GENEVA - United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi appeared to have averted the collapse of peace talks Friday between Syria’s government and the opposition after a fraught first day, saying late in the afternoon that the two sides agreed to meet today.
After threats by the Syrian government to abandon the long-awaited talks because the opposition delegation refused to meet in the same room as its foe, Brahimi said he had secured the commitment of the two sides to sit down together.
Brahimi seemed confident that neither side would walk out, at least in the coming days, and he predicted that the talks would continue for another week before taking a break.
“Both parties are going to be here tomorrow. They will be meeting,” he said. “We will be working on Saturday; we will be working on Sunday. Nobody will be leaving on Saturday, and no one will be leaving on Sunday.”
“We do expect some bumps on the road,” Brahimi added. “It is impossible that there aren’t any.”
After Brahimi spoke, a member of the Syrian National Coalition spoke about what would happen today.
“Everybody will be in the same room, but everybody will address Mr. Brahimi. He will be the one who is going to conduct the negotiations,” said Louay Safi, who is taking part in the talks. “We will be addressing him. There will be no direct negotiation with the regime.”
Omran Zoubi, Syria’s information minister, said Assad’s delegation was committed to the talks.
“We will stay here until we do the job. We will not be provoked. We will not retreat, and we will be wise and flexible,” he said.
If the meeting goes forward, it will be the first face-to-face session between the warring factions since the start of a bloody civil war that has left more than 130,000 people dead.
The delegation representing opposition groups said earlier Friday that it would not enter into direct talks unless the government agreed that the purpose was to negotiate a transitional government to replace the regime of President Bashar Assad.
Hearing that, the government delegation threatened to go home.
Opposition representatives said they want Assad’s representatives to sign the protocol under which the talks are being held before they meet with them. The so-called Geneva I communique specifies that the talks, known as Geneva II, should negotiate the formation of a transitional government that would strip Assad of his authority.
The Syrian government saidit would not sign the protocol, stressing that it had agreed to attend the Geneva talks “without preconditions,” said a journalist traveling with the government delegation.
At the same time, members of the opposition said the government delegation was divided on the question of discussing the formation of a transitional government.
“There are serious splits in the government delegation,” said Oubai Shahbandar, an adviser to the opposition coalition.
Earlier, Syrian state television quoted Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem as saying that if no “serious sessions” were held by today, the Syrian delegation would leave Geneva “due to the other side’s lack of seriousness or preparedness.”
However, Zoubi, who is also part of the Syrian delegation, later said Syria would not withdraw from the talks, hinting at possible differences within the government delegation over how to proceed.
Zoubi also reiterated Syria’s refusal to accept the Geneva communique, and he called the Syrian opposition’s demands for Assad’s departure “fairy-tale talk.”
“This is the beginning of a negotiation process, and as today has shown, expect ups and downs as it proceeds,” an official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the issue is sensitive. “What is important is that the Geneva II process continues.”
In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that despite the setbacks, the United States continues to believe that a peaceful, pluralistic Syria “is achievable” and that “it is ultimately diplomacy” that will end the conflict. “There is no military solution to the problem of Syria,” Kerry said.
Despite what he called “terrible new evidence of torture at the hands of the Assad regime,” he said there are signs of hope for an end to the civil war.
“Obviously, we know this isn’t easy - in fact, is obviously very, very hard,” Kerry said.
He repeated the U.S. contention that Assad “will never have the legitimacy to govern Syria” because of his regime’s killing of Syrians. “The opposition will never stop fighting while he’s there,” Kerry said. “If your objective is to have peace, this one man must step aside.”
The original plan was for the two sides to meet Friday in the same room just long enough for Brahimi, who is in charge of mediating the talks, to present options for the agenda.
The parties were then to retire to separate rooms to discuss the proposals, a formula that was designed to allow the talks to get underway on schedule without either side being forced directly to address the other.
However, even such a limited session failed to materialize Friday. Instead, Brahimi met with the two delegations separately.
Both the Syrian government and the opposition are under intense pressure from their supporters not to offer any concessions and from their international allies to remain at the talks. Russia has exerted as much pressure on the government to attend the Geneva talks as the United States has on the opposition, and the rebel factions know they risk losing international support if they are seen as responsible for torpedoing the peace effort.
Ordinary Syrians on both sides also want the talks to make at least some progress toward reducing the horrendous levels of violence, adding to the incentive for both sides not to quit.
Western diplomats from countries allied with the Syrian opposition hope the two sides begin a process that would enable them to engage on a range of issues, such as local ceasefires and the provision of humanitarian aid.
More than 60 people have died in the past few months in a besieged Palestinian refugee camp in Syria’s capital from a lack of food and medicine, an activist group said Friday.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the first person died in the Yarmouk camp in June. It said 63 people have died there since the government siege began - 61 of whom died in the past three months.
Yarmouk, on the southern fringe of Damascus, is one of the worst-hit besieged areas in Syria. Activists and residents previously said that some 50 people died of starvation and hunger-related illnesses since the government imposed a blockade on the sprawling district a year ago.
The Observatory called on the international community to work toward lifting the siege.
“It is shameful that the international community, which claims to protect human beings, is not working for ending the humanitarian crisis in Syria,”the group said in a statement.
Over the past week, authorities allowed a few hundred food parcels to reach the camp in what appeared to be a goodwill gesture ahead of the peace conference in Switzerland.
Also Friday, three rockets fired from Syria fell in the border town of Hermel in neighboring Lebanon, a stronghold of the militant Hezbollah group, whose members are fighting alongside Assad’s forces, the state-run National News Agency said. There was no immediate word on casualties.
Syrian rebels have fired scores of rockets into predominantly Shiite areas of Lebanon in the past months, killing and wounding a number of people.
In Davos, Switzerland, meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called for the withdrawal of “foreign elements” from Syria, while denying that Iran is sending fighters to the country. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is widely reported to have contributed fighters, and Iran is Syria’s main source of military resupply.
“I can ask all foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon and from Syria, and we will do our best,” Zarif said at the World Economic Forum. As the moderator and audience laughed, he flashed a wry smile.
“What I can ask is for all foreign elements to leave Syria to allow the Syrian people to decide their own future, to stop funneling funds and money and arms to Syria, and to allow the Syrian people to decide their destiny,” Zarif said.
“We were not invited, but we hope that Geneva can produce results because we are in the region and we will be affected by any disaster coming out of Geneva,” Zarif said.
Meanwhile, a prominent member of the Saudi royal family called U.S. policy in Syria counterproductive Friday. President Barack Obama has encouraged both sides to dig in by removing the threat of any near-term use of U.S. military force against Assad, Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal said.
America’s Arab allies, meanwhile, are dismayed by “the sense of no direction” in Washington’s policy, said Turki, a former ambassador to the United States.
The strong U.S.-Saudi bond has been frayed by Obama’s decision to seek a nuclear deal with Saudi adversary Iran and by his decision to pull back from airstrikes on Syria last summer.
Information for this article was contributed by Liz Sly, Ahmed Ramadan and Anne Gearan of The Washington Post; by Lori Hinnant, Zeina Karam, Desmond Butler, Bassem Mroue, Diaa Hadid, Matthew Lee and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Anne Barnard of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/25/2014