What happened at the Geneva I conference?

Montreux: The international conference on Syria held in Geneva in June 2012 was intended to pave the way to a peaceful solution to the country’s civil war, but the deal reached was never implemented.

The foreign ministers of the five permanent UN Security Council members, along with several Middle East countries, made clear their condemnation of the violence against the civilian population in the closing document.

Participants in the Action Group for Syria unanimously declared that they were “committed to the sovereignty, independence, national unity and territorial integrity of Syria.”

They also said they were “determined to work urgently and intensively to bring about an end to the violence and human rights abuses and the launch of a Syrian-led political process.”

All parties to the conflict should fully implement the six-point plan put forward by UN peace envoy Kofi Annan in March 2012, it said.

Annan’s plan called for an end to the violence, a political process to resolve the conflict, the release of prisoners, unimpeded access for humanitarian organisations and freedom of assembly and the right to demonstrate.

The Geneva conference’s roadmap for a political transition process in Syria included the formation of a transitional government in Damascus made up of representatives of the current regime and the opposition.

At Russia’s insistence, Syrian President Bashar Al Assad would not be excluded from this. This meant that the Western powers were unable to implement what was from their point of view the most important element of Annan’s peace plan.

Representatives of the Syrian opposition had insisted before the conference that they would not accept that those responsible for crimes against humanity went unpunished. For them, participation in a transitional government with Al Assad was out of the question.

Rejecting the outcome of the conference, the opposition immediately announced it would step up its armed struggle.