Little sign of constructive action despite Ban Ki-moon’s call to seize ‘fragile chance’
Syria’s bloody crisis moved no nearer to resolution at the Geneva II peace conference on Wednesday as the Damascus government insisted that Bashar al-Assad would not step down and called western-backed rebels fighting to overthrow him terrorists and traitors to their own people.
Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, described an all-encompassing disaster in Syria but there was little sign in a long day of formal speeches of the constructive action he urged to find a way out of a conflict that has already cost an estimated 130,000 lives, made millions refugees and destabilised the Middle East.
Our purpose was to send a message to the two Syrian delegations and to the Syrian people that the world wants an urgent end to the conflict, Ban said in a closing press conference at the talks in Montreux. Enough is enough, the time has to come to negotiate, Ban said. We must seize this fragile chance.
John Kerry, the US secretary of state, spoke of the extraordinary suffering in Syria and stated flatly that Assad would have to go: There is no way the man who has led a brutal response to his own people can regain the legitimacy to govern, he said. One man and his henchmen can no longer hold an entire nation hostage.
Kerry also called on Syria to explain the images of thousands of emaciated corpses with numbers scrawled on their chests, part of a report prepared by three senior international legal figures – reported by the Guardian and CNN this week – into suspected war crimes.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called on all external players to encourage Syrians to reach an accord, and warned that western interference in the Middle East would turn back the clock.
But the most uncompromising speeches came from Syrian speakers. No one can grant or withdraw the legitimacy of the president … other than the Syrians themselves, Walid Muallem, Assad’s foreign minister, told 40 colleagues in a heavily-guarded hotel overlooking Lake Geneva. This is their right and duty. The west, he added, claims to fight terrorism, but it secretly feeds terrorism.
In Syria, the wombs of pregnant women are cut open, the foetuses killed. Women are raped, dead or alive … Men are slaughtered in front of their children in the name of the revolution. The US state department later condemned what it called Muallem’s inflammatory rhetoric.
Outside the media centre a few dozen Syrians demonstrated noisily in favour of Assad. In spirit and fire, we well redeem you Bashar, went one slogan. Another was adapted from the early days of the Arab spring protests in Libya. Allah, Bashar, Syria, and that’s enough, they chanted.
Syrian flags flew alongside the yellow clenched fist and Kalashnikov banner of Hezbollah, whose forces are fighting with the Syrian army. Across the road, a handful of opposition supporters, sheltering behind Swiss gendarmes, hurled back abuse. Further along the lake shore, the campaign group Avaaz dramatised a call for a ceasefire with a macabre enactment. In it a man in an Assad mask stood gloating over a line of mock corpses, wrapped in bloody shrouds in the wreckage of a house hit by shell fire, domestic detritus scattered amid the charred ruins.
Inside the conference, Muallem argued with Ban when the UN chief requested he keep his speech within the prescribed time limit. You live in New York. I live in Syria, Muallem retorted. I have the right to give the Syrian version here in this forum. He also launched a furious attack on the opposition. If you want to speak in the name of the Syrian people, you should not be traitors … or agents in the pay of enemies of the Syrian people, he said.
Ahmad Jarba, president of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, condemned the violence Assad had unleashed from the moment protests began in March 2011 and accused him of employing international mercenaries such as Hezbollah as well as backing al-Qaida groups to divide and smear his enemies. It is we who are engaged in a struggle against terrorism, Jarba said. The revolution is facing Assad’s terrorism and the terrorism he has brought into Syria.
Syrian state TV broadcast Jarba’s speech on a split screen that showed the opposition leader on the right, under the heading Montreux, Switzerland, and on the left footage of death and destruction under the heading Terrorist crimes in Syria. It did not identify him.
The long-awaited Geneva II conference was intended to launch a peace process in which the Syrian government and opposition negotiate the creation of a transitional governing body by mutual consent – a formula first agreed at the Geneva I conference 18 months ago but never implemented.
Nothing suggested this will be possible. UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi will meet separately with both Syrian sides on Thursday to see if they can even sit together in face-to-face talks due to begin on Friday at UN headquarters in Geneva. But diplomats say the best that can be hoped for is that direct talks will not collapse at once, and that they will be sustained by pressure from the respective backers of each Syrian side. It is still unclear, however, whether the protagonists will even be in the same room or hold proximity talks with the UN mediator, Lakhdar Brahimi, shuttling between them.
Brahimi suggested that there has been some movement on humanitarian issues. We have had some fairly clear indications that the parties are willing to discuss issues of access to needy people, the liberation of prisoners and local ceasefires, he said.
Speaking at the close of Wednesday’s talks, Oxfam’s Shaheen Chughtai said: It took a monumental diplomatic effort to make today’s conference happen. Grandstanding aside, the Montreux conference could mark the first step on a long, rocky road to the resolution of this devastating crisis.