Tomorrow a new round of the international conference "Geneva-2" is due to start, aimed at a peaceful settlement of the situation in Syria. The first round of the conference was virtually ineffectual. The President of the Middle East Institute, Yevgeny Satanovsky, explains why it happened and if progress is to be expected after February 10.
"There are two types of negotiations. You can take part in a conference after winning or losing a war and then decide the future of territories, the way it was in Potsdam or in Yalta. Conferences of the second type, like the Geneva-2 conference, are conferences that are aimed at creating a process. Very often people understand in advance that there will be no results. In this case, the parties that will take part in Geneva-2 have only one disagreement - on the issue of "land", as we call it: who will be buried first. In this situation they have nothing to agree on," Mr Satanovsky believes.
He explains his opinion through the current situation: "On the one hand, there is the government which is successfully holding on during a civil war which has been funded and organized from outside. On the other hand, there are representatives of the opposition, who in general are ready to talk with this government. But these people are not responsible for anything. They do not have those armed groups, who, strictly speaking, are fighting this war. They have no effect on them."
"What we are observing happening along with Geneva-2 are certain agreements reached with field commanders on the passage of humanitarian convoys into areas occupied by the opposition, "terrorist" groups as I call them, about the passage of government forces. This, frankly, does much more for the people of Syria than the Geneva-2 conference. There is an ongoing supply of weapons, particularly through Jordan. There are rather serious efforts at attacking Shiite communities on the territories of Iraq and Lebanon, particularly aimed at unblocking weapons' and militants' supply channels blocked by Hezbollah and the Mahdi Army and at opening another front against Assad. This is the reality of our days. It is clear that diplomats are working in this direction, but the people who are organizing, funding the civil war, are active too".
"The Syrian civil war is part of a larger (at least according to the Salafi leadership, the Saudi leadership) conflict between the Shiites and Sunnis. It has to do with efforts to stop the expansion of Iran in the Arab world. As part of the operation to stop the expansion of Iran in the Islamic world, an attack has been made on a hospital in Yemen, where the Acting Yemeni President Hadi is undergoing treatment, because Prince Bandar does not agree on two issues: the supply of oil via Yemen bypassing the Strait of Hormuz and issues regarding Asir province. The Iranian embassy in Beirut has been bombed, causing the deaths of diplomats and employees of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. And we have all the events that are happening in Syria, which is also part of a larger mosaic. Looking at them separately in this case would be incorrect. Hoping for successful diplomatic actions when explosions take place every day during the negotiation process would be very optimistic, but not very realistic".
Speaking of the Jabhat al-Nusra, an organization that is active in Syria, Mr Satanovsky declared, "The Saudis claim that this structure has been created by Damascus or directly by Iran. From our perspective, it is most likely a Salafi structure of Iraq, which is a separatist group, as often was the case in the Iraqi civil war, where the Salafi group were not under the control of Saudi Arabia but remained committed to the Salafi ideology. There is no one to influence the rival forces which are attacking the authorities of Syria, there is no point in doing this."
Mr Satanovsky is convinced that "in this situation Assad will win the elections if they take place, because the part of the population who understand that there will be genocide, that there has been a promise to destroy the Alawites and the Shiites in general, while the Druze and the Kurds, not even mentioning the Christians after Maaloul and the rest that happened there, will get what is coming to them, understand that they can only hope in the central authorities. It is already a war between communities, like in Lebanon. Unfortunately, one can only shrug in this situation. There is nothing to be done here. There is no evil government that tyrannizes its own people, nor great heroes who are fighting for freedom and independence. We can leave these tales to the Western media."
