Putin: Western policies encouraging chaos in Syria

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused the West of pursuing policies that had destabilized states in the Arab world and now risked creating chaos in Syria. "The most important thing is that our partners cannot stop themselves," news agencies quoted Putin as saying at his local Moscow residence at a meeting with local residents of the Ryazan region in central Russia. "They have already created a situation of chaos in many territories and are now continuing the same policy in other countries -- including Syria," said Putin. Putin's tough talk comes a day after British Prime Minister David Cameron told the U.N. General Assembly that nations like Russia and China who vetoed sanctions resolutions on Syria had left a "terrible stain" on the United Nations' reputation. Countering the accusations, Putin used apocalyptic language to warn that Syria risked seeing the kind of bloody chaos that followed the Roman Empire's invasion of Carthage and the great city's fall in 146 BC. He described this as the world's first example "of wide-scale ethnic cleansing". One fable said the Romans then salted corpses to make sure that nothing ever grew there -- a process Putin described in bloody detail and warned might be repeated again in Syria. "The Roman empire not only seized and occupied Carthage, but even when it destroyed everything, it dismembered everyone and then poured salt over them to make sure that nothing grew back," Putin said. "We would really like not to see what happened in history many centuries ago repeated again today," the strongman Russian leader stressed. But he then argued that "something similar happens when strong countries try to force weak ones to follow their own rules of conduct and their moral codes." Putin has often used colorful and forceful language to make his point in disputes with the West over policies ranging from the conduct of war to his own human rights record. Cameron had used the U.N. General Assembly podium to effectively accuse Russia of having the blood of Syrian children on its hands "The blood of these young children is a terrible stain on the reputation of this United Nations," Cameron said in reference to a death toll that the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said has reached more than 30,000. "And in particular, a stain on those who have failed to stand up to these atrocities and in some cases aided and abetted President (Bashar Assad's) reign of terror." Russia continues to sell arms to Syria and has repeatedly rejected sanctions against is last major Arab world all as an example of biased policy in a civil war.