Stalled peace talks put U.N. mediation in jeopardy

GENEVA — With war trumping peace efforts in recent weeks in Syria, U.N.-mediated talks sputtered over another missed deadline to resume last week. Critics say patience is waning and prospects for a deal brokered by the United Nations are wearing increasingly thin.

U.N. special envoy Staffan de Mistura, entering his 27th month in the job, on Thursday shrugged off his inability to meet two target dates in August to get envoys from President Bashar Assad’s government and the main opposition back to the table in Geneva.

De Mistura blamed the increasing “militarization” of Syria’s crisis for the failure and again deferred to Russia and the United States to lead the way out.

“It’s not about deadlines, about dates,” he said. “It’s about realities.”

De Mistura, a veteran Swedish-Italian diplomat, has long touted his “three-legged table” approach to helping end a merciless 5½-year war: Reducing the violence, boosting humanitarian aid, and drawing Assad’s state and its enemies into a political process.

But Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, is on the cusp of disaster, and a truce that gave beleaguered Syrians a respite early this year is all but dead. U.N.-led humanitarian aid is trickling in, but only to the neediest spots. Turkish troops have crossed into Syria after years of staying out.

De Mistura said Assad now has “clearly a strategy” to force surrenders and evacuations, such as recent ones by residents of two Damascus suburbs, Daraya and Moadamiyeh, after years of grueling sieges.

De Mistura’s Aug. 1 target date for resuming talks that broke up in April passed, then another went by at the end of August.

No longer does he talk about timetables for getting the Syrian sides back to Geneva; he is focusing instead on getting the world community more involved. He says he’s preparing an unspecified, “quite clear political initiative” to present before the U.N. General Assembly this month in New York, to help the assembly “look the Syria problem straight in the eye.”

In other words, it’s back to the international drawing board, just as two important political dates lie on the horizon: votes for U.S. president and U.N. secretary-general.

On Aug. 26, de Mistura briefly dropped in on 12 hours of bilateral talks in Geneva between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. In their final news conference, they referred to de Mistura only once and Kerry canceled plans for a private meeting with him.

Critics have accused the U.N. of enabling Assad’s government, either by bolstering it with humanitarian aid that goes to his supporters or by naively thinking he and his backers will accept a political transition when the war has recently been going their way. U.N. officials say their job is to help all civilians in such war zones, whether in areas Assad controls or outside them.

Analysts acknowledge de Mistura always faced a tough task.

“No one will question Staffan de Mistura’s well-intentioned efforts, but one can certainly question the strategy adopted,” said Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Some of de Mistura’s questionable assumptions, Hokayem said, include believing that Russia and the U.S. could have sway with key regional players Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran, or that Moscow had the leverage or the will to steer Assad toward an accord. He noted how Russia has been both a participant, helping Assad’s fight, as well as an arbiter in the war.

“The U.N. is in an extremely difficult place right now … It largely has relied on the U.S.-Russia track,” Hokayem said from Beirut. “It is basically a hostage to battlefield developments, great-power politics and regional preferences.”

U.S. and Russian experts worked behind closed doors in Geneva last week on details of a joint plan, and some U.N. diplomats are hoping that President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin may provide some direction on Syria from a Group of 20 summit in China this weekend.

Jeffrey Martini, a Middle East expert at the Rand Corp. think tank, said Moscow and Washington’s main point of commonality is opposition to the Islamic State militant group, and until its extremists are quelled, a political process in Syria will be on hold.

Fighting the Islamic State is the “low-hanging fruit, more than the civil war … which is much more intractable,” Martini said.