UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations said Thursday action would be taken against the interpreter responsible for an erroneous report that Syria has a nuclear facility.
Syria denied that one of its representatives told the U.N. General Assembly's committee that deals with disarmament on Tuesday that Israel had attacked a Syrian nuclear facility. It said the representative was misquoted, demanded a correction, and insisted that "such facilities do not exist in Syria."
After more than seven hours of investigation Wednesday, U.N. officials agreed the Syrian delegate was misquoted. "There was an interpretation error," U.N. associate spokesman Farhan Haq said. "There was no use of the word nuclear."
The U.N. expressed regret for the incident.
The mistake made headlines in the Middle East and heightened concerns over Damascus' nuclear ambitions. Those ambitions were under scrutiny following a Sept. 6 Israeli airstrike on an unknown target in northeastern Syria near the border with Turkey. Widespread reports say it may have been a nascent nuclear facility, a claim Syria has denied.
The incident started Tuesday night with a U.N. press summary in English of the disarmament committee's proceedings that paraphrased the Syrian representative as saying, "Israel was the fourth largest exporter of weapons of mass destruction and a violator of other nations' airspace, and it had taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack in Syria."
The Syrian representative spoke in Arabic, but Haq said Thursday the problem was not the translation from Arabic. An interpreter who worked from Arabic into French was fairly accurate, he said.
The problem occurred when interpreter translated the statement into English from French, Haq said.
"Action will be taken against that freelance interpreter to the fullest extent of the U.N. rules and regulations," Haq said, refusing to comment further on what that action might be.
Other U.N. staffers familiar with the rules said the freelance interpreter likely works on some kind of contract with the U.N. translation service that will not be renewed. The staffers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Earlier Thursday, U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas told reporters: "We regret the error and the department that deals with General Assembly affairs is looking further into the incident."
She confirmed that the Syrian Mission had discussed the matter with the Department of General Assembly and Conference Management. She added that any reporter who spoke Arabic and listened to the original tape recording of the Syrian delegate would realize the mistake.
According to the corrected text, the Syrian representative said: "...the (entity) that is ranking number four among the exporters of lethal weapons in the world; that which violates the airspace of sovereign states and carries out military aggression against them, like what happened on Sept. 6 against my country, such entity with all those characteristics and even more, has no right for its representative to go on lying without shame..."
The Syrian representative was replying to a speech to the committee on Monday by Israeli Ambassador Miriam Ziv, deputy director general for strategic affairs in the Foreign Ministry, who accused Syria of continuing to transfer weapons to Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/18/news/UN-GEN-UN-Syria-Israel.php
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If the airstrike is proved to be based on misunderstanding and misinterpretation, this would be a major embarassment for Israel. That would also prove that Israel is willing to strike its neighbours only based on false clues.
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