UDC

94(569.1)

Authors

Khodynskaya-Golenischeva Maria Sergeevna
Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations Office
and Other International Organizations in Geneva
15 Avenue de la Paix, 1211 Geneve, Switzerland;
e-mail: khodynskaya_m@mail.ru

Abstract

The article describes the manipulation of the Syrian conflict death toll by the US and its allies to achieve egoistic political goals. It shows how the US used its unabated hegemony in world affairs after the collapse of the Soviet Union to reformat global interaction and put it at the service of its interests. Further, the paper dwells on human rights and humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which were created and financed by Washington, firstly, to fill the vacuum produced by the disappearance of the US key geopolitical rival and, secondly, to establish their close cooperation with the United Nations on order to keep the UN’s work in the “right ideological direction”. In the Syrian case, these efforts have yielded tangible results. In an attempt to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime, the US, together with its allies, used their wide representation in the UN Secretariat as well as a US-controlled NGO network to gather information on the number of casualties which was then handed over to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and later presented as the “UN data”. This statistics, compiled in favour of the anti-government forces, was used to create an impression that the majority of Syrian casualties were caused by the regime. The aim was to discredit the Syrian leadership and to declare al-Assad illegitimate as well as to isolate Russia and China, opposing this US policy. The author believes that increasing multipolarity of international relations will reduce the chances of the UN being used in dishonest political schemes. Russia, in its turn, has consistently been stressing the inadmissibility of politicizing UN human rights and humanitarian activities to achieve one’s selfish foreign-policy goals.

Keywords

Syria, unipolarity, UN, multipolarity, systems of international relations, human rights, death toll