Global envoy holds fresh Syria meet as peace talks loom

UN-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi was holding fresh talks Friday with US and Russian negotiators as they seek to smooth the way to a January peace conference on Syria.

The veteran mediator’s intensive shuttle diplomacy between Geneva, the Middle East and the capitals of world powers last month helped finally set January 22 as the start date for talks in Switzerland.

On the eve of Friday’s meeting, Brahimi underscored that the Syrians themselves would have to drive the talks between the government and rebels.

“There’s a necessity for national ownership of this process,” he said at the UN in Geneva.

Brahimi and Jeffrey Feltman, the UN’s political affairs chief, were to meet with Russian deputy foreign ministers Mikhail Bogdanov and Gennady Gatilov, and senior US State Department official Wendy Sherman.

Talks were also scheduled with fellow UN Security Council permanent members Britain, France and China, plus envoys from Syria’s neighbours Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, the European Union and the Arab League.

All eyes are on the potential list of participants from Syria, amid opposition rifts between supporters of negotiations and hardliners who say even talking to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is a betrayal.

It was not clear how much headway Friday’s talks would make on the participant issue, which also centres on which Middle Eastern countries should take part — beyond Syria’s neighbours who have taken in the overwhelming majority of the war’s 2.4 million refugees.

The Syrian war began after a bloody March 2011 crackdown on Arab Spring-inspired democracy protests, and to date has claimed over 126,000 lives.

Besides the refugees, millions within Syria have been driven from their homes and rely on foreign aid to survive.

There has been persistent wrangling over a role in the talks for Assad’s staunch ally Iran, also a leading backer of the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah fighting alongside Syrian government forces.

Russia, a key backer of Assad’s regime, has sought to have Iran at the table, while Western nations are pushing for Saudi Arabia to take part.

Moscow’s strong support of the regime in Damascus was again highlighted Thursday when it blocked a US-sponsored UN Security Council statement denouncing Assad’s government for its brutal military offensive on the northern city of Aleppo, where scores of civilians have been killed in recent missile and “barrel bomb” attacks.

Saudi Arabia and fellow Sunni monarchies in the Gulf, such as Qatar, are major backers of the rebels in Syria’s civil war, which has morphed into a sectarian battle between Islam’s two main branches.

Brahimi’s spokeswoman Khawla Mattar was tight-lipped this week about the guest list for the upcoming talks.

“Those countries that the United Nations, with the initiating states, have agreed upon will be invited,” she told reporters.

Whichever foreign countries take part, Brahimi has underscored that they will only be invited to the January talks’ opening day, before the Syrians meet.

The so-called Geneva II conference is meant as a follow-up to one held in June 2012, where world powers issued a call for a Syrian transition government.

But Syria’s warring sides failed to agree on whether Assad or his inner circle could play a role in the process, and amid spiralling fighting plans for Geneva II repeatedly were put on hold.

The January 22 session will in fact be held in Montreux, a city 90 kilometres (about 60 miles) northeast of Geneva.

The negotiations involving the two Syrian delegations and Brahimi will continue at the UN in Geneva on January 24 but it remains undecided how long they will last, Mattar said.