Letter from Ambassador of Egypt in London to The Guardian Newspaper, in response to its article published on the 20th of October 2016 concerning the fallacies on Egypt’s position towards Syria’s draft resolutions at the UN Security Council.

Let me acknowledge that by the time I went through the above-mentioned article, I felt compelled to refute at least some of the obvious and factual mistakes that have been unfortunately entailed in that article; and perhaps the most striking of all was claiming that Egypt had voted to block the French draft resolution on Syria at the UN Security Council…On the contrary; Egypt voted in favor of that resolution ( as well as for the Russian draft resolution due to what we view as common elements shared by both drafts )…Frankly I find it bizarre that such a straight forward fact has not been verified by the Guardian’s editor!

It worth noting that your article has also been misled by a totally false theory; that theory is trying to create an alleged link between Egypt’s vote in favor of the Russian draft resolution and the decision of the Saudi company “ Aramco ” to temporarily suspend its oil supplies to Egypt for October 2016…Again that fib has to be corrected and let me refer you to the statement issued by the Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum at the beginning of this Month, which obviously indicates that Aramco’s decision was made prior to the “ Syria vote” in the Security Council.

Hopefully those observations would be taken into account if the Guardian is really interested to change – or at least to alleviate – the prevailing perception in my Country about the Guardian being biased and lacking objectivity when it comes to the paper’s coverage of the events in Egypt.

Within the desired spirit of fairness and transparency; I would expect from a leading newspaper like the Guardian to publish my reply to the above-mentioned article.

Nasser Kamel

Ambassador of Egypt
London “