Syria’s first peace talks were on the brink of failing on Friday before they commenced with the opposition declining to meet President Bashar al-Assad’s delegation and the government threatening to bring its team home.
The opposition said it would not meet Assad’s delegation unless it first agreed to sign up to a modus operandi calling for a transitional administration. The government discarded the demand and said its negotiators would return home unless serious talks began within a day.
“If no serious work sessions are held by (Saturday), the official Syrian delegation will leave Geneva due to the other side’s lack of seriousness or preparedness,” Syrian state television quoted Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem as saying.
Friday was meant to be the first time in three years of war that Assad’s government and rivals would negotiate face to face but plans were casted off after the opposition said the government delegation must first sign up to a 2012 protocol, known as Geneva 1, that calls for an interim government to oversee a transition to a new political order.
“We have explicitly demanded a written commitment from the regime delegation to accept Geneva 1. Otherwise there will be no direct negotiations,” opposition delegate Haitham al-Maleh told a foreign news agency.
The government delegation met U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi separately, and said it rejected the opposition demand: “No, we will not accept it,” stated the Information Minister Omran Zoabi.
Brahimi, who met the government team for barely an hour, was due to talk to the opposition delegation separately later on Friday.
The opposition says it has come to discuss a transition that will remove Assad from power. The government says it is there only to talk about fighting terrorism – the word it uses for its enemies – and that no one can force Assad to go.
“There are no Syrian-Syrian talks at the moment,” said U.N. spokeswoman Alessandra Vellucci. “I cannot tell you anything about what will happen in the next few days.”
Even before the announcement that the direct talks were cancelled, the outlook was dim.
“The objective is for the first round of talks to last until next Friday, but expectations are so low we’ll see how things develop day by day,” a Western diplomat said.
Few expect the peace talks to result in a positive advancement to end the war, since Islamist fighters who disregard the Western and Arab-backed opposition are not present at the talks, and nor is Iran, Assad’s main regional backer.
But officials hope they can save the process by starting with more modest, practical measures to ease the troubles of millions of people on the ground, especially in areas cut off from international aid.
More than 130,000 people are believed to have been killed in the fighting, nearly a third of Syria’s 22 million people have been driven from their homes, and half are in need of international aid, including hundreds of thousands in areas cut off by fighting.
