Russia Stands in the Way of U.N. Call for Assad to Step Down

UNITED NATIONS — The tensions over the forces for change erupting across the Middle East were coming to a head here on Tuesday as Arab and Western states confronted Russia over its refusal to condemn the Syrian government for its violent suppression of popular protests.

In the hours leading up to the diplomatic duel in the Security Council, the steady drumbeat of violence continued unabated in Syria, where government forces pushed rebels back from strongholds near Damascus.

With a draft Security Council resolution put on the table by Morocco that calls for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to step aside to speed a democratic transition, Russia stressed its opposition to any such plan, even while attempting to distance Moscow from the man himself.

“The Russian policy is not about asking someone to step down; regime change is not our profession,” Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation during a stop on a tour of Asia.

“We are not friends or allies of President Assad,” he went on, according to a transcript on the Interfax news service, evidently hoping to deflect accusations that Moscow should be held responsible for the widening bloodshed. “We never said that Assad remaining in power is a precondition for regulating the situation. We said something else — we said that the decision should be made by Syrians, by the Syrians themselves.”

Mr. Lavrov made it clear that it was the ghost of Libya, where foreign powers intervened with force, and recent Security Council resolutions that haunt the debate on Syria in the United Nations and beyond.

“The international community unfortunately did take sides in Libya and we would never allow the Security Council to authorize anything similar,” Mr. Lavrov said.

To stress the high level of Western interest in adopting a resolution, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Portugal, headed to the Security Council meeting.

They have all made statements about the need to stop the spiraling violence in Syria. After the death toll reached more than 5,400 in January, the United Nations stopped counting because it said figures were too hard to confirm. Part of the West’s interest is pressuring Mr. Assad to leave is that his fall would weaken the position of Syria’s ally, Iran, in the region, as well as that of Hezbollah, which continues to back the Damascus government.

But even in the West and among Arab League members, there is no support for the kind of foreign military intervention that occurred in Libya, because of concerns that an implosion of Syria could spread beyond its borders, dragging neighbors, like Israel, Iraq and Lebanon, into a wider conflagration.  The goal is to try to stanch the bloody conflict in Syria without sparking a sectarian civil war.

The Security Council resolution effectively adopts a proposal by the Arab League, which called for Mr. Assad to hand power over to his vice president before forming a unity government with the opposition and paving the way for a new constitution and legislative elections.

Nabil al-Araby, the league’s secretary general, and Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani, the Qatari prime minister, were expected to try to convince Security Council members that the move is less about regime change and more about meeting the democratic aspirations of the Syrian people who have been demonstrating for 11 months.

The strategy is similar to one that was applied in Yemen, and promoted by Arab states, where the long time autocratic president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, agreed to turn over power to his vice president after a months long standoff with pro-democracy demonstrators. Critics of the strategy say that it is aimed only at stopping the violence without promoting real change.

No vote is scheduled Tuesday at the United Nations — the haggling over the wording is expected to commence in earnest again on Wednesday. But privately diplomats were anticipating a showdown vote, with at least Russia resorting to a veto, to come as early as Friday. Russia and China vetoed a similar resolution last October.

Russia, backed discreetly by China and India, rejects the idea that the world organization can interfere in the domestic politics of any country to force a leadership change.

They all feel that they were duped into supporting a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians last March, and are infuriated at the West for using it as a license to help overthrow the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. To a certain extent, the Arab League and the rest of the world were ready to dump the eccentric Mr. Qaddafi because he had made many enemies. Mr. Assad, who also has many enemies in the region and in the West, continues to have a strong ally in Moscow, which analysts say has other concerns about forced leadership change.

“That the Morocco resolution ‘calls for’ Assad to step aside is their worst example and fear,” said George Lopez, a professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and a sometime adviser to the United Nations. “If today it is Assad, tomorrow Putin? They worry.”

Other calculations also come into play. Vladimir V. Putin, who wants to regain the Russian presidency in elections this March, seeks to portray Russia as regaining its superpower influence. Russia’s long ties to Syria generate billions of dollars in weapons sales, plus the relationship gives Moscow the entree it needs to the table for Middle East peace talks. In addition, the Russian Navy deploys some ships from the Syrian port of Tartous, widening Russia’s sphere of influence into the Mediterranean.

But it is the worry about setting a precedent that seems to trump all those issues for Russia. To try to address that, diplomats here have inserted all kinds of reassuring language into the draft resolution.

“Nothing in this resolution compels states to resort to the use of force or the threat of force,” it said, and underscores the “strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Syria, emphasizing the need to resolve the current crisis in Syria peacefully.”

It also calls on both the government and the rebels to halt the violence, although it does not equate the two sides as Russia often does. The official Syrian position is that it is under armed attack from terrorists from abroad, its explanation ignoring the protest movements sweeping the region.

Members of the Syrian National Council, a nascent government in exile, made their debut around the United Nations in another attempt to sway the argument in favor of condemning the Assad government. But the Syrian council rejected a Russian offer to sponsor talks in Moscow between the government and the opposition. Council members said that Mr. Assad’s stepping down and an end to the violence were their preconditions.

“I appeal to Russia, which has long historical ties with the Syrian people, to prevent the Assad regime from exploiting the Russia support in order to continue its oppression,” said Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the council, after meeting with Russia’s United Nations envoy, Vitaly I. Churkin.

Even if the resolution were to pass, Mr. Ghalioun said he did not expect it to have an impact on either the violence or Mr. Assad himself.

“We don’t anticipate him to accept or listen to the resolution,” he said. “Nevertheless, to have that resolution is extremely important to emphasize his lack of legitimacy.”

On Monday, government forces in Syria recaptured most of the towns that rebels had seized last week on the eastern doorstep of Damascus. The government forces were pushing to take two more towns, Zamlka and Arbeen, residents of the area reported by telephone. Some said loud explosions and continuous gunfire had started early Tuesday.

A resident from Saqba, a poor town about 20 minutes from central Damascus, reported heavy destruction in the area after government troops regained control. He said that at least 14 tanks were deployed across the town and that troops were carrying out house-to-house raids in a search for activists.

“The situation is awful inside the town,” the resident said. “There are checkpoints and armed forces everywhere. They shelled everything, nothing was spared.”

A resident from Zabadani, a town under the control of the opposition Free Syrian Army on the western border near Lebanon, said that residents were bracing for a major assault by government forces. “The situation is very tense here,” said the resident, who identified himself as Abu Diab. “People are very scared and expecting a bloody invasion in the next few days.”