Moscow: Russia is pushing Syrian President Bashar Al Assad to accept a limited power-sharing plan that would give his opponents some role in a transitional administration while ensuring internationally-recognised elections can take place next year, advisers to the government in Moscow said.
The more than three-week-old Russian air campaign, which is supporting a land offensive by Syrian forces and their Iranian allies, aims to change the balance of power on the ground enough to bring opposition representatives into the political process, the advisers told Bloomberg News. Russia considers Al Assad, 50, has every right to stay on and seek re-election, they said.
“Russia is already working on the political settlement, without waiting for the results of its military operation,” Lieutenant-General Leonid Reshetnikov, a long-time foreign intelligence veteran who heads a Kremlin advisory group, said in a phone interview from Moscow on Friday. “For such talks, we need to get the Syrian leader on board, because without him we can’t move forward.”
President Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Syria, Russia’s largest outside the former Soviet Union in decades, is posing a direct challenge to American power in the Middle East. Putin welcomed Al Assad to the Kremlin this week in the Syrian leader’s first official foreign visit since the civil war in his country began 4 1/2 years ago.
Russia’s latest initiative aims to coax the Syrian leader into softening his previous refusal to share power with the opposition. It could allow him to remain at the helm in spite of continued calls by the US and its allies for his ouster.
Russia isn’t willing to sacrifice Al Assad, said Vitaly Naumkin, a leading Moscow-based Middle East expert who chaired peace talks between some Syrian opposition groups and the government in the Russian capital earlier this year. Even if that view changed, Iran, the other key Al Assad backer, is “absolutely opposed,” he said.
Putin said on Thursday he had secured the agreement of Al Assad for Russia to work together with armed rebel groups that are ready to fight Daesh. The Russian president told participants at the Valdai discussion club in Sochi that the Free Syrian Army, which is backed by the US, fits this description.
“Of course the Syrian leadership must establish working contacts with those opposition forces which are ready for dialogue,” Putin said. “As far as I understood from the meeting with President Al Assad the day before yesterday, he is ready for such dialogue.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who met US Secretary of State John Kerry and counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan in Vienna on Friday, said the time had come to start “full-scale” talks between Al Assad and the “whole spectrum” of opposition groups. He denied any discussion on Al Assad’s departure.
Kerry, in a concession to Russia, said after the Vienna talks that Iran might be invited to join the Syria negotiations eventually. He said that differences remain over how a transition could work.
The US, the EU, Gulf allies and Turkey say Al Assad must step down as part of any resolution, though many of their leaders have recently modified the position and acknowledged that his departure wouldn’t have to be immediate. They’ve also accused Russia of using an air campaign that’s officially supposed to combat terrorists to target a wider range of opposition groups.
A United Nations plan for Syria endorsed by major powers in June 2012 calls for full executive powers to be transferred to a transitional governing body including the government and opposition. After constitutional changes, free and fair multi- party elections would be held, according to the so-called Geneva Communique.
The current successes of the Syrian army backed by Russian air strikes “permits the government to consolidate their position and should make the state more interested in progress of the political process,” Lavrov said on Sergey Brilev’s show aired on Russian state television Saturday.
Both parliamentary and presidential elections should take place in about a year’s time, said Reshetnikov, director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies.
The US, the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council all refused to recognise the previous election, in June last year, when Al Assad won another seven years in power with 89 per cent of the vote. Al Assad has lost control of most of the country during a civil war that’s left more than a quarter of a million people dead and triggered Europe’s worst migrant crisis since Second World War, though the areas he still holds contain a majority of the population.
“We’re not going to try and persuade Al Assad to refrain from taking part in the elections, which he has every right to do,” Reshetnikov said. “But we will have talks with Al Assad about ensuring a wider participation of people and parties opposed to him.”
