countries like the U.S. and the U.K., it's got to be of interest, that humanitarian situation and the ramifications that it's got.

AMANPOUR: Well, you've just written a powerful piece in the "Financial Times." You've just been to the region. There's a whole new study from the IRC.

How bad is it?

MILIBAND: One in three Syrians have been driven from their homes. Two million Syrians out of the country, just think about this: for a country like Lebanon, 4 million people in Lebanon; 750,000 Syrians arriving there. That's like every single Briton, 60 million of us, 65 million of us, arriving in the U.S.

A country like Jordan, a very close ally of the U.S., population 5.5 million-6 million, 500,000 refugees. That's like every single citizen of Poland arriving in the U.S.

These are traumatized people, driven from their homes, losing husbands, sons in war, and they're arriving in countries that are themselves fragile. And that's why it's right to call it a regional crisis, not just a Syrian crisis.

AMANPOUR: And the worst, they say, the UNHCR says the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.

What does this -- you know, there are 100,000 people who've been killed. We're now focusing entirely --

MILIBAND: (Inaudible).

AMANPOUR: Indeed. And we're now focusing exclusively on the ultimate crime, which is the use of weapons of mass destruction.

But certainly Britain was quite, you know, forward-leaning; France was quite forward-leaning in wanting to intervene earlier.

Should there have been a more robust intervention to prevent the deaths of these 100,000 (inaudible)?

MILIBAND: There's no question in my mind that the humanitarian response, judging by all the figures, the U.N. figures, other figures, has been tardy and too small.

I mean, you -- just to give you a sense of it, the U.N. says that 40 percent of its appeal has been achieved. So there are organizations like the IRC that are doing work in the neighbors and in Syria, running health supplies into Syria to save people's lives. We can do more. Organizations like ours can do more. But we need the resource.

There's also the point that it's not safe, either for civilians or for aid workers. And there is a fundamental responsibility on the combatants in this, the government as well as the rebels, to allow freedom of movement for aid workers.

Remember, I've met doctors in Jordan who are Syrian doctors, talking about how they've been targeted at checkpoints. I mean, that is taking us centuries back in terms of the way people should be trying to sort these things out.

AMANPOUR: And you're obviously very familiar with the Iraq syndrome. You're a Labour and peer politician during the Labour-backed war in Iraq. Your own brother, as leader of the Labour Party now, decided not to back the prime minister in intervening in Syria.

How much responsibility do you think the politicians, who went into that flawed fiasco into Iraq, as many call it, bear for the failure to act in a real crisis today?

MILIBAND: Well, there's no question that across the Western world, there's a backwash, first of all, of Iraq and Afghanistan, and there's a backwash from the financial crisis as well. People are feeling that these are tough times in Western countries and there is also the bitter experience of the last 10 years, eight years in Iraq, 10 years in Afghanistan.

I think that individual congressmen in the U.S., politicians in the U.K., have to speak for themselves rather than me provide a commentary on that. But that's undoubtedly the background for this.

Equally, it's right to say that there is a -- there's a civil war going on at the moment with massive ramifications. And the question is can we learn from experience rather than be imprisoned by experience?

One of the learnings is that humanitarian catastrophes can have political consequences. If you destabilize Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, that has political consequences.

A second important lesson is that whenever military action is contemplated, it needs a wider diplomatic and political strategy.

That's why I think the point about the current goings-on, what really matters is whether or not the chemical weapons are disposed of. Those are some ways, I think, that we can learn the lessons of Iraq without being imprisoned by them.

AMANPOUR: We wish you good luck, because we've been following the terrible plight of these people for 2.5 years now. David Miliband, new president of IRC, thank you very much for joining me.

MILIBAND: Well, thank you, Christiane.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: And if this wasn't bad enough, let's ask this important question: did the world implicitly enable Syria's use of chemical weapons by not responding to the horrors of the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranians and against his own Kurdish population in the village of Halabja, killing thousands of them?

Our CNN camera man, Rich Brooks, was an eyewitness to that and he offers his riveting first-hand account of a chemical weapons attack.

But before we take a break, just back in March on the 25th anniversary of the Halabja massacre, on this program, we remembered the victims and the ominous implications for Syria. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: Today, Halabja's dead are remembered in monuments and memorials. But they cry out for more than tears. They want justice.

And meanwhile on Iraq's western border, another brutal regime, that of Bashar al-Assad of Syria, has stockpiled chemical weapons. Will he use them?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: Of course Assad has now answered that question in the most horrifying way. And now he's been forced to admit that he has those weapons and to pledge publicly to give them up. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, in his address to the nation, President Obama painted an agonizing picture of chemical warfare in Syria.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The images from this massacre are sickening: men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas; others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath; a father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: The words are powerful and yet not many outsiders have actually witnessed a chemical weapons attack.

Our own Rich Brooks is one of the few exceptions. Back in 1988, he brought his unflinching camera to the Kurdish village of Halabja, where Saddam Hussein unleashed a lethal chemical cocktail on his own people. He killed about 5,000 people and he left 10,000 more scarred for life.

Rich recorded that atrocity in unforgettable images that resonate especially today, as the world confronts the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons on innocent children. And he joins me now from Atlanta.

Rich, thank you for being with me. You're one of CNN's longest serving and most talented cameramen. So I'm really pleased to have you.

I want to know what it was like when you first went to Halabja.

What did you feel? What did you sense? What did you think when you got to this terrible, terrible scene?

RICH BROOKS, CNN PHOTOJOURNALIST: Well, we weren't sure what we were going to see exactly. But what I remember vividly was entering the village and just how still and silent it was. Initially, we saw birds on the ground and then we saw cattle and sheep. And then we turned a corner into a street that was just full of bodies.

And you've seen it before and the smell was overwhelming. And as we walked through there, you just couldn't believe the scope of what it was. And it was most likely the worst thing I've seen in my career.

AMANPOUR: Well, I was going to ask you, because you have covered so many wars and so much hell on this Earth.

What made it the worst thing that you'd ever seen? And it was before I was a correspondent; I didn't see that. But the images are seared into my mind and into anybody's mind.

What made it so bad?

BROOKS: Well, they're seared into my mind as well because these were civilians. These were women, children, older people; they were not combatants and they were just dead where they fell. They were in their houses, sitting on sofas, you know, dead, in the street. There's that image of the woman clutching her child, trying to take shelter in her house, I can imagine.

And recently, there was an image I saw that just brought all those images back to me in such a way that I couldn't help but think of Halabja. The video of the animals piled high, and that's exactly what we saw in Halabja.

AMANPOUR: When you saw what was revealed finally in Syria after August 21st, you know, you say it brought all the memories of Halabja back, could you ever have imagined, after actually bearing witness to that attack in 1988, that this would happen again?

BROOKS: Well, it's hard to believe 25 years later that the world has seen this happen again. And I wonder if we are going to do anything because just a short 2.5 years after Halabja, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, as we all know and we know what happened after that.

But it's still unbelievable that these weapons are used; even the -- you know, somebody thinking about using them in such a way, because they do affect the civilian population much more so than the battlefield.

AMANPOUR: And so many people simply don't want to look. Tell me why you think it's important that you go there, that you take your camera and everybody else does?

BROOKS: Well, I think if journalists don't go and tell these stories, you know, now with the advent of the Internet and how quickly information travels, we don't always go there. But in 1988, we had to go there to take these images and bring those pictures back and show the world.

And nowadays it happens so quickly and so should the response, I believe. people need to see this and we need to not sanitize it when it's aired on TV and let people know exactly what's going on.

AMANPOUR: You're absolutely right. Rich, thank you so much indeed for your special, special account. And you and we have kept the spotlight on.

And perhaps President Obama said it best in his speech last night, and I quote, "When dictators commit atrocities, they depend on the world to look the other way until those horrifying pictures fade from memory , but these things happened," he said. "The facts cannot be denied."

That's it for tonight's program. Meantime, you can always contact us at our website, amanpour.com. Thanks for watching and goodbye from New York.

END