After Years of War in Syria, U.N. Passes Resolution on Talks
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and DAVID E. SANGERDEC. 18, 2015
UNITED NATIONS — For the first time since the nearly five-year-old Syrian civil war began, world powers agreed on Friday at the United Nations Security Council to embrace a plan for a cease-fire and a peace process that holds the distant prospect of ending the conflict.
A resolution adopted unanimously by the Security Council reflected a monthslong effort by American and Russian officials, who have long been at odds over the future of
Syria, to find common national interests to stop the killing, even if they cannot yet agree on
Syria’s ultimate future.
But there remain sharp disagreements to be reconciled between the American and Russian positions, and huge uncertainty about what the plan will mean on the ground. A dizzying array of armed forces have left Syria in ruins, killed 250,000 and driven four million refugees out of the country, threatening to destabilize the nations where they are seeking new homes.
“This council is sending a clear message to all concerned that the time is now to stop the killing in Syria and lay the groundwork for a government” that can hold the country together, Secretary of State
John Kerry said at the Security Council.
Later on Friday, he added: “No one is sitting here today suggesting to anybody that the road ahead is a gilded path. It is complicated. It will remain complicated. But this at least demands that the parties come to the table.”
The resolution makes no mention of whether Syria’s president,
Bashar al-Assad, would be able to run in new elections, which it says must be held within 18 months of the beginning of political talks. That process will begin sometime in January at the earliest, Mr. Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, conceded. Privately, officials believe it may take significantly longer.
The remaining gap between the Russian and American sides became obvious at the very end of a news conference Friday evening that involved Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov. Mr. Kerry noted that 80 percent of Russian airstrikes were hitting opposition groups fighting Mr. Assad, not the forces of the Islamic State extremist group. Mr. Lavrov shot back that for two and half months,
Russia had asked the United States to coordinate military operations.
Still, the resolution, adopted with a 15-to-0 vote, gives the Security Council’s imprimatur to a possible political solution for the first time. However, even as it signals a narrowing of the diplomatic gap between Washington and Moscow, it remains uncertain whether they will be able to cool the tempers of regional rivals — chiefly, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Even trickier is how to translate the delicate consensus achieved on paper in New York into real change on the ground.
On paper, the resolution is striking for its ambition. It places the political process to decide Mr. Assad’s future under United Nations auspices, making it far harder for Mr. Assad to control the vote, and specifically requires that all Syrians, “including members of the diaspora,” be allowed to participate in the vote. That language was created in Vienna in November by Mr. Kerry, who is betting that if Syrians around the world can participate in the vote, Mr. Assad will not be able to win.
But the Russians and the Iranians have blocked any explicit discussion of whether Mr. Assad, who has depended on Moscow and Tehran for critical military and financial support, can try to stay in office. Showing one of the complications that lie ahead, Mr. Lavrov argued after the vote that there should be no move for regime change. He cited Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya as examples where American intervention led to chaos.
“We should try avoiding the mistakes we have made,” he said at a news conference alongside Mr. Kerry. “Only the Syrian people are going to decide their own future. That also covers the future of the Syrian president.”
Missing from the talks so far has been the man at the center of the storm: Mr. Assad, whose barrel bombs, chemical weapons and vicious tactics have so embittered a huge segment of his own population that his critics insist he can no longer rule the country. But he reacted to the prospect of a Security Council resolution with sarcasm. “I was packing my luggage; I had to leave,” he told a Dutch television station on Thursday. “Now I can stay.”
The Security Council session followed a meeting in New York earlier in the day of top diplomats from more than a dozen countries with stakes in the conflict. They included the five permanent members of the Council, along with the foreign ministers of Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the European Union.
The resolution abides by an accord known as the Geneva Communiqué, reached three years ago and considered critical by the Western powers, that proposes a transitional government with full executive powers.
Mr. Kerry told reporters after the Council meeting that steps would have to be taken to form a transitional government within six months. He sharply disputed the notion that the agreement deferred a decision on Mr. Assad’s fate, saying it put a time frame on what needs to happen next. “This is not being kicked down the road; it’s actually being timed out,” he said.
One obstacle to putting a deal in place may be determining which of the disparate rebel groups would participate in the talks scheduled to begin next month, and whether they would agree to come to the table at all without a guarantee of Mr. Assad’s exit. Nor has Mr. Assad said he would participate — though he will be under pressure from Russia and Iran to do so.
A cease-fire in Syria poses its own challenges. It is not expected to apply to all parts of the country — certainly not to the vast areas held by the Islamic State — and the idea of sending United Nations-sanctioned observers to monitor it seems almost unthinkable. The resolution gives Secretary General Ban Ki-moon one month to tell the Council how a cease-fire could work and how it could be monitored.
The resolution leaves open the question of whether other rebel groups can be designated as terrorist organizations and excluded from the cease-fire agreement. It embraces an effort led by Jordan to figure out which groups should receive that designation. Mr. Lavrov hinted at the disagreement there, saying it was “inadmissible to divide terrorists between good and bad ones.”
The resolution was a significant victory for Mr. Kerry, who brought together the Saudis, Russians and Iranians in a series of meetings in Vienna and elsewhere over the past three months and force-fed a diplomatic process that many in Washington had believed would never get off the ground.
The United States has backed away, bit by bit, from the demand that Mr. Assad leave office immediately — which was the administration’s position in 2011, when President Obama stepped into the Rose Garden in the early days of the Arab Spring to say Mr. Assad must go. But he had no plan at the time to force him out, and now, with the Islamic State’s rise, there is little desire to create a vacuum in Damascus that the Islamic State or other extremist groups might fill.
Mr. Kerry said that the immediate American goal was to defeat the Islamic State, and that military action would be “pushing ahead into the northern Syrian border.” But he also made it clear that the American objective, not shared by Russia or Iran, was to oust Mr. Assad, who Mr. Kerry said had lost the “moral credibility” to govern the country. “If the war is to end, it is imperative that the Syrian people agree on an alternative,” he said.
Ultimately, Mr. Kerry envisions a Syria that remains in one piece as the United States and its allies take on the Islamic State, then help guide Syria out of the Assad era. But the Saudis believe the political process will fail, and the Iranians hope that in the end, they will retain some measure of control over Syria’s future — critical to their ability to project power in the Middle East.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/19/world/middleeast/syria-talks-isis.html?_r=0