France will propose making United Nations envoy Kofi Annan's peace plan for Syria obligatory by invoking the U.N.'s "Chapter 7" provision, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Wednesday, describing the conflict there as a "civil war."
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Fabius said he hoped Russia would agree to using Chapter 7, a measures which can authorise the use of force, and he said that a no-fly zone was another option under discussion.
"We propose making the implementation of the Annan plan compulsory," Fabius told a news conference. "We need to pass to the next speed at the Security Council and place the Annan plan under Chapter 7 - that is to say make it compulsory under pain of very heavy sanctions."
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Wednesday that Syria was on the verge of collapse and that he would be holding urgent talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Thursday to ensure implementation of the plan brokered by Annan.
"Syria is on the edge of a collapse or of a deadly sectarian civil war," he told reporters in Kabul where he will attend a regional conference on Afghanistan.
Russia's Foreign Minister defended his country's sale of arms to Syria Wednesday and accused the United States of supplying rebels with weapons to fight against the government, Reuters reported.
"We are not violating any international law in performing these contracts," Reuters quoted Lavrov as saying in response to a question about arms sales to Syria at a news conference in Tehran shown on Iranian state television.
"They (the United States) are providing arms and weapons to the Syrian opposition that can be used in fighting against the Damascus government," he said, speaking through an interpreter.
Neither his comments, nor the translation, could immediately be verified by other news sources.
Russian state news agency RIA Novosti noted that Russia is the biggest supplier of arms to Syria, and maintains its only military base outside the former Soviet Union there. It said Russia President Vladimir Putin earlier this month claimed Russian arms were not being used against pro-democracy protesters in Syria, a claim derided as "patently untrue" by U.S. State Secretary Hillary Clinton on Tuesday.
Clinton says Russia is sending gunships to Syria, could escalate conflict 'dramatically'
Russia, which is resisting Western and Gulf Arab pressure to take a tougher stance toward Assad, says a proposed conference would lend support to a peace plan by U.N. international mediator Kofi Annan.
The U.S. says it does not believe Iran, Assad's strongest regional ally, is ready to play a constructive role in Syria. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week that it was "hard to imagine inviting a country that is stage-managing the Assad regime's assault on its people."
On Monday, U.N. monitors said Syrian helicopters had fired on rebel strongholds north of Homs and said many women and children were reported trapped in the city, calling for "immediate and unfettered access" to the conflict zones.
International mediator Kofi Annan also expressed grave concern about violence in Homs and in Haffeh, a mainly Sunni Muslim town near the Mediterranean coast, where the U.S. State Department said it feared a "potential massacre".
The U.N. observers, tasked with monitoring Annan's April ceasefire deal which failed to stem the violence in Syria, have instead been cataloguing mass killings, bombings and clashes in which many hundreds of Syrians have died.
The outside world, divided in its approach towards Assad's crackdown on a 15-month-old uprising, has been unable to halt the violence despite broad international support for Annan's peace plan.
It was the first time the U.N. monitors have verified repeated allegations by activists that Assad's forces have fired from helicopters in the military crackdown on rebels.
Reuters and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.
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