Separate ‘last hope’ talks for Syria peace

AS NEGOTIATORS met in Vienna yesterday for two days of UN-backed talks over ending Syria’s bloody war, Western diplomats are ratcheting up the pressure for a solution – even as Russia pushes its own round of peace talks.

French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Wednesday that the Vienna meeting, after several failed rounds held in Geneva, was the “last hope” for reaching a political solution.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin has been waging a parallel diplomatic offensive, with a new round of talks at the Black Sea resort of Sochi set for January 30.

Ahead of the Vienna meeting, officials from the US, France and Britain, along with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, gathered in Paris on Tuesday to sharpen their response to the Russian initiative.

“The United Nations has to be put back in the middle of the game. There is no question of letting the Geneva process be hijacked, diverted or bypassed,” a French diplomatic source said.

In Vienna, representatives of the Syrian government, as well as opposition groups, are meeting once again for UN-led talks after the latest failed round in December.

But at least the opposition presented a united front at that meeting, and refrained from insisting that any solution required Assad giving up power, though regime officials refused to negotiate. Hoping to extract some progress in Vienna, where the talks have been moved for this round for logistical reasons, UN envoy Staffan de Mistura has put the subject of a new constitution on the agenda, avoiding the trickier subject of elections.

Next week, though, Russia will host its Syrian National Dialogue Congress, to which both representatives of Syrian civil society as well as Kurds have been invited.

Two months ahead of Russia’s presidential vote, Putin is hoping to show a foreign policy victory after securing a Syria military victory on the ground. Moscow says the goal of the Sochi talks, brokered alongside Iran and Turkey, is to “efficiently” sustain the UN-backed talks with concrete “results”.

The talks follow the Astana meetings in Kazakhstan, which led to four “de-escalation zones” agreed under a deal last year between rebel backer Turkey and regime allies Iran and Russia. But Syrian opposition leaders, who haven’t yet said if they will go to Sochi, doubt Moscow’s intentions and are worried about their security.

Washington, which has largely been absent in the peace process under President Donald Trump, has signalled a shift in recent weeks.

The US now says it will keep its roughly 2 000 soldiers in Syria to counter Iran’s influence and until Assad is no longer in power. — AFP