Syria adviser rebuffs interim-government idea

U.N. Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi reacts Wednesday during his daily press briefing at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva.
U.N. Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi reacts Wednesday during his daily press briefing at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva.

GENEVA - Syrian President Bashar Assad’s adviser Wednesday rejected the opposition’s call for a transitional governing body and suggested for the first time that a presidential election scheduled to be held later this year has the potential to not take place amid the raging violence.

The comments by Bouthaina Shaaban came as United Nations mediator Lakhdar Brahimi announced that the first phase of the Syria peace talks in Geneva will end Friday as scheduled and that the gap between the government and the opposition remains “quite large.”

“To be blunt, I do not expect that we’re going achieve anything substantial” by Friday, he told reporters Wednesday. “I’m very happy that we are still talking and that the ice is breaking slowly.”

Brahimi said both sides will decide when the second phase of the talks will take place -most likely after a one-week break.

Earlier Wednesday, both sides managed to discuss the thorniest issue: the opposition’s demand for a transitional government in Syria.

But Shaaban said it would be difficult to hold a presidential election in Syria, given the fighting, and she rejected a transitional governing body.

“There’s nothing in the world called transitional government. We don’t mind a large government, a national unity government, but I think they invent the wrong term for our people and then they circulate it in the media,” she said.

The idea of a national unity government has been rejected by the opposition, which insists Assad must step down in favor of a transitional government with full executive powers.

Louay Safi, a spokesman for the opposition’s negotiating team, said the issue of a transitional government was put on the table at the talks for the first time. But he said the government delegation stuck to its demand that putting an end to terrorists was still its No. 1 priority.

“Today we had a positive step forward because for the first time now we are talking about the transitional governing body, the body whose responsibility is to end dictatorship and move toward democracy and end the fighting and misery in Syria,” he said.

The government seems “more ready to discuss that issue, but still they’re trying to push it to the back of the discussion,” Safi said. “We told them that this has to come first because nothing else can be achieved before we form a transitional governing body.”

Despite the apparent small step in the peace talks, both sides continued to blame each other for the impasse.

The peace conference, intended to forge a path out of the civil war that has killed 130,000 people, has been on the verge of collapse since it was first conceived 18 months ago.

Additionally, the two sides have apparently not made progress on humanitarian issues related to the conflict, like prisoner exchanges or getting aid supplies to the besieged residents of the Old City section of Homs.

The desperation there of civilians, who have been largely cut off for more than a year, was detailed in a video appeal posted online this week by Father Francis, the patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church.

International aid workers in the region said they were worried that the attention being paid in Geneva to the Homs situation was obscuring the plight of Syrians trapped in other areas besieged by either government or opposition forces. The United Nations lists seven such areas in which a total of about 250,000 people are trapped.

For instance, starvation and illnesses exacerbated by hunger or the lack of medical aid have killed at least 85 people in a Palestinian camp in Damascus besieged for months by forces loyal to Assad, activists said Wednesday.

Also Wednesday, Turkey’s state-run news agency said the Turkish military fired artillery and heavy machine guns at a convoy across the border in Syria belonging to the al-Qaida-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The Anadolu Agency said the attack on the Islamic State vehicle was in response to gunfire that had targeted Turkish troops patrolling the frontier at the border in Kilis province. Turkish troops used tanks, self-propelled artillery and machine guns to destroy two trucks and a bus in the convoy, the agency said. No casualty figures were given.

The Obama administration confirmed Wednesday that it has resumed delivery of nonlethal aid and equipment to rebel-held areas of Syria that had been suspended when Islamist forces raided a U.S. warehouse last year.

Ambulances, garbage trucks, generators, school supplies and office equipment, among other items, are being delivered to civilian local governments and charity groups, State Department spokesman Jen Psaki said.

However, the State Department had no comment Wednesday on a report that Syria has delivered less than 5 percent of its deadliest chemical-weapon agents to international authorities a week before a deadline to surrender the entire cache.

Officials said Assad’s government has transferred about 32 tons of the so-called Category 1 chemical agents to the Syrian port of Latakia, where it has been loaded onto ships for destruction at sea.

But about 670 tons remain in collection points, and officials say it is unlikely that Syria will meet next Wednesday’s deadline.

Information for this article was contributed by Zeina Karam and staff writers of The Associated Press, by Anne Gearan of The Washington Post, by Paul Richter of the Tribune Washington Bureau and by Nick Cumming-Bruce of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 01/30/2014

Upcoming Events