The Daily Star
Russia, Iran and Turkey, supporters of the main sides in Syria’s complex civil war, Tuesday failed to agree on the makeup of a U.N.-sponsored Syrian Constitutional Committee but called for it to convene early next year to kick off a viable peace process.
In a joint statement read out by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the trio met U.N. Syria peace envoy Staffan de Mistura in Geneva, they said the new initiative should be guided “by a sense of compromise and constructive engagement.” The foreign ministers of the three nations had hoped to seal their joint proposal on a committee – which could usher in elections – and win U.N. blessing for it.
But the statement by the three made no mention of the composition of the panel, pointing to lingering disagreement over lists of candidates submitted by Syrian President Bashar Assad and his rebel adversaries.
Mevlut Cavusoglu, speaking to Turkish state media, said that the three powers had made “important contributions” to the creation of the panel and that suggested names were assessed.
“The U.N. will of course carry out necessary work on the nominated names in the coming process,” Cavusoglu said.De Mistura, while addressing a separate news conference, made clear the three powers had not nailed down a workable political forum yet, after years of abortive attempts at ending a war that is thought to have killed over half a million people and displaced around half of Syria’s prewar 22 million population.
“I believe there is an extra mile to go in the marathon effort to ensure the necessary package for a credible, balanced and inclusive constitutional committee, and for including a balanced chairing arrangement and drafting body and voting threshold – to be established under U.N. auspices in Geneva.” De Mistura, who steps down on Dec. 31 after four years, has struggled since January to clinch a deal on the identity of 150 members of the committee.
He said he would brief U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Wednesday and the U.N. Security Council Thursday. He expected his successor Geir Pedersen to build on his work and “focus on the purely political aspect” at the conflict’s end.
The U.N. Syria envoy was authorized to put together a 150-member constitutional committee at a Russian-hosted peace conference in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Jan. 30 but its formation has been hindered by disagreements and the United Nations has accused the Syrian government of blocking efforts to draft a new constitution.
At issue is the 50-member delegation representing civil society, experts, independents, tribal leaders and women which the government has been objecting to. There is already agreement on the 50-member delegation from the government and the 50-member delegation from the opposition.
“Slowly, we are reaching a conclusion,” Cavusoglu said, suggesting there were still disagreements over which civil society groups would participate.
The Damascus government has previously brushed off U.N.-led efforts to set up such a committee.
An op-ed in Syria’s pro-government Al-Watan newspaper Tuesday underscored de Mistura’s tense relationship with Assad’s regime.
“In Damascus, we will never be sorry for Staffan de Mistura’s departure,” Al-Watan said.
De Mistura is “leaving with regret that he couldn’t destroy the Syrian state and couldn’t impose the West’s agenda on Syrians,” it continued, while chastising efforts to “impose a new constitution on Syrians.”
De Mistura tried to put a positive spin on his fraught peace push by suggesting that protracted rounds of diplomacy helped limit bloodshed in Syria.
The veteran U.N. diplomat said he had been contacted by an individual, whom he did not identify, who had conducted “various extrapolations” which indicated that U.N.-backed talks had saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
“The fact that you have been coming up constantly with your team with new meetings, preparatory meetings, inter-discussions, cease-fires that didn’t work and then worked and didn’t work again … we have been calculating that instead of 540,000 people [dead] there would have been 1.3 million,” de Mistura told reporters, quoting the unnamed individual.
A U.N. spokesperson later told AFP that de Mistura was citing an estimated death toll of 540,000 people for Syria that includes combatants.