UN Syria envoy Lakhdar Brahimi resigns after failure of Geneva talks

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/13/un-syria-envoy-lakhdar-brahimi-resigns

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Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy for Syria, finally announced his resignation on Tuesday, expressing regret for his inability to forge a coherent international response to the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Brahimi is to quit at the end of May, a timetable which accelerates the need for a replacement.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said he accepted the Algerian mediator's decision with regret. "Mr Brahimi has long been recognised as one of the world's most brilliant diplomats," he said, describing his resignation as "a failure for all of us". Brahimi thanked Ban and said the resignation "was not a very pleasant situation" for him.

Brahimi's departure had been long anticipated, and urgent efforts are already under way to find a successor. The new mediator is expected to serve only the UN, and not the deeply divided Arab League, as was the case with both Brahimi and his predecessor, the former UN chief Kofi Annan.

Change was widely seen as inevitable after the failure of the Geneva peace talks and President Bashar al-Assad's confident decision to stand for re-election next month.

Leaks about his likely successor have thrown up the names of Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, and Michael Williams, a British peer and UN veteran. Other names on the shortlist are Kamel Morjane, the former Tunisian foreign minister, and Javier Solana, the Spanish politician who has previously served as Nato secretary general and the EU's foreign policy chief.

Brahimi, who is 80, has been in the job since September 2012. He had threatened to resign almost from the start of his mission.

Morjane's candidacy is important because the shortlist must include an Arab name, but diplomats say he has spoken too publicly about his readiness to do the job, which may discount him. Solana is seen as the least likely to get the job. Other names may yet emerge.

Brahimi presided over two rounds of peace talks between the Assad government and opposition representatives in Geneva in January and February, but they yielded no results except for a week-long ceasefire in the partially besieged city of Homs.

The decision on Brahimi's replacement rests with Ban, but he is expected to consult security council members as well as Germany and Turkey. The choice is likely to be discussed by John Kerry, William Hague and other western and Arab foreign ministers when they meet for a Friends of Syria meeting in London on Thursday.

Diplomats working on Syria admit privately that they feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the crisis, despair about making any progress and new complications caused by rising tensions between Russia and the west over Ukraine.

According to the latest figures, more than 150,000 people have been killed since the uprising against Assad began in March 2011 with peaceful protests against the backdrop of the Arab spring. Syria is now embroiled in a fully-fledged war that has drawn in foreign forces and support on both sides. As many as 2.5 million people have fled abroad and 9 million people inside Syria need help in what the UN has described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis in modern times.