Syria civil war: UN taking control of country ‘could provide solution to conflict’
A solution to the seemingly intractable conflict in Syria could be for the United Nations to take control of the country as a “mandate territory”, according to one of Britain’s most respected diplomatic advisers.
The call for a new international consensus on Syria, involving the temporary transfer of legal control to the UN, is made in the Independent On Sunday by Gilbert Greenall, a former international relief adviser with decades of experience in Africa and the Middle East.
He warns that Syria’s situation is “simply unsustainable” and that “a return to a UN mandate territory”, similar to the League of Nations structure that governed the country from 1923 to 1945, should be considered urgently.
The idea of an accelerated role for the UN is understood to have been mooted in Whitehall.