UN special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura was yesterday under pressure to get peace negotiations back on track after intense Russian bombing in support of regime forces left talks in Switzerland hanging by a thread.
De Mistura’s brief is to coax the warring parties into six months of indirect talks in Switzerland.
After formally meeting the main opposition umbrella group, the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), on Monday for the first time in Geneva, the Italian-Swedish diplomat said these negotiations had officially begun.
Photo: EPA
However, less than 24 hours later, it became clear that this had been premature with Damascus’ lead negotiator, Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar al-Jaafari saying that the talks were “still in the preparatory stage.”
“We still don’t know who the opposition delegation is,” al-Jaafari told reporters, adding that he had put de Mistura straight.
Following that, the HNC canceled its meeting with de Mistura scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, with HNC member Farah Atassi saying that “at this moment, there is no reason to repeat ourselves with de Mistura.”
The HNC has demanded that the regime allow humanitarian access to besieged towns, stop bombing civilians and release thousands of prisoners — some of whom are children — languishing in regime jails before the talks can start.
However, what really outraged the HNC is an ongoing regime offensive, backed by Russian airstrikes, that on Tuesday allowed government forces to edge closer to breaking a long-running rebel siege on two government-held villages in Aleppo Province.
Russian planes carried out an intense aerial bombardment throughout the area north of Aleppo City, with the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reporting about 320 raids since Monday morning in the region.
The observatory group said at least 18 civilians had been killed in the raids on Tuesday, including five women, three children and two emergency workers.
“We have never seen things like this since the beginning of the revolution,” HNC spokeswoman Basma Kodmani said in Geneva, calling the Russian raids “unprecedented.”
“The regime’s and Russia’s actions gravely threaten the political process at this early stage,” Atassi said.
The hoped-for peace talks in Geneva are part of an ambitious roadmap hammered out in November last year in Vienna by the outside powers that foresees elections within 18 months.
US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday urged the Syrian opposition to remain on board despite the Russian bombing, adding that he was “extraordinarily sympathetic” to their difficult situation.
Russia, — which put its military might at al-Assad’s disposal in September last year — said it was willing to coordinate efforts towards a ceasefire with the US, Interfax news agency reported.
The agency reported that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said de Mistura would meet the opposition negotiators again on yesterday or today.
Gatilov, in Geneva to follow the talks, said the opposition “will explain their position and will announce the makeup of the delegation that will participate in talks,” Interfax reported.
Late on Tuesday De Mistura said on Swiss TV that if these talks fail, “all hope would be lost.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS