Can the Geneva meeting on Syria accomplish anything?
Kofi Annan, the UN special envoy to Syria, says he is 'optimistic' the emergency meeting on Syria will yield results, but the parties involved have already staked out some irreconcilable demands.
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Annan has not yet proposed a formal transition plan; the intention is to lay out the parameters at the meeting. But details of the proposal began leaking out earlier this week, angering Russia, according to the Times.
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Middle East Editor
Ariel Zirulnick is the Monitor's Middle East editor, overseeing regional coverage both for CSMonitor.com and the weekly magazine. She is also a contributor to the international desk's terrorism and security blog.
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Hints of Mr. Annan’s possible route to a diplomatic compromise emerged Wednesday when Reuters quoted unidentified diplomats as saying Russia and other powers supported his idea of a Syrian government of national unity that would include opposition figures but exclude those whose participation would undermine it — language that clearly was meant to refer to President Bashar al-Assad. But details were vague.
Part of the purpose of the meeting, a diplomat based in Geneva said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, is to uncouple the process of achieving a cease-fire from the increasing demands that Mr. Assad’s government be held to account for human rights abuses, which a United Nations panel said Wednesday have continued on “an alarming scale.”
“I consider it a sign of an unscrupulous approach to diplomacy that there are leaks to the press about certain formulas, certain ideas, that are being recommended as part of a final document by specific countries,” Mr. Lavrov said.
Bloomberg reports that, according to three UN officials, all of the meeting participants agreed to an outline of a unity government plan from Annan. “The conflict must be resolved through peaceful dialogue and negotiation alone,” the outline, which Bloomberg obtained, says. “Conditions conducive to a political settlement must now be put in place.”
Russia denied any sort of agreement. A foreign ministry official told Bloomberg that it made an alternative proposal and won't back a plan that forces Assad to step down. But two UN diplomats said that despite public statements that Russia remains opposed to regime change, a shift has occurred behind closed doors because "Russia is keen to engineer a soft landing to raise its standing in the region by acting as a peace broker."
Russian anger stems from the fact that "the Russians do not like to have deals they are cutting in private to be exposed in public" before they are ready, Jeff Laurenti, a UN analyst at the Century Foundation in New York, told Bloomberg. “They are very concerned that their so-called partners on the other side may be leaking it to force their hands to do more than what they have signaled they were ready to do.”
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