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New Round of Syria Talks Off to a Slow Start New Round of Syria Talks Off to a Slow Start
(about 11 hours later)
GENEVA — Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations mediator for Syria, brought opposition and government representatives together here Tuesday for their first face-to-face meeting in the current round of peace talks. He said the talks were “laborious” and so far unfruitful. GENEVA — Face-to-face peace talks between the Syrian government and opposition representatives in Geneva failed to make progress on Tuesday, both sides said, each making statements indicating that they were still talking past one another.
After meeting with the delegations separately on Monday, Mr. Brahimi sought direct talks on measures to end the violence, a move that complemented the continuing efforts by aid agencies in Syria to complete the evacuation of civilians from the Old City in Homs, taking advantage of an extended cease-fire that is scheduled to last until Wednesday. “I don’t have much to tell you except that the beginning of this week is as laborious as it was the first week,” Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations mediator for Syria, told reporters afterward. “We are not making much progress.”
In the peaceful surroundings of lakeside Geneva, however, Mr. Brahimi ran into the entrenched positions of both sides. “I don’t have much to tell you except that the beginning of this week is as laborious as it was the last week,” Mr. Brahimi told reporters afterward. “We are not making much progress.” The first round of talks in late January achieved little beyond the not insignificant achievement of getting the two sides in a room to talk.
Opposition delegates largely echoed that view. “There was no progress,” Louay Safi, an opposition spokesman, told reporters. His delegation presented documents that it said implicated the government of President Bashar al-Assad in massacres and in acting in concert with terrorists. “We owe it to the Syrian people to move a little bit faster than we are doing,” Mr. Brahimi said, while acknowledging there was little he could do to force the pace. “How can you put a gun to their heads?” he said. “It’s their country.”
The government delegation refused to discuss matters of substance, he said, and also resisted a suggestion that Mr. Brahimi increase the daily negotiating sessions to two from one. This “again proved to us that these people are not here to come up with a political solution,” he said. Government and opposition representatives underscored his assessment, each one blaming the other for the impasse and trading barbed statements accusing one another of not being serious in the quest for peace.
An American official welcomed the meeting of all parties, but added in a statement, “We reiterate our position that the regime must stop evading a serious and constructive discussion on the full implementation of the Geneva communiqué, including the establishment of a transitional governing body.” Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad, called Tuesday’s meeting a “lost day” because the opposition had refused to discuss terrorism, the Syrian government’s priority for the talks. He said his delegation would not move onto other issues until this was addressed.
Mr. Safi said Wednesday’s talks would address the core issue of forming a transitional government as mandated by the 2012 Geneva communiqué, which forms the basis for the peace process. Mr. Brahimi, a seasoned mediator known for keeping his cards close to his chest, declined to specify what he had on the agenda for the next meeting. The government refers to the opposition as terrorists, and insisted that the talks address terrorism as a prerequisite for Syria’s joining them.
“We owe it to the Syrian people to move a little bit faster than we are doing,” Mr. Brahimi said, but wearily acknowledged there was little he could do to force the pace. “How can you put a gun to their heads? It’s their country,” he observed. Louay Safi, an opposition spokesman, said “there was no progress” because the government team did not accept Mr. Brahimi’s agenda or the opposition’s suggestion that he increase daily negotiating sessions from one to two. By their rigid insistence on dealing exclusively with terrorism, he said, they “again proved to us that these people are not here to come up with a political solution.”
Faced with deadlock in his diplomacy, Mr. Brahimi hailed the “success” in Homs, where a cease-fire between government and rebel forces has allowed humanitarian relief agencies to evacuate more than 1,150 residents, United Nations officials in Geneva reported on Tuesday. An American official agreed, saying in a statement “the regime must stop evading a serious and constructive discussion on the full implementation of the Geneva communiqué, including the establishment of a transitional governing body.”
Most left for the Homs suburb of Al Waer, Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency, said, but the Syrian authorities took 336 men to a school on the outskirts of Homs for questioning. So far, 41 of the men have been allowed to leave, and none have been taken away by the authorities, Ms. Fleming said, but United Nations protection officers were monitoring their situation. Mr. Safi said the talks on Wednesday would address this issue. His delegation has reportedly prepared a document setting out principles for the formation of a transitional government. But he expressed uncertainty whether the government delegation would even show up.
Mr. Brahimi, known for keeping his cards close to his chest, declined to specify his agenda for Wednesday but said that for the peace talks to advance they needed “a lot of outside help.”
That may come in talks later this week with American and Russian officials. The American under secretary of state for political affairs, Wendy Sherman, and the Russian deputy foreign minister, Gennady Gatilov, are to meet with Mr. Brahimi on Thursday and then possibly with the Syrian delegations, a proposition the opposition is reportedly ready to accept but which has yet to gain approval from the government team.
Analysts monitoring the talks say the American and Russian involvement could increase the pressure on both sides to move from shadowboxing to matters of substance.
Mr. Safi voiced hopes that Russia would step up the pressure on the Syrian government, which he said was responsible for getting the government to participate in the Geneva talks, and for supporting a draft resolution in the United Nations Security Council that calls for unhindered access for humanitarian aid to civilians and threatens sanctions against any entity obstructing them.
The Security Council discussed that resolution on Tuesday, but Russian support seemed unlikely. Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly I. Churkin, declined to say whether he would reject the resolution if it came to a vote, and Sergey V. Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of Russia, called it one-sided and “detached from reality.”
The resolution’s backers said they were determined to bring it to a vote, virtually inviting a Russia veto.
The French ambassador to the United Nations, Gerard Araud, said his country was determined to “move quickly” to a vote, without specifying when. “We want to have a substantial text not a provocative text,” he said, adding: “We would have wanted to have a much stronger text, a much stronger text, so we have made real effort to try to have consensus in the Council.”
Faced with deadlock in Geneva, Mr. Brahimi hailed the “success” on the ground in Syria, where a cease-fire between government and rebel forces has allowed humanitarian relief agencies to evacuate more than 1,150 residents from the besieged Old City neighborhood of Homs. United Nations officials in Geneva reported Tuesday that some 500 people were evacuated on Monday.
Relief agencies did not conduct any evacuations on Tuesday, Geoffrey Ijumba, the head of the Unicef branch in Homs said in a phone interview. But he said the operation had only “paused” and would resume on Wednesday. The cease-fire is scheduled to last through Wednesday.
Aid agencies are unsure how many civilians remain in Old City, but are prepared for up to 2,500 people, he added. “We have all the supplies that are required stockpiled and ready to go,” he said. After a mortar attack over the weekend killed 11 civilians and damaged two trucks carrying aid, much of the supplies are now being carried in armored SUVs and smaller trucks that can navigate the neighborhood’s narrow streets more easily, Mr. Ijumba said.
Most evacuees have left for the Homs suburb of Al Waer, said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency, but the Syrian authorities had taken 336 men considered to be of fighting age to a school on the outskirts of Homs for questioning. A United Nations spokesman, Martin Nesirky, said later that Syrian authorities had held 370 people and have since released 111 of them.
The United Nations said its staff has been in the school monitoring the treatment of the detainees but Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay, expressed “deep concern” at their detention and said that civilians not engaged in hostilities “must be free to move to safe areas.”