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Under U.S. Pressure, U.N. Withdraws Iran’s Invitation to Syria Talks Talks Over Syria to Begin as Iran Sits on the Sidelines
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Under intense American pressure, the United Nations on Monday withdrew an invitation to Iran to attend the much-anticipated Syria peace conference, reversing a decision announced a day earlier. WASHINGTON — American and other Western diplomats on Monday managed to salvage the long-awaited peace conference on Syria, which had seemed on the verge of unraveling before it even began when Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, issued an unexpected invitation to Iran to attend.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, whose decision to invite Iran had threatened to unravel the Syria talks less than 48 hours before the scheduled start, issued a statement on Monday rescinding the invitation. The United States had said it was surprised by the invitation because Iran had not agreed to conditions for the talks, to be held on Wednesday in Montreux, Switzerland. The possible presence of the Iranians infuriated Syrian opposition leaders who said they would not attend the conference. But after a day of intensive consultations in which American officials made clear their unhappiness with Mr. Ban’s move, Iran was disinvited and diplomats affirmed that the conference would begin in Switzerland on Wednesday. The 24-hour controversy, while a diversion from the main issues about Syria’s future that will be on the table there, seemed a fitting prelude for what even the most optimistic American diplomats say will be prolonged, grinding and uncertain negotiations in which the combatants in the Syrian civil war are scheduled to meet face to face for the first time.
Mr. Ban contended that he had been privately assured by the Iranians that they would respect the conditions. But in their public statements, Iranian officials said Iran had been invited with no such conditions attached. “I don’t think that anyone who’s dealt with Syrian officials has any false expectations of rapid progress,” a senior official at the State Department said on Monday, in what turned out to be one of the day’s more optimistic assessments. “This is the beginning of a process. It is not going to be fast.”
“Given that it has chosen to remain outside that basic understanding, he has decided that the one-day Montreux gathering will proceed without Iran’s participation,” Mr. Ban’s spokesman said in the statement. It is, in fact, hard to imagine a peace conference that has been convened under less propitious circumstances.
The invitation also angered the Syrian opposition and Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival and a major backer of the Syrian insurgency, and they threatened to boycott the talks. Secretary of State John Kerry announced during a trip to Moscow in May 2013 that the United States wanted to convene the peace conference, along with Russia, an idea first discussed the year before in Geneva. But since that announcement, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has strengthened his military position, the fractious opposition has become more divided, and Russia and the United States have differed on how to interpret the mandate for the meeting.
The United States’ longstanding position has been that Iran, a major backer of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, must publicly endorse the mandate of the conference, which is outlined in a communiqué from a 2012 meeting in Geneva. That mandate says that the conference’s purpose is to negotiate the establishment of a transitional administration that would govern Syria by the “mutual consent” of Mr. Assad’s government and the Syrian opposition. The United States’ leverage over the Assad government, meanwhile, has declined. Mr. Kerry arrived at the State Department last year declaring his intention to change Mr. Assad’s “calculation” about this ability to hold on to power. But the Obama administration withdrew the threat of force in return last fall for an agreement that requires Syria to eliminate its chemical arsenal, while the American effort to train and equip Syrian rebels, by all accounts, remained very limited.
“Since Iran has not publicly and fully endorsed the Geneva communiqué,” a State Department official told reporters Monday morning, “we expect the invitation will be rescinded.” “For any political conference to succeed in trying to defuse, much less settle, an intense conflict, the ground has to be laid,” said Dennis Ross, the former Middle East envoy. “An agenda needs to be agreed; the parties have to want some minimal achievement; the convening co-sponsors have to share some basic goals; and there has to be sufficient leverage on those doing the fighting to permit some compromises to be made,” he added. “Most of these conditions are lacking.”
Mr. Ban’s reversal appeared to have salvaged the plan to proceed as scheduled with the talks, which the United States, the United Nations and Russia had been seeking to organize for months. Added a Western diplomat involved in preparations for the talks: “We don’t have a Plan B.”
“As we’ve stated many times, the purpose of the conference is the full implementation of the Geneva communiqué,” Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, said after Mr. Ban’s decision. “We are hopeful that, in the wake of today’s announcement, all parties can now return to focus on the task at hand, which is bringing an end to the suffering of the Syrian people and beginning a process toward a long overdue political transition.” Unlike the Middle East talks, in which Mr. Kerry set a nine-month goal for completing a peace treaty, there is no target date for completing the Syria peace talks or establishing a transitional administration that could take over if Mr. Assad agreed to relinquish power. In a closed-door meeting with the Syrian opposition last year, Mr. Kerry noted that Vietnam peace negotiations had gone on for years.
The Syrian political opposition dropped its boycott threat. But Mr. Ban’s reversal was a diplomatic embarrassment to the United Nations and to others who had wanted Iran to participate, including Russia. Despite the enormous obstacles, the State Department asserts that the talks are worth holding because the push to establish a transitional body to govern Syria, a main goal of the conference, might encourage defections among Mr. Assad’s traditional supporters, including the Alawi community.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said in Moscow earlier on Monday that leaving Iran out of the talks would be an “unforgivable mistake.” “There are elements inside the regime itself, among its supporters, that are anxious to find a peaceful solution, and we’ve gotten plenty of messages from people inside; they want a way out,” the State Department official said.
“Negotiations involve sitting at the table not just with those who you like, but with those whose participation the solution depends on,” Mr. Lavrov said at a joint appearance with the foreign minister of Norway. “That’s the whole point of their going to Geneva,” he added, referring to the Syrian opposition. “To promote the alternative, the alternative vision.”
The United States and several of its allies have opposed Iran’s presence at the conference in part because Iran has been a strong supporter of the Assad government, sending it arms and paramilitary fighters from its Quds force. Mr. Lavrov, in arguing for Iran’s inclusion, noted that several other countries that directly backed one side in the conflict were participating. But if that is the goal, Mr. Assad has sought to redefine the purpose of the talks before they have even begun. In comments published Monday by Agence France Presse, Mr. Assad said that the purpose of the meeting should be discuss ways to fight terrorism and that it was “totally unrealistic” to think that he would ever share power with the opposition that is living in exile.
Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, has long argued that Iran, as a major regional power, should be included in the talks. But he said last week that the decisions on whether to invite Iran had to be made by consensus among the United States, the United Nations and Russia. At the same time, American officials say, Syrian forces have carried out a display of force by stepping up their attacks inside Syria and have continued to bomb Aleppo.
For his part, Mr. Assad said once again that he would not share power with his adversaries or accept the creation of a transitional government. A recent announcement by the Syrian government that it was prepared to accept a cease-fire in the bitter battle for Aleppo, American officials report, contained an enormous catch: It requires rebel fighters to vacate the city, where many of their families reside, so it could be controlled by Syrian forces.
Mr. Assad said in an interview with Agence France-Presse that the talks in Switzerland should focus on what he called “the war against terrorism” in his country. He described the idea of sharing power as “totally unrealistic,” and said there was a “significant” likelihood that he would seek a new term as president in June. To even get this far required a day of intensive diplomacy after Mr. Ban announced on Sunday night that the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, had agreed to the mandate for the conference and that Iran would be invited to attend.
While he has made such remarks before, the timing of his latest comments seemed to underscore the complexities facing negotiators in Switzerland, despite months of preliminary negotiations to bring the combatants to the table. American officials said that Mr. Kerry had told Mr. Ban before his announcement that Iran needed to publicly endorse the 2012 communiqué that laid the basis for the conference, which stipulates that the goal of the meeting is the establishment of transitional administration by “mutual consent” of the Assad government and the Syrian opposition. Mr. Kerry was described by an American official as having been furious after Mr. Ban’s news conference.
In the region’s tangles of hostility, the invitation to Iran drew immediate objections from both the exiled political opposition to Mr. Assad and from Saudi Arabia, which is a key backer of the insurgency and the arch rival of Iran, Mr. Assad’s main regional sponsor. But after Iran declined to publicly endorse the communiqué Monday, the United Nations withdrew the invitation and the conference was back on track.
Mr. Ban said on Sunday that Iranian officials had pledged to play “a positive and constructive role,” implying that Tehran had accepted that the negotiations were posited on the idea of a new political order in Syria. The controversy played out on the same day that the temporary agreement to constrain Iran’s nuclear program went into effect. But American officials say the United States has received no communications from Iran complaining about the withdrawal of the invitation or linking the Syria issue to the nuclear negotiations.
On Monday, however, the Iranian state news media quoted a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry in Tehran as saying, “We have always rejected any precondition for attending the Geneva II meeting on Syria.” The Syria conference will begin on Wednesday with a round of addresses by Mr. Kerry and his counterparts in the Swiss town of Montreux. On Friday, the conference will shift to Geneva, where a delegation of Syrian opposition officials will sit down with a team sent to represent Mr. Assad.
Within hours of Mr. Ban’s invitation to Iran, Syria’s political opposition said it would not attend the peace conference unless the gesture was rescinded. Attending the meeting carries risks for both sides. For the government delegation, a hotel lobby teeming with foreign journalists, Western diplomats and Syrian opposition members is an opportunity to sell their message but anyone suspected of talking about possible participation in a transitional body could face repercussions at home.
“The Syrian coalition announces that they will withdraw their attendance in Geneva II unless Ban Ki-moon retracts Iran’s invitation,” a Twitter message said, quoting Louay Safi, a coalition spokesman. The opposition coalition, for its part, risks a further erosion of influence with fighters inside Syria for sitting down to talk with Mr. Assad’s delegation. The opposition has yet to release the names of its delegation and its several dozen advisers, but they are said to include only a small number of military commanders.
The ultimatum came just a day after the opposition coalition, facing a boycott by one-third of its members, voted to send a delegation to the peace talks. The opposition has been under intense international pressure, including from the United States government, to participate. An immediate question is whether the talks will lead to the opening of aid corridors, prisoner exchanges or local cease-fires. The matter is important to address the deteriorating humanitarian situation in which the Assad government has imposed blockades on the delivery of food, medicine and aid to try to drive his opponents into submission. But such measures would also be intended to create an environment for an eventual political accommodation.
In all, some 30 countries have been invited to Montreux for what may be a largely ceremonial opening day of the peace talks. Two days later, Syria’s government and opposition delegations are scheduled to move to Geneva to continue talks, mediated by Mr. Brahimi. Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, announced last week that the Syrian government was making a significant gesture by opening up aid channels to two besieged towns, al-Ghezlaniya and Jdaidet al-Shibani. But the State Department official said the towns had long been under the control of the government and had not been blockaded at all.
Diplomats and Middle East analysts say that if any breakthroughs are achieved, they will take place in Geneva, not in the opening two days in Montreux. Over all, the negotiations were not expected to yield major results, except perhaps to open up certain parts of Syria to the delivery of humanitarian aid. A convoy was allowed on Saturday to deliver aid — a tiny fraction of what is needed — to the Yamouk camp for Palestinian refugees. But East Ghouta, a Damascus suburb of 160,000 remains cut off from food, medicine and other supplies.
A Western diplomat who follows Syria said he was exasperated with both the opposition and the government for placing new conditions and making aggressive statements at the last minute — possibly squandering a chance to ease suffering of Syrian civilians.
“This proves that anybody pretending that he is representing the Syrian people is lying and misleading, and doing this either to preserve his power or to acquire power,” the diplomat said. “We’re headed this way: by the end of summer we’ll be talking about 150,000 to 200,000 dead.”