On the eve of the first Syrian peace talks in two years, the UN Syria envoy made an emotional plea on Thursday (January 28) for a peaceful resolution to the bloody and bitter five-year-long war.
However, earlier on Thursday the Syrian opposition said it will not attend peace talks due to begin in Geneva on Friday (January 29), derailing the first attempt in two years to hold negotiations aimed at ending the conflict.
An opposition council convening in Riyadh said its delegation would “certainly” not be in Geneva on Friday, saying it had not received convincing answers to its demands for goodwill steps including an end to air strikes and blockades.
The failure to get talks off the ground on time reflects the challenges facing peace-making as the conflict rages unabated on the ground.
The Syrian government is clawing back territory from rebels with military help from Iran and Russia. It has said it is ready to attend the negotiations, which U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura plans to hold in an indirect format.
Another opposition representative said the delegation might turn up if their demands were met in a day or two, but the chances of that appeared vanishingly slim.
The turn of events is a bitter blow to De Mistura, whose office issued a video message that he had sent to the Syrian people, in which he said that the latest talks simply “cannot fail” in resolving the conflict on behalf of the Syrian people.
“Five years of this conflict have been too much. The horror is in front of everyone’s eyes,” said the Italian.
“You must know also that we count on you to raise your voice, to say khalas (Arabic phrase describing something being completely finished), it is enough. To say to everyone who is actually coming from Syria and from abroad to this conference that there are expectations on them to make sure that their vision, their capacity of compromise in discussion for reaching a peaceful solution in Syria is now and they need to produce that. You have seen enough conferences, two of them already taken place. This one cannot fail.”
A spokeswoman for his office, speaking before the opposition statement, said the talks would begin on Friday as scheduled.
Before agreeing to talks, the HNC had been seeking U.N. guarantees of steps including a halt to attacks on civilian areas, a release of detainees, and a lifting of blockades. The measures were mentioned in a Security Council resolution approved last month that endorsed the peace process for Syria.
Despite the lack of Syrian opposition representation at the talks, de Mistura said in his video message that enough is enough.
“Enough buildings being destroyed, enough bombing my city where I am, and I do not who is bombing me; I just see bombs coming down, rockets, anything. Enough, my brother, my sister being humiliated and becoming a refugee and trying to take a boat and drowning in the Mediterranean when I love my country. Enough, when you see your children say I want to go to school and I cannot go to school because you are not allowing me to go because it is too dangerous,” said the impassioned de Mistura.
The talks were meant to start in Geneva on Monday but the United Nations has pushed them back to Friday to allow more time to resolve problems including a dispute over which groups should be invited to negotiate with the government.
The exclusion of a powerful Kurdish faction that controls wide areas of northern Syria has triggered a boycott by some of the invitees. Turkey had opposed the PYD’s participation on the ground it views it as a terrorist group.
The United States, whose Secretary of State John Kerry is among those pushing for negotiations to start on Friday, urged the opposition to seize the “historic opportunity” and enter talks without preconditions to end the war, which has also displaced more than 11 million people.
Diplomacy has so far had little impact on the conflict, which has spawned a refugee crisis in neighbouring states and Europe. De Mistura is the third international envoy for Syria. His two predecessors – Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi – both quit. (Reuters)