Syria’s government and opposition, meeting face to face for the first time at a UN peace conference, angrily spelled out their hostility yesterday as world powers also restated contrasting views on the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Opposition leader Ahmed Jarba accused al-Assad of war crimes that recalled Nazi Germany and demanded the Syrian government delegation at the one-day meeting in Switzerland sign up to a plan for a transition of power.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said al-Assad would not bow to outside demands and painted a graphic picture of “terrorist” rebel atrocities supported by Arab and Western states, who back the opposition and were present.
Photo: Reuters
The US and Russia also revealed their differences over al-Assad in speeches that began what was to be a day of formal presentations.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who exchanged sharp words with Moualem when the Syrian minister spoke for more than three times the 10-minute limit Ban had set, opened proceedings at Montreux on Lake Geneva by calling for immediate access to humanitarian aid for areas under siege.
“After nearly three painful years of conflict and suffering in Syria, today is a day of fragile, but real hope,” Ban said, urging both sides to reach a comprehensive settlement based on the UN Geneva Communique, under which world powers called in 2012 for a transitional government to oversee change in Syria.
Western powers and Russia have sought to set aside their own sharp differences over whether al-Assad must be forced to make way for an interim administration and have backed the conference as a way to stop the spread of cviolence across the region.
However, Moscow and Washington differ on whether the 2012 accord — known as Geneva 1 — means that al-Assad must step down immediately. Western powers say that it does.
Showing the opposition’s determination to see through the demands of the rebels, Jarba called for the government delegation to turn against their president.
“We agree completely with Geneva 1,” Jarba said. “We want to make sure we have a partner in this room that goes from being a Bashar al-Assad delegation to a free delegation, so that all executive powers are transferred from Bashar al-Assad. My question is clear. Do we have such a partner?”
Turning around the government’s accusations that the rebels have fostered al-Qaeda and other militants, Jarba said it was al-Assad’s forces which, by targeting mainstream opposition groups, had created the conditions for al-Qaeda to thrive.
Moualem called on foreign powers to stop “supporting terrorism” and to lift sanctions against Damascus, while insisting that al-Assad’s future was not up for discussion:
“We came here as representatives of the Syrian people and state, and everybody should know that nobody in this world has the right to withdraw the legitimacy of a president or government ... other than the Syrians themselves,” Moualem said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov repeated Moscow’s opposition to “outside players” meddling, but he also said Iran — al-Assad’s main foreign backer — should have a say.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said: “We see only one option, negotiating a transition government born by mutual consent.”
“That means that Bashar al-Assad will not be part of that transition government,” Kerry said. “There is no way, no way possible, that a man who has led a brutal response to his own people can regain legitimacy to govern.”
Iran was not represented.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the