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U.N.’s Reversal on Iran Prompts Outcry From Syrian Allies Peaceful Swiss Resort Takes On Troubles of Syrian War
(about 13 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Allies of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria on Tuesday assailed a decision by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, to withdraw an invitation to Iran to attend the long-awaited peace conference on Syria, which had seemed on the verge of unraveling before it even began. MONTREUX, Switzerland — The expectant melancholy typical of resort towns in the winter has given way here, at least in the center of this lakeside village, to something edgier, as if a piece of the Green Zone had levitated here from Baghdad.
Less than 24 hours after issuing a surprise invitation to Iran, Mr. Ban rescinded it on Monday in the face of protests from the United States, from Syria’s exiled opposition, which threatened to boycott the talks, and from Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional archrival. Knots of police officers in bright blue windbreakers outnumber pedestrians. A swath of grand Beaux-Arts hotel buildings and the town’s conference center, the site of the Syrian peace talks opening Wednesday, have been cordoned off. Their wrought-iron fences have been covered in white plastic sheeting, like a hazardous waste site.
On Tuesday, the outcry came from the opposite quarters. Russia, Mr. Assad’s main international backer, called the reversal by Mr. Ban a “mistake” but “not a catastrophe.” Nonetheless, he said, it had damaged the authority of the United Nations. The talks are set to open in the Swiss city of Montreux on Wednesday. Montreux could not seem farther from Syria. Its vistas, indeed, match a stock image of peace and beauty idealized by many Syrians too poor to travel outside their country; it is common there to find bare cinder-block dwellings decorated with generic photographs of alpine lakes.
Iran, the leading regional power supporting Mr. Assad’s government, said the United Nations chief had been acting under pressure and Tehran viewed his withdrawal of its invitation as “deplorable.” Here, Lake Geneva glows beneath clouds that wreath the mountaintops, dusted with white above the snow line. Spired chalets look down from the cliffs. Along the shore outside the conference zone, little moves but ducks and couples pushing double strollers. But as dozens of foreign delegations and more than a thousand journalists trickle in for the conference, they bring echoes of the Syrian war.
American officials said that Secretary of State John 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 a 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 invitation to Iran. “I’ve never in my life seen a town so besieged,” said Fernand Thomas, a white-haired taxi driver, complaining of the street closings that forced a change in city bus routes and dug into his business. “They are afraid of a bomb or something.”
Mr. Ban said on Sunday that the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, had agreed to the mandate for the conference. The contrast between Swiss order and conflict-zone chaos has been amplified by the haphazard prelude to the meeting, which Mr. Thomas called “the most important conference we have ever had here,” an assertion that many Syrians, keeping their expectations low, might dispute.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Zarif challenged Mr. Ban’s account of their discussions, echoing similar Iranian disavowals on Monday. “I made it clear in numerous phone conversations with the secretary general that Iran does not accept any preconditions to attend the talks,” Mr. Zarif said, according to the ISNA news agency. On Monday, the meeting seesawed close to cancellation over the last-minute invitation, and equally abrupt disinvitation, of Iran. On Tuesday, the Syrian government delegation spent hours stuck in Athens when ground service crews refused to refuel their chartered plane, making them miss key sideline meetings and prompting a pro-government Syrian journalist to grouse, “It’s like kindergartners in a playground.”
“It is also regrettable that Mr. Ban does not have the courage to provide the real reasons for the withdrawal,” Mr. Zarif said, adding that “Iran was not too keen on attending in the first place.” The local police have had to grapple with the insistence of certain delegations that they not share a hotel, and preferably not bump into one another, except, theoretically, at the negotiating table. Uncertainty swirled about whether any actual fighters would show up, except representatives of the only major faction that recognizes the leadership of the exile coalition’s largely notional Supreme Military Council.
The run-up to the gathering was marked, moreover, by new reminders that Syria’s civil war, which has claimed more than 100,000 lives, has been characterized by what Human Rights Watch in an annual report published in Berlin on Tuesday called ruthless and indiscriminate attacks on civilians."The international community’s response to this slaughter has been painfully narrow,” said Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch. Problems have extended to the very mundane. The geopolitically grander venue of Geneva had to be shelved because hotels were booked for a luxury watch convention. That brought the event to the eastern tip of the lake, better known as the home of the annual jazz festival where a fire at the Casino de Montreux inspired Deep Purple to write the rock anthem “Smoke on the Water.”
Separately, a dossier of images compiled by a self-styled Syrian defector was said to provide “direct evidence” of torture and execution on a mass scale. Logistics were still being ironed out as delegates arrived, ranging from Mexican diplomats to representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. Journalists became edgy waiting to pass through a single airportlike security check to reach the press center, then repaired to its lakeside terrace for restorative espressos. An Agence France-Presse reporter was thrown out of the conference hall — journalists are restricted to the press area — but not before triumphantly spotting the defunct place card for the banished Iranians.
A six-person panel of experts, assembled by a law firm working for the government of Qatar, a main sponsor of the Syrian opposition, said the 26,948 images appeared to be evidence of the killing of as many as 11,000 prisoners, provided by “a truthful and credible witness.” Syrian antigovernment activists and citizen journalists who normally spend their time in refugee camps and border towns in Turkey popped in and out of the press center, where on Wednesday dozens of representatives of Syrian state-owned news media are expected to join them, undoubtedly coming face to face during smoke breaks on the narrow terrace.
The 24-hour controversy over Iran’s attendance, 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. Despite the cold and gray, and the ferment among opposition factions who say the meeting is a waste of time, the activists projected a certain air of buoyancy. For all the complaints from some opponents of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria that the conference restores his aura of legitimacy, it also confers it upon the opposition. What began with waves of protests that would have been unimaginable in Syria before 2011, then turned into an armed insurgency, has become, for a few days, the focus of global diplomacy.
“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 one of the day’s more optimistic assessments. “This is the beginning of a process. It is not going to be fast.” Adnan Hadad, who helped set up the antigovernment Aleppo Media Center, acknowledged that people in that northern Syrian city at best ignored the conference and at worst would consider him a traitor for going.
It is, in fact, hard to imagine a peace conference that has been convened under less propitious circumstances. “Most of the fighters, they don’t understand politics — not even the basics, let’s be honest,” he said. “They didn’t get a chance to experience politics. In their minds, this will end when they reach the palace of Bashar al-Assad and slaughter him.” “It’s not realistic; it’s very emotional,” he continued. “To me, a military end is not going to happen, not from either side. The negotiations seem to be the only rational thing.”
Mr. Kerry announced during a trip to Moscow in May that the United States, along with Russia, wanted to convene the peace conference, an idea first discussed the year before in Geneva. But since that announcement, President Assad 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. Rami Jarrah, 29, grew up in a dissident household and rose to prominence documenting the early Syrian protests. He was arrested and tortured, and now works outside the country to promote the opposition and aid refugees. But even he said he could not justify advocating years more of fighting; there is little to offer the displaced if the war continues indefinitely.
On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia said Mr. Ban’s withdrawal of his invitation to Iran was “of course a mistake.” But, signaling that Moscow did not see the affair as a deal-breaker, he said it was “no catastrophe” and Russia would continue to “push for a dialogue between the Syrian parties without any preconditions,” The Associated Press reported. “We are being patient on whose cost?” he asked.
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 his ability to hold on to power. But the Obama administration withdrew the threat of force last fall in return 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. He added: “There is that level of dignity that people ask for, and it’s that Assad is out of the picture. Give us the excuse to accept a deal. Something so we can look in the mirror.”
“For any political conference to succeed in trying to defuse, much less settle, an intense conflict, the ground has to be laid,” said Dennis B. Ross, a 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. Most of these conditions are lacking.” A few minutes later Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, arrived in Switzerland and announced, according to Syria’s state news agency, that “the presidency and the regime are ‘red lines for us and for the Syrian people.’ ”
A Western diplomat involved in preparations for the talks added: “We don’t have a Plan B.”
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 the Vietnam peace negotiations had gone on for years.
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 Alawite sect, of which he is a member.
“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.
“That’s the whole point of their going to Geneva,” the official added, referring to officials of the Syrian opposition. “To promote the alternative, the alternative vision.”
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 on Monday by Agence France-Presse, Mr. Assad said that the purpose of the meeting should be to 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.
At the same time, American officials say, Syrian forces have carried out a display of force by stepping up their attacks in Syria and have continued to bomb Aleppo, its largest city.
A recent announcement by the Syrian government that it was prepared to accept a cease-fire in the bitter battle for Aleppo, American officials reported, 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 government forces.
For the Syrian opposition, the invitation to Iran was a major insult. Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force has been helping Syrian forces in their campaign in Aleppo, opposition officials said, and training Mr. Assad’s militias. Now a belligerent in the conflict would be attending a peace conference that the opposition already feared might be unproductive.
The controversy played out on the same day that a temporary agreement to constrain Iran’s nuclear program went into effect. But American officials said the United States had received no communications from Iran complaining about the withdrawal of the invitation or linking the Syria issue to the nuclear negotiations.
The Syria conference will begin with a round of addresses by Mr. Kerry and his counterparts in 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.
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 its message, but anyone suspected of talking about possible participation in a transitional body could face repercussions at home.
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.
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 its opponents into submission. But such measures would also be intended to create an environment for an eventual political accommodation.
Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, announced last week that the Syrian government was making a significant gesture by opening 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.
On Saturday, a convoy was allowed to deliver aid — a tiny fraction of what is needed — to the Yarmouk camp for Palestinian refugees. But East Ghouta, a Damascus suburb of 160,000 people, 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 the suffering of Syrian civilians.
“We’re headed this way: By the end of summer we’ll be talking about 150,000 to 200,000 dead,” the diplomat said.