Discouraging beginning

The Montreux meeting that is supposed to prepare the groundwork for Geneva II peace talks on the Syrian crisis started on a negative note, with the Syrian regime, represented by Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, and the Syrian opposition, represented by Ahmad Jarba, taking, as expected, opposite stands on the conflict.

There was not a word of reconciliation by either side that could promise a breakthrough of sorts in the three-year-old conflict.

Mouallem was defiant through and through; he even argued with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for exceeding the time limit allocated to speakers and made derogatory remarks about some countries and their leaders, against the rules announced by Ban at the start of the meeting.

The UN secretary general had appealed to speakers, at the outset of the meeting, to avoid making inflammatory remarks and create a negative atmosphere for dialogue between the two principal parties at the gathering.

It is clear, from day one of the Montreux meeting, that a big and perhaps unbridgeable gap exists between the two opposite sides in Syria, that it would take a miracle to reconcile them.

In his opening statement, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was moderate in tone and quite conciliatory.

So was US Secretary of State John Kerry, who spoke briefly and to the point.

The foreign ministers of the two superpowers alluded to the principles and objectives of Geneva I as the basis for holding Geneva II, something that Damascus ruled out completely.

The only significant development on the first day of the meeting was Lavrov’s and Kerry’s apparent meeting of the minds on the fundamentals of the Syrian conflict.

If this stays so when the conference moves to Geneva, in two days’ time, where negotiations are expected to resume in a more substantive and orderly manner, it could be that the US and Russia might cooperate with a view to imposing a settlement that the Syrian antagonists cannot or are unable to reach on their own.