Putin: West Encouraging Chaos in Syria

Local Editor

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused the West of pursuing policies that had destabilized states in the Arab world and now risked creating chaos in Syria.

"The most important thing is that our partners cannot stop themselves," news agencies quoted Putin as saying at his local Moscow residence at a meeting with local residents of the Ryazan region in central Russia.
"They have already created a situation of chaos in many territories and are now continuing the same policy in other countries - including Syria," said Putin.

Putin used tough language to warn that Syria risked seeing the kind of bloody chaos that followed the Roman Empire's invasion of Carthage and the great city's fall in 146 BC. He described this as the world's first example "of wide-scale ethnic cleansing".
One fable said the Romans then salted corpses to make sure that nothing ever grew there - a process Putin described in bloody detail and warned might be repeated again in Syria.

"The Roman empire not only seized and occupied Carthage, but even when it destroyed everything, it dismembered everyone and then poured salt over them to make sure that nothing grew back," Putin said.
"We would really like not to see what happened in history many centuries ago repeated again today," the strongman Russian leader stressed.
But he then argued that "something similar happens when strong countries try to force weak ones to follow their own rules of conduct and their moral codes."

Commenting on the so-called "Arab Spring" and the ongoing Syrian conflict, he said: "Our position is to help carry out changes for the better in all countries but not to try to force on them - especially by armed force - what we consider to be right."
"It is important to encourage developments from within," Putin stressed.
The Russian leader criticized the militant foreign policy of the West, arguing that Russia's repeated warnings went unheeded.

"We did warn that prudent action was needed and that it would be wrong to try to achieve anything by force, otherwise chaos would ensue," he said. "And what do we see today? Chaos prevails."

Source: News Agencies, Edited by moqawama.org