Traitor! Puppet! Insults set tone for new Syria talks

Beirut: It started with avoiding eye contact, moved onto hurling insults and ended with plans to start again 10 days later.

In one of their early face-to-face meetings in Geneva last month, negotiators from Syria’s government and its opponents abandoned talks about peace. Separated by more than 20 feet, they called each other traitors and puppets. Then came accusations of war crimes.

United Nations mediator Lakhdar Brahimi initially pleaded with both sides to stop, “but then he let us talk without interrupting in the hope that we will blow off steam,” said Murhaf Jouejati, a member of the Syrian opposition who was at the talks. “There were many moments of tension.”

On Monday, the Syrians were again in the Swiss city almost three years after the protests that morphed into a civil war began. With more than 130,000 people dead and another 2.4 million displaced, the clock is ticking to at least agree on humanitarian issues such as food for cities under siege.

The acrimony that marked the last talks, known as Geneva 2, and the inability of the two sides to make substantive progress don’t bode well, said Sami Nader, a professor of international relations at Beirut’s St. Joseph University.

Russia, which supports Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, and the US, which backs the opposition, put pressure on the two sides to attend the talks “but conditions are not yet ripe for a solution,” Nader said. “This is the bicycle diplomacy where you keep the wheels spinning until everything is ready.”

In his closing statement on January 31, Brahimi said the delegations were leaving Geneva with the gaps between them still wide. “There is no use pretending otherwise,” he said.

Meanwhile, more than 9.3 million people need humanitarian aid, the UN said in November.

The Al Assad government has increased the use of barrel bombs hurled from helicopters on residential areas, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The group, which relies on a network of activists on the ground, said in an email it recorded the deaths of 246 people by barrel bomb attacks in eastern Aleppo last week.

For its part, the opposition has been infiltrated by Al Qaida-inspired groups.

The leaders of the talks have traded blame for the lack of progress. The main sticking point is Al Assad’s fate. The opposition wants to focus on a transitional government with no role for the Syrian president.

The government delegation says the discussions should tackle terrorism, the term Al Assad’s people use to describe the range of rebel groups. Negotiations should then move on to Syria’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and rejection of foreign interference, something the opposition rejects.

“Why are they rejecting the most evident things which are needed in order to move forward?” Bouthaina Shaaban, Al Assad’s adviser, said in an interview. “Do they not care or are they not allowed to accept anything?”

Al Assad’s delegates also dismissed the opposition, led by the Syrian National Coalition, as ineffective. Foreign Minister Walid Mua’alem referred to it as a “small movement that calls itself opposition” and is detached from reality because they live in “five-star hotels abroad”.

Syria’s UN Representative, Bashar Jaafari, was the most senior official to attend the meetings. Mua’alem and Bouthaina were also in Geneva, though stayed away from the talks.

“They had no sense of responsibility,” Jaafari told state-run Syrian TV after the talks, referring to the opposition. “They would receive instructions from outside on pieces of paper delivered every 10 minutes in a comical scene.”

Haitham Al Maleh, an opposition member, said Jaafari used the same language during the meetings. “From what I saw in the first round, I have no hope of making any progress,” Al Maleh said in an interview from Bonn.

Brahimi said in a January 29 briefing that while the talks haven’t achieved much, the “ice is breaking slowly.”

“This isn’t to say that we’ve become friends and we’re going to kiss and hug soon,” opposition negotiator Jouejati said by phone from Washington. “We have now experienced talking to the enemy. But I don’t think that’s going to change much because they are under instructions to behave in the same way” in this round, he said.