Who will stand up for poor, traumatised Syrians?

From the standpoint of optics, there was little to find fault in a fourway summit on Syria held over the weekend in Istanbul. But stripped of the grandeur of the Ottoman-era setting, what the meeting really produced was a bunch of feel-good bromides.

Given that the leaders of Turkey, Russia, Germany and France were in attendance to advance a mix of national, political and personal interests, the failure of the summit’s final communique to create even an illusion of problem-solving must have come as no surprise to ordinary Syrians.

Indeed, the appearance of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron at a post-summit press conference made for a jarring contrast with their appeal for a “Syrian-led and Syrianowned political process”, to end a conflict that has left more than 500,000 dead or missing and displaced half of the country’s prewar population.

Granted, to the extent that Merkel and Macron intended to use the event to manoeuvre the West back into the Syria dialogue, over which Turkey, Russia and Iran had steadily gained monopoly, they have achieved modest success.

Also, if the goal was to show they were doing something to tackle the root cause of the influx of refugees into Europe since 2015, then Merkel and Macron have built on their call in August for a “coordinated European solution” to the human-trafficking problems further downstream in the migration process.

Even so, the Istanbul summit, just like the ones before it, left unanswered the question of who really champions the people of Syria — the oppressed, the displaced, the traumatised and the homeless — on the global stage.

Invitations to Bashar Al Assad or his government officials are an absolute no-no, for the Syrian president presumably will be in bad odour with the international community for the rest of his life.

To all intents and purposes, Putin plays the role of Assad’s advocate at summits where Iran is not welcome. With Russia’s air force helping to swing the balance of power decisively in Assad’s favour and its diplomats helping him to dodge accountability for war crimes, Putin has plenty of skin in the game.

Still, it doesn’t help that Putin’s man in Syria is the face of a dynasty whose suffocating grip on public life, politics and the economy triggered the popular uprising of 2011 that morphed into a multi-sided civil war.

For their part, as long as they possessed firepower and influence on the ground, the moderate rebels were the main reason the exiled Syrian opposition groups got invitations to all major UN-organised conferences on Syria.

However, once it became clear that the rebels, after losing to Assad’s forces in a series of battles, had no territory left to speak of, the victors — Russia, Iran and Turkey — apparently decided to do away with even a token Syrian opposition presence at the negotiating tables.

Then there is Erdogan, who has been willing to put Turkish boots on the ground and back an assortment of Islamist factions, mainly to curb the power of left wing Kurds in Syria’s northeast. Thus, he has ensured he gets a vote on the final shape of postwar Syria.

However, the current conditions in the areas seized by Turkish government forces and their local proxies, namely the Kurdish-majority Afrin enclave in Aleppo and parts of Idlib, do not make for an ideal template for a stable, inclusive, multi-sectarian Syria.

Although he has generously kept Turkey’s doors open to Syrian dissidents and refugees, granted them access to free health care and promised citizenship to many of them, Erdogan has been unable or unwilling to find a politician or activist with the stature to speak for all Syrians.

The approximately one-third of Syrian territory in control of a US-backed joint Kurdish-Arab alliance, SDA, is easily the only part of the country free of the barbarism and wickedness of a Hobbesian world. Yet there are no takers for SDA representatives at Syria summits due to the Turks and Iranians’ implacable hostility to the liberal, secular Kurds’ right to self-expression.

Merkel and Macron deserve credit for ruling out a return of refugees to war-torn Syria until a political process is initiated.

Against this chequered backdrop, Merkel and Macron deserve credit for ruling out a return of refugees to war-torn Syria until a political process is initiated and for insisting on “assurances that there will be no persecution or arrests, that certain fundamental humanitarian conditions are fulfilled”. But while words are fine, it is actions that will count.

Will Assad’s military stop carrying out indiscriminate attacks on civilians in pursuit of his goal of recovering “every inch” of Syrian territory? Will he and Erdogan stop hounding the Syrian Kurds as well as avoid a direct military confrontation in Idlib? Will Putin hold Assad’s feet to the fire if he refuses to facilitate the creation of a constitutional committee?

With no practical answers to the above questions and the US content to watch from the sidelines, what the Istanbul summit highlighted is the absence of a credible Arab voice in the fitful process to determine Syria’s postwar future. Unless someone is always around to robustly defend the interests of war-weary Syrians, even the best-laid plans of foreign interlocutors are doomed to failure. — Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on Middle East