Little hope for Syria peace talks in Astana after opposition stays away

Regime negotiator Bashar Al Jaafari slammed the rebels' snub of the third round of negotiations after attending two earlier rounds, saying it shows 'the indecency of their politics'

A damaged aid lorry that never made it to Aleppo on September 20, 2016 - an example of what Physicians for Human Rights called the 'slow-motion slaughter' by the Syrian regime of their countrymen trapShow more

ASTANA // Talks between the Syrian regime and key power brokers appeared doomed before they began after the Syrian opposition refused to attend.

Those who did gather in the Kazakh capital on Tuesday tried to shrug off the absence of rebel groups but their absence is a blow to any hopes of progress.

The third round of negotiations sponsored by regime allies Russia and Iran and rebel-backer Turkey come as other diplomatic efforts to end the bloodshed have proved fruitless.

Regime negotiator Bashar Al Jaafari slammed the rebels’ decision to snub the talks in Astana after attending two earlier rounds but insisted it was still worth going ahead with the event. The Syrian news agency Sana quoted him as saying, “We are eager to ensure the success of the Astana path ... whether or not the armed factions attend. The failure of the armed factions to attend Astana shows the indecency of their politics.”

Mr Jaafari said the regime delegation had come to the two-day talks primarily to meet Russia and Iran, and not armed opposition groups.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow thought the rebels’ refusal to show up stemmed from a “misunderstanding”. But the rebels said earlier that they were skipping the Astana talks in protest at the Syrian government’s violations of the fragile ceasefire which has been in place since late December.

UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said onTuesday that the Syrian conflict was the “worst man-made disaster the world has seen since World War II”.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Mr Mr Peskov said on Tuesday that the talks were “from time to time truly complicated by the existing differences in the different sides’ approaches”.

While the two previous rounds of talks in Astana had focused on bolstering the nationwide truce brokered by Moscow and Ankara, a new round of negotiations set for March 23 in Geneva will focus on governance, the constitution, elections, counter-terrorism and possibly reconstruction, according to the UN’s Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura.

Russian mediator Alexander Lavrentiev said the Astana talks were meant to “facilitate” Mr de Mistura’s task of finding a solution to the conflict. “If this brings any good, we think this will benefit the Geneva process,” he said.

As officials met in Kazakhstan, a UN investigation probe accused the Syrian government of intentionally bombing the Ain Al Fijeh spring outside Damascus in December, leaving around 5.5 million people in the capital without access to water, which the UN branded a war crime.

“The information examined by the Commission confirms that the bombing of (the Ain Al Fijeh) spring was carried out by the Syrian Air Force,” the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria said in a report presented to the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday. “The attack amounts to the war crime of attacking objects indispensable for the survival of the civilian population, and further violated the principle of proportionality in attacks.”

Water was cut off from Damascus and its environs when fighting intensified in Wadi Barada near the Syrian capital in December. The regime accused the rebels of poisoning water resources and cutting off the mains while the armed opposition said regime bombardment had destroyed the infrastructure.

The UN commission, which has never been granted access to Syria and bases its reports on interviews and documents, said it had found no “indications that the water was contaminated” before the spring was bombed on December 23.

“On the contrary, interviewees say that Wadi Barada residents used water up until the bombing of 23 December and no one experienced any symptoms of contamination,” the report said.

The water was contaminated after the bombing because shrapnel damaged fuel and chlorine storage facilities. The bombing itself indicated the spring was deliberately targeted. “While the presence of armed group fighters at (the Ain Al-Fijeh) spring constituted a military target, ... the damage caused ... was grossly disproportionate to the military advantage anticipated or achieved,” said the commission, which was led by Brazilian academic Paul Sergio Pinheiro.

Rebel forces first seized Wadi Barada in 2012 but the Syrian army regained control at the end of January. Syria’s representative to the rights council, Hussam Aala Edin, on Tuesday reiterated accusations that the commission was politicised, and slammed its “amateurish approach” and “naive conclusions”.

Tuesday’s report also detailed a range of other war crimes committed in Syria since last July, including a series of attacks last October on schools in Haas, in Idlib province, that killed 36 civilians, 21 of them children.

In a separate report, the civil rights group Physicians for Human Rights said the Syrian government was guilty of “slow-motion slaughter” of unknown numbers of Syrians trapped in besieged and hard-to-reach areas by willfully denying them food and health car — which amounted to a war crime.

The New York-based advocacy group said a new two-step approval process agreed last April by Syrian and UN officials to allow aid convoys into Syria “fell abysmally short” of its aim of ensuring access to all Syrians in need because the government in Damascus retained “unilateral authority” over who received assistance.

Besides the unknown numbers of Syrians that have starved to death, Physicians for Human Rights said many others suffered avoidable deaths because military forces stripped medical supplies from aid convoys that did manage to enter besieged and hard-to-reach areas.

“Still others bleed to death from war-related injuries — or die in childbirth, or from other preventable causes — because their besiegers refuse to allow the sick and injured to be evacuated to medical care,” the rights group said.

The report called on the United Nations to carry out deliveries to the most difficult areas without prior government approval, and to document and quickly report attempts to restrict or block convoys. And it called on the Syrian government not to block, restrict or delay aid convoys.

Earlier Tuesday, UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein described the Syrian conflict as an “immense tidal wave of bloodshed and atrocity,” and “the worst man-made disaster the world has seen since World War II”.

* Associated Press, Agence France-Presse