The two-day annual G8 summit which began today at Northern Ireland’s luxury Lough Erne golfing resort in County Fermanagh, near the town of Enniskillen, is expected to be dominated by discussions on the continuing crisis in Syria, as G8 factions back both sides.
Written by Chris White
The summit places the US leader Obama who has just announced that America will now adopt an open policy of directly arming Syria’s rebel factions at loggerheads with Russia’s President Putin, whose government is committed to defending President Assad’s regime with arms treaties by supplying Assad’s military with extensive anti-air craft weapons systems.
The crisis pits the Western powers led by the United States against Russia and has now now escalated into a proxy war mirroring the Cold War period, in which either side now directly and openly supports opposing factions in the same conflict.
Putin’s decision to supply Syria’s Assad regime with finance and munitions has caused consternation within the Western camp. However, Putin has in the recent past indicated that his patience with Western intransigence was wearing thin, with Putin initially expressing frustration with the Western excesses in the Libya campaign of 2011, which many believe was simply a ploy to smother the popular ‘Arab Spring’ uprising against Western backed Arab governments which started in Egypt that same year.
Amid claims that his government had transgressed international law by forming the alliance Putin said: “We are not breaching any rules or norms and we call on all our partners to act in the same fashion.” – And accused The West of supporting rebels who “not only kill their enemies but open up their bodies and eat their internal organs in front of the public and the cameras”.
However, David Cameron whose British Government along with the government of France have been busily engaged in lobbying for US military intervention in Syria for many months now attempted to spin differences with Russia, responding: “What I take from our conversation today is that we can overcome these differences if we recognise that we share some fundamental aims: To end the conflict, to stop Syria breaking apart, to let the Syrian people decide who governs them and to take the fight to the extremists and defeat them.”
The summit is the site of some of the largest security operations in Northern Ireland’s history with approximately 8,000 police officers drafted in from all over the province to guard the two-day conference from anti-globalisation protesters, determined to disrupt the meeting.
The security measures consist of heavily armed police with armoured Land Rovers stationed at regular intervals along country roads leading to the luxury golf course where the summit is being held.
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