Friction and acrimony broke out almost immediately with the start of a long-delayed peace conference on Syria, punctuated by a testy exchange between the Syrian foreign minister and the leader of the United Nations, casting doubt on the prospects for easing hostilities or even opening up emergency aid corridors to help besieged civilians.Rico says we gotta take one of these:
The conference of delegates representing some thirty countries in the lakeside Swiss city of Montreux, already troubled by last-minute diplomatic stumbles, was described by Secretary of State John Kerry as a test for the international community. But the meeting had barely begun when the atmosphere grew even more charged over divisions between the United States and Russia and especially among the Syrians themselves.
The Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, who led his country’s delegation, was openly defiant, calling Syrian insurgents evil and ignoring appeals by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, to avoid invective or even yield the floor as a bell rang signaling that he had exceeded the allotted time for his remarks.
“You live in New York City, I live in Syria,” Moallem snapped after Ban asked that he conclude his speech, which lasted more than thirty minutes. After Moallem finished, Ban lamented that his injunction that participants take a constructive approach to the crisis “had been broken.”
Despite the lack of concrete progress, several Syrians expressed hope that the conference signaled the start of a process in which Syrians might eventually overcome their differences. “It’s a historic moment,” said Ibrahim al-Hamidi, a veteran journalist for the Saudi-owned al-Hayat newspaper, originally from the northern Syrian city of Idlib. “After three years of military struggle, when the opposition tried very hard to destroy the regime, and the regime tried very had to crush the opposition, this is the first time the two delegations sit down in one room under UN auspices.”
Another Syrian journalist, speaking on the condition of anonymity to express an opinion, pointed to the fact that many in the government delegation had probably never come face to face with an avowed opposition activist. “These people have never seen, let alone spoken, to anyone in the opposition,” he said. “They’ve never seen Haytham Maleh,” he added, referring to a former political prisoner in his eighties, who is a member of the opposition’s delegation here. “So for them to sit across the table for him is historic. It is as if people from the Stalinist system suddenly sat down with the White Russians.”
On the eve of the conference, Kerry, Ban, and Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, engaged in a calculated display of comity, a gesture that appeared intended to play down the United States’s successful lobbying effort to persuade the United Nations to withdraw its invitation to Iran to attend the meeting. “Do we look happy?” Lavrov quipped as the three held hands in for a Tuesday night photo opportunity.
But when the conference opened, the sharp differences re-emerged. Kerry said it was unthinkable that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria could play a role in a transitional administration that would govern the country as part of a political settlement. The establishment of such a transitional body by “mutual consent” of the Assad government and the Syrian opposition is the major goal of the conference. “The right to lead a country does not come from torture, nor barrel bombs, nor Scud missiles,” Kerry said. “And the only thing standing in its way is the stubborn clinging to power of one man, one family.”
But Lavrov challenged the American insistence that Assad be excluded from a possible transitional administration, arguing that the conference had to “refrain from any attempt to predetermine the outcome of the process”. Lavrov also revived the Russian argument that Iran, Assad’s regional ally, should be present, challenging the American position that Iran not be allowed to participate until it publicly endorses the mandate for the conference.
While the stark differences between the American and Russia positions were outlined in civil tones, that diplomatic restraint was abandoned when Moallem took the floor and launched into a diatribe in which he accused Arab nations of financing terrorism and conspiring to destroy his country. “They have used their petrodollars to buy weapons,” he said,” and to flood the international media with lies.” Moallem also accused insurgents of conducting “sexual jihad” by brainwashing women into becoming sex slaves and engaging in incest. After Ban repeatedly urged him to be concise, the Syrian foreign minister said he would conclude soon, adding that “Syria always keeps its promises”.
But he continued with his denunciations of the opposition. “Your glorious revolution,” he said sarcastically, “did not leave one single evil deed on earth that it did not do.”
Ahmad al-Jarba, the president of the Syrian opposition, opened with the story of Hajar al-Khatib, eleven, who he said had been shot by government forces as she rode a bus to school in Rastan, near the central city of Homs, in May of 2011, in the early days of the anti-Assad protests that morphed into a civil war. “Ten-thousand children have died because of the Syrian Army,” he asserted. Syrians “waited almost a year before they fought back,” he said, referring to the transformation of a largely peaceful protest movement to an armed insurgency. “Who, ladies and gentlemen, would accept to be violated in this manner? How long should they have waited? We want to be sure we have a Syrian partner in this room.” Jarba said, alluding to the conference’s goal of establishing a transitional administration. “Do we have such a partner?” he asked, noting that the opposition would never accept a role for Assad in a transitional administration.
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, which supports Syria’s opposition and is home to tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, reacted sarcastically to Moallem’s charge that Turkey was backing terrorists. “Yes,” he said, there were many “displaced terrorists in Turkey seeking food and refuge.”
Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, was asked during his own brief remarks to the conference if the first day had been a dialogue of the deaf. “No, one delegation was deaf and blind but no one else,” Fabius said, referring to Moallem’s speech. “And one delegation saw itself above all and responsible for nothing.”
Outside the conference, Assad’s supporters waved the flags of the Syrian government and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi'ite militant organization that is helping him. “God, Bashar, and nothing else!,” they screamed.
An opposition activist, Rami Jarrah, approached them with a television camera. When he asked if Assad should be tried for war crimes, they began shouting, calling him a Zionist, shoving and pushing. The police intervened, but not before one Assad supporter grabbed a phone from Jarrah’s colleague and threw it to the ground, breaking it.
Inside, the Syrian information minister, Omran Zoubi, said Syria was open to all journalists and would answer all questions. But when asked by a Syrian opposition journalist from Aleppo, Adnan Hadad, to comment on the deadly barrel bombs the military had used on neighborhoods in his city, Zoubi turned hostile. “This is the kind of question you ask if you support the terrorist groups,” Zoubi said. “Ask the Saudi foreign minister.”
and fly it into wherever Assad is sleeping these days, and deal with the aftermath...
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