World powers on Saturday agreed to a plan for a transition in Syria that could include current regime members, but envoy Kofi Annan doubted if Syrians would pick leaders “with blood on their hands”.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it clear that Washington did not see any role for President Bashar al-Assad in the new regime, even though there was no explicit call for him to cede power. “Assad will still have to go. He will never pass the mutual consent test,” said Clinton.
While Annan did not name names and said it was up to the Syrians to decide who they want in a unity government, he added, “I would doubt that Syrians… would select people with blood on their hands to lead them.” The deal came despite initial pessimism from participants about the prospects of the Geneva talks due to deep divisions between the West and China and Russia on the future of Assad.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said following the meeting that Moscow had convinced other parties to accept that the transition would be decided by Syrians and that no party should be excluded from the process. “How exactly the work on a transition to a new stage is conducted will be decided by the Syrians themselves,” he said. “There are no demands to exclude from this process any one group. This aspect had been present in many of our partners’ proposals. We have convinced them that this is unacceptable,” Lavrov said. A long-time Syria ally, Russia is loathe to cast Assad aside, even as relations between Moscow and Damascus have cooled. Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi also stressed that “outsiders cannot make decisions for the Syrian people”. As divisions threatened to scupper talks earlier Saturday, Annan had warned at the opening of the meeting that history “will judge us all harshly” if world powers failed to bridge their gaps on how to end the bloodshed in Syria and chart a transition.
A failure to unite also raised the spectre that the conflict that has claimed 15,800 lives over 16 months in the strategic Middle East country could spill over to the region and expose the world to fresh threats, said the former UN chief.
“History is a sombre judge – and it will judge us all harshly if we prove incapable of taking the right path today,” Annan told the five permanent Security Council members – the United States, Russia, Britain, China and France — as well as regional powers Qatar, Turkey, Kuwait and Iraq.
