Syria Calls for Non-Politicization of UNESCO’s Work on The Ukrainian Crisis
Syria denounced the attempts of politicization and opportunistic polarization that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is witnessing with regard to the Ukrainian crisis, calling on it to review the course of the crisis without selectivity, bias or discrimination.
Syria’s permanent representative to UNESCO, Ambassador Lamia Shakkour, said in an intervention before a meeting of the organization today on the current situation in Ukraine in the various fields of UNESCO: “Syria, as a founding member state of UNESCO since 1946, has always called for rejecting politicization in the Organization and working side by side with many building countries of this UN edifice relentlessly in the consolidation of peacemaking in the minds of women and men and in laying the foundations of international multilateral cooperation in line with the spirit of the founding charter of the Organization in order to sustain an impenetrable fortress of the Charter of the United Nations and international humanitarian law and continue its role in the cohesion and support of peoples in the face of successive crises that threaten humanity, the latest of which is the pandemic COVID-19, which the countries of the South are still suffering from.
Shakur expressed Syria’s regret that the proposed draft resolution on the current situation in Ukraine did not amount to strengthening the efforts of dialogue and negotiation. Rather, it reduces the areas for a possible immediate settlement. It also surrounds ways to avert the repercussions of the Ukrainian crisis in the near future, because if the resolution is adopted it fuels conflicts and prevents enabling UNESCO to take quick measures to meet the needs arising from the damage to its areas of competence in Ukraine, stressing the need to take a unified position to adopt the amendment submitted by the Russian Federation. Syria also welcomed the amendment submitted by Senegal.
Syria’s permanent representative to UNESCO stressed Syria’s demand for UNESCO to review the current events in Ukraine without selectivity, bias or discrimination, and also to the Executive Council to remain a beacon of peace because UNESCO, which was born in the midst of World War II, stands today at a historical turning point for the birth of our new world.
Shakkour said: “Syria deplores the miserable attempts of opportunistic polarization that the Organization is witnessing with regard to the current events in Ukraine, especially the relentless attempts to entrust the central and basic issues that are specialized in our organization, namely education, science, culture and communication, which threatens the development and identity of UNESCO as a result of the rampant practice of double standards, stressing the need to preserve the Organization and distancing it from becoming an international laboratory to perpetuate the fragmentation of the world in the twenty-first century and a witness to its fragmentation and dismantling.
In another context, Shakkour confirmed that Syria has continued since 2011 to fight terrorism until eliminating the remnants of the terrorist organizations of “ISIS”, “Jabhat al-Nusra” and “Al-Qaeda”, as well as fighting extremism and attempts to undermine its unity on the land and people despite the West’s continued obstruction of the political solution and the return of refugees as well as the reconstruction process of what was destroyed by terrorism.
Shakkour pointed out that Syria continues with determination in its efforts to rise from the consequences of the crisis, preserve the national political decision, and work to overcome the repercussions of illegal Western economic measures by self-reliance on its capabilities and energies, reviving and preserving cultural identity and heritage, following up on the educational process, and working to liberate every inch of the Syrian land from occupation, including the occupied Syrian Golan.