The Geneva 2 conference on Syria began ominously on Wednesday, when representatives of the Bashar al-Assad regime and the Syrian opposition refused to meet each other and resorted to angry speeches, which threatened to forestall the formal talks scheduled to begin on Friday. The failure to get them face-to-face was compounded by the government delegation threatening to pull out if “serious” discussions didn’t begin by Saturday. With the opposition calling for Assad’s removal as the starting point of peace negotiations and the regime focused on fighting what it calls “terrorism”, the divisions remain too entrenched for a consideration of the 2012 Geneva 1 communiqué that called for a transitional government.
In realistic terms, Geneva 2 has been narrowed to a smaller, concrete agenda, such as local ceasefires and safe passage for aid convoys. The larger political questions of the civil war, which has killed 1,00,000 people and rendered 9.5 million refugees, will have to wait. Three top diplomats, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, couldn’t convince the warring sides about the need to discard the dispute over who started the bloodshed and to look, instead, at ways to end the violence. Their prime concern now is to ensure that neither side walks out.
