Internationally sponsored talks between Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime and opposition elements seeking its overthrow ended Friday without any progress and with “the key positions… still very wide apart,” according to statements made by United Nations-Arab League Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi to a Geneva press conference. The New York Times noted that Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had “raised expectations” in January that humanitarian aid corridors could be established, but that the talks fell short of those goals.
“We haven’t made any progress to speak of,” said the United Nations mediator, Lakhdar Brahimi, after a final round of talks with both delegations. “The gaps between the sides remain wide; there is no use pretending otherwise.”
“The regime is responsible for the lack of real progress in the first round of negotiations,” said officials from the United States and others of the so-called London 11 nations that have supported the moderate Syrian opposition. “We express outrage at the maintaining, by the regime, of its ‘starve or surrender’ strategy.”
The U.N. press center spun the failure as positively as possible, declaring that U.N. officials hoped the Geneva II talks would “be just the first stage of talks” and emphasizing that “the opposition has agreed to return for a further session” though the regime’s participation remains uncertain. The failure was in one sense expected, given the initial positions and the publicly expressed red lines of each party: Damascus would not countenance a scenario under which Assad would be eased from power, while rebel groups all but conditioned talks on facilitating exactly such a transition. Walid al-Muallem, Syria’s foreign minister, Friday described the opposition as being “immature” for demanding Assad’s removal.
Walid al-Muallem, Syria’s foreign minister and chief negotiator, complained of the “immaturity” of the other party in demanding the removal of President Bashar al-Assad, and attacked the US for arming the rebels. He sneered at the opposition as “those who stay in five-star hotels abroad”, implying they were out of touch with events on the ground, especially where al-Qaida was fighting.
The information minister, Omran al-Zohbi, told pro-regime demonstrators outside the Palais des Nations, the UN’s European headquarters: “Neither in this round, nor in the next will they obtain any concessions from the Syrian delegation.”
Western powers had weeks ago been criticized for spending diplomatic capital and making concessions in order to coax Assad’s government and its allies to the table. That the talks collapsed for precisely the deadlocks predicted by skeptics – a fundamental gap between the regime and its opponents – may reinvigorate such criticism.
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