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SOPHY RIDGE:  Now the political tensions over the war in Syria are reaching new heights this weekend with the G7 countries including the United Kingdom and the United States facing off against Russia.  The Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, has cancelled his trip to Moscow today so where is this all heading?  Well I’m joined in the studio now by the co-chair of the Parliamentary Group, Friends of Syria, Andrew Mitchell. Thank you very much for being with us on the programme today.  Now the Defence Secretary has said that Russia is guilty by proxy for some of the, all of the deaths in the devastating chemical attack in Syria earlier this week, is he right?

ANDREW MITCHELL: Yes, he is and the attack, the appalling attack which we saw, could not have taken place without either the active support or the passive acquiescence of Russia.

SR: You’ve been a very fierce critic of Russia’s role in Syria in the past, we can have a look actually at something you said about Russian’s actions in Syria last year, you said ‘We are witnessing events that match the behaviour of the Nazi regime in Guernica in Spain’.  Do you stand by that, that Russia is behaving in a way that is similar to the Nazis?

ANDREW MITCHELL: Absolutely, in the same way that the Italians and the Germans destroyed the League of Nations in the 1930s, Russia has completely undermined international humanitarian law.  After all the Chemical Weapons Convention which I think took place in the 1920s survived the whole of the Second World War, no one used chemical weapons and now we have chemical weapons being used which is absolutely appalling because of course the Russians told the international community that those weapons were being dismantled and removed and here they are available to Syrian forces in Syria today.  

SR: So was Boris Johnson correct to cancel his planned trip to Moscow or was it better for him to be there, look them in eye and actually tell them face to face about what they should be doing.

ANDREW MITCHELL: I think Boris Johnson makes his plans and he’s in a much better position to judge whether he should be in Moscow today than I am but the fact is that the international community has been outraged by the behaviour of Russia and the Syrian government regime over the last five years and thank goodness the appalling error of judgement that was made by President Obama in saying that there were red lines which could not be crossed and then doing nothing when those red lines were crossed, which sent a signal to Assad and to Russia that they could do what they want, thank goodness that President Trump – and I wouldn’t have voted for him had I been an American at the last election but thank  goodness he has reasserted the importance of international humanitarian law.  He said that he will not stand for war crimes being committed and has acted in the way that he did.

SR: So you are praising Donald Trump for that decisive air strike but on the other hand we have reports out today that Boris Johnson is going to be trying to get a strongly worded hard hitting statement about Russia from the G7 so while America is backing military action we are trying to get a strongly worded letter.  Is that enough?

ANDREW MITCHELL: Well America is the one country that could take the action which was taken.  I think that President Trump was decisive, he was proportionate and I think he was absolutely right to do what he did.  All of us actually, not just the poor people in the cities in Syria but all of us around the world, can sleep more safely as a result of international humanitarian law being reasserted and the world’s main superpower standing up for that which they weren’t before.

SR: So should the UK be prepared then to back the US in the terror link?    

ANDREW MITCHELL: The UK should be prepared in an alliance with our allies, with America, hopefully with the UN as well although that is extremely difficult because of the veto structure that exists there.  Hopefully the international community will now say that we simply cannot stand by and allow international humanitarian law to be broken but let’s be clear, what is required in Syria today is a ceasefire, unfettered access for humanitarian agencies, a ceasefire that we were told would be brokered and secured by Russia, Iran and Turkey and that’s what we now need to see. The critical thing is to hold the Russians to their commitment on the ceasefire, that they will police it and deliver it in every way they possibly can and not, as I say, be passively acquiescent in regime attacks on innocent civilians.  

SR: The difficulty is though isn’t it that in the Syrian conflict there doesn’t really seem to be a good side to back. We have Assad on the one hand who by all accounts is carrying out these devastating chemical attacks on his own citizens but on the other hand we have an opposition which is heavily infiltrated by Islamic State.  If you attack Assad are you just helping Islamic State?  

ANDREW MITCHELL: What we need is this ceasefire so that negotiations can take place.  Those negotiations need to be from the bottom up.  You’re quite right, there are 50 or so different parties in this conflict in one way or another and it’s not for us to decide what a peaceful outcome should be but what we can say is that we will not stand by and allow innocent civilians and children to be murdered in the way they have been in Aleppo and in many other places in Syria as well.  

SR: In this conflict which has gone on for many years, thousands have people have died, children, we’ve seen chemical attacks, we’ve seen the appalling events in some of these cities.  How much responsibility does the UK and UK politicians bear for standing by, for not backing for example in 2013 military action?

ANDREW MITCHELL: Well in my view that was a terrible error of judgement by the House of Commons and I think hindsight is a great thing but those of us who were passionately in favour of Britain standing up then against those abuses of international humanitarian law, I think were right. We weren’t able to carry the day, we weren’t able to persuade our colleagues of the importance of that and I think when we look back I think we’ll say the international community has been supine in the face of the most extraordinary barbarity that’s taken place in Syria and done nothing about it but again I think a lot of the blame for that was that an American President said he would take action if red lines were crossed, chemical weapons were then used for the first time in this sort of state way since the 1920s and he did nothing about it.

SR: At the same time though, taking action now when the picture is more complex than perhaps it was in 2013, that risks confrontation with Russia doesn’t it?  I mean things could get very, very messy indeed.

ANDREW MITCHELL: Well I think this is a proportionate reaction to what happened and I think it sends a very clear message to the Kremlin that they cannot break international humanitarian law and that is extremely important.  It’s not a declaration of war against Russia, we’re standing up for international humanitarian principles.   

SR: Okay, Andrew Mitchell, thank you very much for your thoughts today.