Syria. Results of the Vienna negotiations
The second round of peace talks in Syria took place in Vienna on Friday. This time, representatives of as many as 19 states and international organizations were searching for ways out of the crisis. In addition to the four participants in the previous meeting (Russia, the USA, Saudi Arabia and Turkey), the UK, Germany, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Italy, Qatar, China, Lebanon, the UAE, Omann, France, the EU and the UN took part in it.
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The last two institutions were represented by the head of the foreign policy department, Federica Mogherini, and the special envoy of the UN Secretary General for Syria, Staffan de Mistura. Apart from the Chinese representative, who joined the conference literally at the last moment, all other states were represented by their foreign ministers.
On the agenda was the traditional question of the place of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the political settlement, whom Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia demanded to remove immediately, the United States and Europeans were already ready to endure for some time, and Russia and Iran insisted on whether Assad should leave or not The Syrians themselves must decide. Here, all parties remained unchanged in their opinions, except that the regional “hawks,” following their senior ally the United States, are now ready to tolerate Assad for some time. As German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said: “There was no breakthrough, but it was not expected.”
Further, the terms of the ceasefire, that very transition period, the formation of a coalition government and subsequent elections were discussed. For this, the key issue is the de-virtualization of that very “moderate opposition” according to the United States and the “patriotic opposition” according to the Russian Federation, with which the current authorities will be able to establish a constructive dialogue. To this end, according to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian delegation exchanged lists of opposition groups that could take part in future negotiations with their colleagues from Saudi Arabia.
“We invite representatives of the Syrian government and the Syrian opposition to begin a political dialogue and form a new unified government,” said US Secretary of State John Kerry. The ceasefire process, which, according to Western countries and their allies in the region, includes the cessation of the operation of the Russian Aerospace Forces, as well as negotiations on a new government, should take from four to six months.
This process should be crowned by a constitutional reform that will consolidate the current state of actual fragmentation of Syria in the form of a federation or confederation. The key parameters of the future constitutional system of Syria were described by Kerry: “Unity, sovereignty, territorial integrity and the secular character of the state must be preserved.”
To implement this program, according to Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, the summit participants “agreed to create a special body that will determine the paths of constitutional reform and recommendations for holding parliamentary and presidential elections. The relevant provisions are included in the final document.”
Well, naturally, all the meeting participants spoke in favor of stepping up the fight against groups recognized by the UN Security Council as terrorist, and also, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, “to conduct additional consultations in order to agree on the list of other organizations that are not yet included in the UN lists, but are clearly terrorist." At the same time, John Kerry even admitted that if Russia focuses on the war against the Islamic State, then the cooperation in this matter long proposed by Moscow will finally meet with a response from the American side.
While difficult seven-hour negotiations were going on in Vienna, new information appeared about the events in the theater of operations itself. Thus, the Syrian opposition spread information about the shelling by government troops of one of the suburbs of Damascus, as a result of which rockets allegedly hit the market and caused the death of forty people.
And news came from the United States that Barack Obama had instructed the Pentagon to send a group of about 50 special forces to northern Syria to intensify the training of local militants of the “moderate” association “Syrian Arab Coalition”, as well as to adjust air strikes. And although ABC TV sources claim that military personnel will not directly participate in hostilities, after the recent incident with the death of an American special forces soldier in Iraq, where the authorities also stated that American soldiers do not participate in direct clashes with IS forces, this information is perceived completely differently.
As the official who provided information to the TV channel assures: “We have not the slightest intention to participate in long-term large-scale combat operations, similar to what we previously saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.” However, it is unlikely that in the history of world wars we will find a government that from the very beginning planned the participation of its soldiers in a long and bloody war. Usually it just happened somehow...
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