Envoy calls for Syria transition to elections

— Lakhdar Brahimi, the international envoy on a mission to Damascus seeking an end to the escalating civil conflict in Syria, said Thursday that a transitional government should be granted full executive powers until new elections can be held.

Brahimi did not say who would serve in such a government, and he offered no details about the role Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, would play - if any - during the transitional period.

“This government must have all the powers of the state,” Brahimi said.

His remarks to journalists in Damascus followed intensive talks this week with Assad and a range of opposition figures.

Over the past month, Brahimi, as the special Syria representative from the United Nations and Arab League, has consulted extensively with the United States and Russia in hopes of fulfilling an accord reached in Geneva this summer calling for dialogue between Syria’s government and the opposition.

“The Syrian people seek genuine change,” he said.

He emphasized the importance of preserving state institutions and warned that military intervention would “lead to the destruction of the Syrian state,” according to Russia’s Itar-Tass news service.

“There will be no victor in this war,” he said.

As a Syrian government delegation met with Russia’s top diplomats in Moscow, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Alexandr Lukashevich, said there was no specific plan under discussion that would include a transitional government. Opposition figures have suggested that Brahimi presented Assad with offers to either cede some of his authority or leave the country, but Lukashevich denied that.

“There was and is no plan, it is not being discussed with Mr. Brahimi or with American colleagues,” he said.

Russia, a key ally of the government in Damascus, has long pointed to the Geneva agreement, which calls for negotiation between the government and the opposition, as the only acceptable basis for resolving the conflict.

But the agreement requires both Assad’s allies and Syrian opposition forces to agree to negotiate - a long shot, said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Earlier this year, he said, influential policymakers in Moscow favored a process like the one that led to the Dayton accords to end the Bosnian War of the 1990s: “Bring them together, close the door and don’t let them out until they reach an agreement.” He said he had serious doubts that either Moscow or Washington could induce the two sides to sit down at the table.

“Frankly, I see very little leverage that Russia has over Assad,” Trenin said. “Even if the United States were prepared to lean hard on the opposition, or push them toward some kind of negotiation, I do not see the gulf states or theTurks backing that move.”

In recent weeks, Lukashevich said Thursday, Moscow has ratcheted up its diplomacy in an effort to “intensify dialogue, not only with the government but also with the opposition groups.” Top Russian officials met Thursday with Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Faisal al-Meqdad. Brahimi will have his own meeting Saturday in Moscow with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

Lukashevich said Russia was open to talks with Syria’snational opposition coalition, which has been recognized by many Western governments as representing the Syrian people.

“We are not rejecting this dialogue,” he said. “On the contrary, we are holding it very vigorously with all opposition groups who are also interested in getting better insight into the Russian approach.”

“It is obviously another question when and at what level they will take place,” he said.

Among the widely discussed sticking points for a possible transition plan is what role, if any, Assad and his allies would play in the process. Among the options being floated this week are an arrangement that would allow him to remain in officefor most of or the rest of his presidential term, which ends in 2014, but transfer much of his authority to a transitional body. A separate question is whether the agreement would allow him to run for re-election in 2014.

Lukashevich said the Geneva agreement did not establish Assad’s departure as a precondition for talks. As for Assad’s ability to run for reelection, he said, Russia had no role in determining this.

“We are not lawyers for this regime,” he said. “We would prefer that the Syrians themselves should determine the form and prospects for their state’s further development, and to get away from the horrible prospect of the collapse of the state along religious lines. So the question is more to the Syrians than tothe Russians.”

Violence flared in Syria again Thursday, with rebels attacking a police academy and military airport in the northern province of Aleppo while clashing with government forces near the Wadi Deif military base in northern Idlib province.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 11 rebels and 16 government soldiers were killed in clashes around Idlib province.

A car bomb blew up in the Damascus suburb of Sbeineh, killing four people and wounding 10, the state news agency reported.

Information for this article was contributed by Ben Hubbard, Albert Aji and Vladimir Isachenkov of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 12/28/2012

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