UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, author of a plan to resolve the crisis in Syria that was not put into operation, admitted that his mission failed and urged Iran to take part to the negotiations, in an interview with Le Monde newspaper.
“This crisis is still ongoing after 16 months, and I started to get involved three months ago. Substantial efforts have been made in trying to resolve this situation peacefully and politically. It is obvious that we have failed. And maybe there is no guarantee that we will succeed,” Kofi Annan acknowledged. “But have we studied the alternatives? Have we put the other options on the table? I said this in the UN Security Council”, adding that “this mission was not indefinite in time, nor my role,” he added.
This interview is published the day before the Paris meeting of the Conference of Friends of the Syrian people, in which more than 100 Arab and Western countries have asked the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution containing a threat of restrictive sanctions against Damascus. Kofi Annan spoke also about the mission of observers in Syria (UNSMIS), mobilized in mid-April, consisting of about 300 unarmed soldiers deployed in several cities in Syria, and of about 100 civilian experts. UNSMIS patrol missions were suspended in mid-June, because of persistent warfare.
“We hear it said sometimes that the unarmed observers have failed to end violence. But they never had such a role! They were sent to Syria to check if the parties complied with their commitments to cease hostilities. And for a short time, on April 12, this happened, the two sides ended confrontation,” said Annan. Former UN Secretary General underscored the important role of Russia, which is close to the regime in Damascus and has so far blocked all international actions taken against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while stressing the importance of Iran’s participation in negotiations. “Russia has influence, but I’m not sure that the events will be determined only by Russia (…). Iran is an actor. It should be part of the solution. It has influence, and we can not ignore it,” said Annan.
Americans and Europeans have opposed for Iran, an ally of the regime in Damascus, to be invited to the recent inter-ministerial conference in Geneva on the situation in Syria, because of the conflict that opposes Tehran to the West on its nuclear program issue. According to Annan, the Libyan precedent is what explains the position of Moscow and Beijing, which blocked any initiative of international action against Bashar al-Assad regime in the UN Security Council.
“I will say openly that the way the “responsibility to protect” was used in Libya created a problem of this concept. Russians and Chinese believe they have been deceived: they adopted a UN resolution that has been used for a regime change. It was not the original intention, in terms of these countries,” said the Ghanaian diplomat. In Syria, the suppression of the popular uprising and the fighting that followed between government forces and armed opposition have resulted in 16,500 deaths since March 2011, according to nongovernmental organization (NGO) Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London.
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