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U.S. and Russian Diplomats Confer With Syria Mediator
Security Council Urged to Act on Syria Policy
(about 5 hours later)
GENEVA — Russia and the United States pledged their help in reviving stalled Syrian peace negotiations, United Nations’ mediator Lakhdar Brahimi reported Thursday, but their deliberations did nothing to dispel uncertainty about how the process will proceed or produce any initiative to ease the plight of war-weary Syrians.
UNITED NATIONS — The hard-won humanitarian cease-fire in the Syrian city of Homs — the sole success that occurred during the peace talks in Geneva — cannot be considered “progress,” the United Nations top official for emergency operations said Thursday evening as she urged the Security Council to ensure that aid workers can do their work without getting shot.
Mr. Brahimi’s consultations with Russian deputy foreign minister Gennady Gatilov and undersecretary of state for political affairs Wendy Sherman came as intense fighting in Syria caused a spike in casualties and a new flood of refugees. And while the two powers that set the peace process in motion have a common purpose in moving it forward, Russia and the United States have squared off in the U.N. Security Council over a resolution intended to open access for relief agencies to deliver humanitarian aid to civilians worn down by three years of conflict.
“Even wars have rules,” said Valerie Amos, the United Nations official, after briefing members of the Security Council, as the 15-member body weighs two competing resolutions on humanitarian access to areas ravaged by the Syrian conflict, which began with protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011.
Mr. Brahimi was due to meet the warring factions again on Friday but as the second round of peace talks ground towards a close the only progress he could report was that the warring parties were a little more used to the presence of the other side. “I don’t think any friendships have developed yet,” he said drily.
And in Geneva, the United Nations mediator for Syria warned that the intransigence of the Syrian government risked collapsing the peace talks.
“Failure is always staring at us in the face,” he observed.
At the United Nations, Australia, Jordan and Luxembourg proposed one draft, which called for punitive measures on individuals and entities that obstruct aid delivery and naming specific besieged communities in need of aid. Russia, which had just days earlier dismissed that text as “a nonstarter,” proposed its own late Wednesday, lacking enforcement language and making no mention of the besieged communities.
The immediate sticking point in Geneva is government delegates’ insistence that talks must focus on terrorism and the opposition’s determination to discuss the formation of a transitional governing body. The government has often used the term to describe all armed resistance to its rule so the opposition is loath to frame the discussion as a fight against terrorism. It wants instead to talk about political transition, a proposition dismissed by the government’s spokesmen this week as “a recipe for disaster.”
Security Council diplomats said they hoped the two texts could be reconciled. That would allow Russia to avoid vetoing a resolution on aid during the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Mr. Gatilov, after meeting the government delegation on Wednesday, said both issues were important, Syria’s state news agency, SANA, reported , but the extent of Russia’s leverage with President Bashar al-Assad’s government and how much political capital it is ready to expend in using it remains a matter of conjecture.
On Thursday, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly I. Churkin, demurred when asked about the differences. “We would not say we are too far apart,” he told reporters. “One thing which unites us is the realization that the humanitarian situation in Syria is very grave and additional efforts need to be taken in order to improve it.”
Ms. Sherman was due to meet opposition representatives later on Thursday but hopes that the three diplomats would be able to hold a joint session with both of the warring parties in a bid to inject some momentum into process looked unlikely to go ahead.
His American counterpart, Samantha Power, likewise declined to discuss details.
The Syrian government team which is led by foreign minister Walid Muallem rejected the idea, an official following the talks said.
Last October, the Council unanimously approved a presidential statement urging humanitarian access, though it lacked an enforcement mechanism. Since then, Ms. Amos said in her strongest remarks on the subject to date, 15 aid workers have been killed, little help has reached those in need and humanitarian laws have been “intentionally and flagrantly violated” by all parties in the war.
The divergence on terrorism, meanwhile, has spilled over to the Security Council, where Russia has rejected an American-backed resolution threatening sanctions against anyone obstructing humanitarian aid deliveries and has submitted its own draft resolution combining the issue of humanitarian aid with calls to condemn terrorism.
Ms. Amos stopped short of calling for a resolution with enforcement measures. She said only that the Council should exercise “levers” and that it should be different from last fall’s presidential statement.
“Terrorism is certainly no less acute a problem” than the need for aid access to blockaded areas in Syria, Russian foreign minister Sergey V. Lavrov said, adding that Russia’s draft laid out “our vision of the role the Security Council can play if we want to foster a solution to the problems and not antagonise one side or the other.”
The debate occurred as the mood darkened in Geneva, where it was clearer than ever that modest humanitarian gains had yielded no political progress. Lakhdar Brahimi, the Syria mediator, told senior United States and Russian officials in a “very grim” meeting that the Syrian government has so far refused to compromise even on the agenda, two Western diplomats said.
The Russian draft, which was circulated Wednesday evening, makes no mention of the specific cities that are besieged, as the original draft does, nor does it condemn barrel bombs. The first draft singles out the Syrian government on several occasions, especially for thwarting the delivery of aid into besieged towns and cities. Russia’s takes out those references to the government and establishes parity of blame.
Mr. Brahimi was “very blunt,” said one diplomat, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. He added that he believed Mr. Brahimi might call off the talks rather than risk his credibility presiding over an empty process if Russia cannot push the Syrian government to compromise. The Russians made no promises, the diplomat added.
The original draft condemns terrorism and singles out Al Qaeda, as well as the Hezbollah and Quds Force, which both enjoy Iranian support and fight on behalf of the Assad government. Russia mentions only Al Qaeda.
A local cease-fire allowed United Nations convoys to deliver a month’s worth of food to people trapped by a two-year government blockade of the rebel-held Old City of Homs, and to evacuate 1,400 people. Several hundred, however, were then held for questioning by security forces in a nearby shelter.
There are no punitive measures in the Russian draft text. While the first draft uses the term “demands” to express what the Security Council wants from the warring parties, the Russian draft uses the toned-down phrase “calls upon.”
“I find it difficult to describe it as progress. Our people were under fire,” Ms. Amos said. “We evacuated 1,400 people. There is nearly quarter of a million more people to go. We provided food and medicines to 2,500 people. There are over three million people in hard-to- reach communities.”
The Russian text also commends the Syrian government for honoring a presidential statement that the Council passed in October, urging the warring parties in Syria to let in badly needed aid. The United Nations’s aid chief, Valerie Amos, has since said that she regretted that there has not been greater cooperation from both sides, and has lately described the siege as “heinous.”
Hours earlier, the top United Nations official in Syria, Yacoub El Hillo, said that he hoped the warring parties would strike similar deals elsewhere, as long as they allowed not only evacuations but also aid delivery to residents who wish to stay.
Ms. Amos is scheduled to brief the Council this afternoon. Walking into the Council this afternoon, Vitaly I. Churkin, looked unruffled, smiled at reporters, and asked how negotiations are going, said simply: “Very well.”
Yet critics say that framing the Homs deal as a confidence-building step to jump-start political talks served chiefly to give an empty process the veneer of substance while leading only to a modest delivery of aid. Advocates of Mr. Brahimi’s choice to pull the Homs aid talks into the Geneva spotlight contend that without the added international scrutiny, perhaps no aid would have reached Homs at all.
Ambassadors representing the five permanent members of the Council, plus the three who drafted the first draft resolution, met at the Russian mission this afternoon.
Mark Malloch-Brown, a former United Nations deputy secretary general, insisted that while the truce was useful, the only way to go forward was a Security Council resolution with teeth. “There has to be consequences for noncompliance,” he said.
As talks here paused, awaiting the outcome of the senior officials’ meetings, fighting intensified in Syria. Nearly 5,000 people have died in Syria in three weeks since the meetings began in Geneva, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-government group base in Britain that tracks the conflict through networks on the ground.
The Homs deal was a victory, if a modest one, for international aid workers who had insisted that humanitarian principles required delivering food to the blockaded area, not just letting civilians leave, as the government had initially proposed.
The government’s barrel bombing of Aleppo alone had killed 421 people in the last 12 days, it said, including 109 children under the age of 18. The United Nations refugee agency said fighting in northern Syria had caused a surge in refugees crossing into Turkey and it was bracing for a similar influx in Lebanon following a burst of fighting in the Qalamoun area along the border on Thursday.
As long as aid delivery continues to be twinned with evacuations, said Mr. El Hillo, who personally supervised the Homs deliveries and evacuations, the deal should be used as a model. “We certainly would like to do that,” he said in a telephone interview from Damascus, Syria, adding that future deals should be supported internationally and will mean little unless aid deliveries continue regularly.
Anti-government fighters reported a new development there, the use of so–called barrel bombs, large payloads of TNT often dropped from helicopters, on the town of Yabroud. The town is a rebel stronghold that had long ruled itself but has come under fire during a government offensive that has taken back other towns in the mountainous area.
He said the Homs deal was successful in insisting that civilians should be allowed to leave war-torn areas and also that aid must be delivered to those who wished to stay — principles that should be applied to aid everyone under blockades, including by rebels.
Abu al-Majed, a rebel leader in the area, said by telephone that many civilians had left the area, heading to the Lebanese border town of Arsal or to Damascus, depending on their security situation. He said that government reinforcements, including 20 tanks, were arriving on the outskirts of Yabroud from Damascus and Homs, backed by fighters from the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. In recent days, more than 50 aerial bombardments have hit Yabroud, fighters said.
Yet other United Nations officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to express concerns about policy, said that given the poor record of aid access, deals could end up lopsided, with more evacuations than aid deliveries.
In the northern city of Aleppo, 51 people, including 13 rebel fighters, were killed by government bombardment in the city of Aleppo, according to the Observatory. The flow of people fleeing Aleppo for the Turkish border has intensified during weeks of heavy barrel-bomb bombardment there, according to aid workers near the border.
The deal “puts all of us in a difficult position,” a United Nations official in Geneva said. “There’s deep unease about where it will end.”
In Syria, the governor of the central city of Homs told Reuters that a ceasefire there that began Friday to allow aid access to blockaded neighborhoods had been extended for an additional three days.
The governor, Talal al-Barazi, said that 1,400 people had been evacuated from the besieged Old City since last Friday, when the U.N.-brokered ceasefire began. But he said 220 were still detained for questioning. Monitors have been present for the questioning, according to American officials, who called for continued international attention to make sure those detained — mainly males considered to be of fighting age, do not disappear into indefinite detention.
The so-called humanitarian pause in Homs, so far the only concrete achievement of the Geneva talks, has been controversial. Some government supporters say it amounts to feeding enemies, and opponents contend it is a government scheme to displace or imprison residents and then obliterate whoever and whatever remains.
Diplomatic pressure is building to allow humanitarian agencies to deliver aid to more than six million Syrians in need of support after nearly three years of brutal conflict, including a quarter of a million people believed to be trapped in besieged areas.
