UNITED NATIONS ? Ambassadors to the U.N. Security Council gathered behind closed doors Wednesday in hopes of hammering out language they can all accept in a resolution on Syria.
Envoys heading into the afternoon session made clear they still disagreed on some key issues, especially the current draft's call for Syrian President Bashar Assad to step aside.
Indian Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri said the text needed to state clearly that armed opponents, as well as Assad's security forces, were responsible for the continuing bloodshed in Syria.
As to the demand that Assad leave power, Puri said: "How (do you) get both sides to agree if the precondition for one side is to step down?"
Portuguese Ambassador Jose Filipe Moraes Cabral said he believed that "good conditions" exist for consensus. With more lives and the possibility of civil war in the balance "there are too many things at stake for us not to arrive at a reasonable compromise," Cabral said.
Russian officials have said they'll oppose the resolution if it contains any hint of a military intervention or regime change in Syria, a major ally.
Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters before Wednesday's session that a change in the current language calling for Assad to step aside "would make it easier for us" to approve.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the foreign ministers of Britain and France joined Arab League officials in a high-level meeting at the U.N. urging council members to approve the resolution.
Clinton reiterated Wednesday that it was important for the council to move quickly.
"Every member of the council has to make a decision, whose side are you on? Are you on the side of the Syrian people ... or are you on the side of a brutal dictatorial regime?" she said.
Clinton has said she will discuss the resolution with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov at the Munich Security Conference in Germany this weekend.
Amnesty International called on Russia to stop what it said was its "unconscionable" obstruction of U.N. efforts to help end the bloodshed in Syria. The U.N. said several weeks ago that at least 5,400 people have been killed in the 10-month-old government crackdown on a civilian uprising.
Russia and China used a double veto in October to block an earlier Security Council resolution condemning the violence in Syria.
"Russia's threats to abort a binding U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria for the second time are utterly irresponsible," Jose Luis Diaz, Amnesty International's U.N. representative, said Wednesday.
"Russia bears a heavy responsibility for allowing the brutal crackdown on legitimate dissent in Syria to continue unchecked," he said.
Diaz noted that Russia is the Syrian government's largest overseas arms supplier and reportedly has continued arms shipments to the country in recent weeks.
Martin Nesirky, the spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general, said Wednesday that Ban Ki-moon hopes the international community, and the Security Council in particular, will respond to the violence in Syria with "a unified voice."
"He's concerned that as time passes more people are being killed," Nesirky said. "The need for action is because of the need to stop the killing."
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Associated Press writers Eileen Alt Powell at the United Nations and Bradley Klapper in Washington contributed to this report.
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