GENEVA:
Syrian government anger over a U.S. decision to resume aid to the
opposition prompted the U.N. mediator to cut short Tuesday's peace
talks, but he said no one was to blame for the impasse and that the
negotiations would continue.
A deal to allow
humanitarian aid into Homs remained stalled, with the Syrian delegation
demanding assurances the U.S. aid will not go to "armed and terrorist
groups" in the besieged city.
UN-Arab League mediator
Lakhdar Brahimi said he was relieved that the government and opposition
said they will remain in the daily talks through Friday, as planned.
"Nobody's
walking out. Nobody's running away," he told reporters. "We have not
actually made a breakthrough, but we are still at it, and this is enough
as far as I'm concerned."
Tuesday's talks were the fifth
day of negotiations regarding the civil war, focusing on opposition
calls for the formation of a transition government in Syria and help for
Homs.
But there has been little progress toward resolving
a key issue of whether President Bashar Assad should step aside and
transfer power to a transitional government.
Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, whose country has been a key Syrian
ally, said Moscow wants to avoid "another obsession with regime change
because of somebody's personal animosity, personal hatred to a
particular individual."
"Imagine Assad disappears. Who is
going to keep it together? There is no answer," Lavrov said in Brussels,
where a Russia-European Union summit was being held.
Brahimi said he decided to cut short Tuesday's talks "without any request or pressure from anyone."
He confirmed that the Syrian government delegation had talked at length about its opposition to the resumption of U.S. aid.
"We
believe this is not the best present to the Geneva conference," said
Faisal al-Mikdad, Syria's deputy foreign minister, calling the American
decision "another manifestation of U.S. support for "terrorist groups"
in Syria.
"This proves again that the United States is not
interested in the success of this process, and we believe the U.S. has
to desist and stop its claims that it is interested in the success of
this conference," he told reporters.
American officials
said Monday the U.S. has restarted deliveries of nonlethal aid to the
Syrian opposition, more than a month after al-Qaida-linked militants
seized warehouses and prompted a sudden cutoff of Western supplies to
the rebels.
The officials said the communications
equipment and other items are being funneled only to non-armed
opposition groups, but the move boosts Syria's beleaguered rebels, who
saw their international support slide, in large part because of the
extremists among their ranks.
"Any notion that we support
terrorists is ludicrous. The Assad regime is a magnet for terrorists,"
U.S. State Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez said in a statement.
Vasquez
accused the Syrian government of "evading the core purpose of the
Geneva talks," which is to reach a negotiated political solution for
ending the war and suffering of Syrians.
Brahimi opened
the morning session reviewing the principles of the Geneva Communique of
June 2012, a broad but ambiguous proposal endorsed by Western powers
and Russia to provide a basis for negotiations. Assad's role in any
transitional government was a red line during those negotiations and
left vague. The U.S. and Russia disagreed about Assad's role, but they
signed the communique.
Murhaf Joueijati, a member of the
opposition Syrian National Coalition's negotiating team, said Tuesday's
session was cut short to give Syria time to make its proposal about the
future of the country within the context of the 2012 accord.
On
Monday, the government presented a working paper on Syria's future,
which Joueijati said the opposition rejected because it "had nothing to
do with a transitional government."
Assad's family, from
Syria's Alawite minority, has ruled the country since 1970, pulling
other religious minorities into its political orbit while rebellions by
members of the Sunni majority were crushed. Today's civil war began as a
peaceful uprising for freedom and rights in March 2011, but it has
deepened the country's sectarian divide and that could add to the
difficulties of forming a transitional government.
Joueijati accused the government of holding up the delivery of aid to Homs, which has been under siege for nearly two years.
One
complication in doing that and evacuating the city's residents is that
the opposition delegation does not control armed groups inside Syria,
including al-Qaida-backed militants, who do not feel bound by agreements
reached in Geneva. These groups gained control of Syria's uprising as
it evolved into an insurgency.
Source Link
