Flickr/UN Geneva. Some rights reserved.The Geneva talks that began on 29 January aiming
to end the civil war in Syria were suspended and will be re-opened on 14 March. By the looks of the current status on the ground internationally,
the talks will be trapped in a dead-end street.
It would be extremely wrong to put the
responsibility for the suspension of the talks on the shoulders of the High
Negotiations Committee (HNC), which is composed of the members of the political
and armed opposition in Syria, because the Geneva Talks were a dead duck to
begin with. This op-ed will briefly articulate three reasons for this.
First it needs to be clarified that Russia
is not a reliable partner to put an end to this humanitarian crisis. The Russian
administration started to support the Syrian government with airstrikes in
September 2015; they continued to carry out airstrikes in Syria while a number
of peace talks were on-going in Geneva a while ago. It goes without saying that
their presence in Syria hampered peaceful international efforts.
Moreover, as long as Russia keeps its
involvement in the Syrian quagmire dependent solely on national interests rather
than promoting a humanitarian point of view to stop the civil war, there is no
point gathering people in Geneva to find solutions. If this continues to be the
case, we will be reading more news about civil casualties in Syria.
If peace is yearned for in Syria, first of
all, the Syrian government and all opposition groups must have a seat at the
table without any wrangling. However, after five years of great suffering,
these two parties, claiming to represent the Syrian people, do not have enough
courage and desire to build a peaceful future for Syria.
Secondly, we have witnessed many
high-profile foreign policies fail in Syria. Although analysing these failures
is not the objective of this piece, we would like to draw attention to one
point: in the first two heated years of the Syrian war, the Islamic State in
Iraq and Levant (ISIL) was a vague threat and Bashar al-Assad was a “hostis
humani generis” (enemy of mankind) according to western countries. In
this vein, they backed the Syrian opposition, never articulating a need for
“peace talks” at the time.
When Assad maintained power and the ISIL
became the ultimate threat in the region, making them the top target for western
powers, Russia and Syria found no point in initiating a peace process. However,
the west has always been adept at disguising their failures, and today their
Syrian arguments are dangerously being based on the notion of “the lesser evil”,
with the international media unsurprisingly covering many stories about western
leaders stating that ‘Syria with Assad is more tolerable than a Syria under the
dominance of ISIL’. There is no doubt that a so-called ‘Geneva III’ process
formed by this western vision would not pan out.
In the current refugee crisis, the west
(specifically the EU) has tried to ‘bribe’ Turkey to close the borders and keep
the millions inside the country, rather than analyse the underlying reasons for
the human flood and making long-term plans. This, indeed, reveals the mentality
of the west towards the Syrian crisis.
Thirdly, there was no consensus on which
countries and groups would be invited and participate in the Geneva talks. As
many researchers observed, the Syrian opposition is not monolithic but consists
of many dissimilar groups, and some of them are not currently represented in
the High Negotiations Committee. This being the case, there are many concerns about
the fact that, even if the peace talks were to transform into a ‘political
process’, this process may not be embraced on the ground.
Moreover, this implies that the Geneva talks
were mainly aimed at getting a (quick and cursory) political deal rather than
advancing a framework to address the roots of the Syrian issue. The main
motivation behind the Geneva talks cannot be simply ‘to restore political order
in Syria’ – more than a quarter of a million people died in the Syrian civil
war.
The states who are parties to the Geneva talks
must review their approaches regarding Syria once again. They must take
responsibility by all means to prevent Syria from becoming a baleful legacy in
the history of mankind. Otherwise, Syria will be the ‘Rwanda’ of the 21st century.
