UN wants US, Russia to move Syria peace process

GENEVA: “A deeper understanding” between Russia and the US is needed to move the Syrian peace process forward, UN Syria envoy Geir Pedersen said in an interview published on Thursday.

Successive UN envoys have failed to stop Syria’s eight-year war, which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and led to an exodus of refugees.

Pedersen, the fourth man in the job, is trying to arrange a committee to oversee the reform of Syria’s constitution — a modest effort, compared with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s attempt to reach a peace agreement at an international conference in 2012.

“Obviously, a Constitutional Committee in itself will not change much,” Pedersen said in an interview published by the Geneva-based Center for Humanitarian Dialogue. “But if handled correctly, and if there is political will, it could be a door-opener for a broader political process.

He told the key players that he needed “a different international setup,” Pedersen said, and wanted to convene a group of influential states alongside the Constitutional Committee meeting.

It would include the five permanent UN Security Council members and two groups of countries that have been politically active on Syria: The “Astana Group” comprising Iran and Turkey as well as Russia, and the “Small Group,” which includes Egypt, Germany, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France, Britain and the US.

“This is indicative of the fact that we are in a new phase ... this has been going on for too long, and it should be possible to move forward. This would, of course, require a deeper understanding between Russia and the US on how to move forward,” he said. “We are also working on that.”

The UN envoy said he had pressed the Syrian regime and the opposition Syrian National Commission on the importance of tackling the issue of people who had been detained or abducted or were missing, and he had appealed to them for “bigger unilateral steps on this.”