Neither protection nor dialogue were the outcomes of last week's Friends of Syria meeting, reports Dina Ezzat The Syrian government shrugged it off as a meeting of "the enemies of Syria", and Syrian opposition groups spoke of their dismay at the meeting's failure to produce concrete measures to end the killing of demonstrators at the hands of the regime led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Such were the verdicts on the meeting of the "Friends of Syria" that convened in Tunis last week, attended by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Arab League Secretary-General Nabil El-Arabi and Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassim. The meeting did not force the Syrian government to end the killing of protesters demanding an end to the rule of Bashar Al-Assad, and it also failed to give the Syrian people hope that the bloody battles between the regime and the opposition would come to an end any time soon. "We have to admit that the meeting was more than a failure. It was almost pointless, if not exactly counter-productive," said one Arab source who took part in the meeting that convened last Friday amid expectations that it could lead to a joint Arab and international plan to end the violence in Syria that has thus far left an estimated 8,000 people dead and thousands wounded and a further 70,000 refugees in neighbouring countries. The meeting was held as a result of a French initiative, and it brought together the foreign ministers of key Western countries, as well as Arab League member states and representatives of developing countries like India, Brazil and South Africa that have good relations with Damascus. Representatives of the Syrian opposition groups were also invited. It had been hoped that the meeting would produce a tentative action plan to unify the Syrian opposition groups under a single coherent leadership, though this too did not happen. In the words of one diplomat who took part in the meeting, "the required basic minimum of understanding is still lacking among the Syrian opposition groups -- not just between the opposition in exile and the opposition in Syria, but also among all the opposition groups." It had also been hoped that the meeting would send a clear message to the Syrian regime that it had to stop its brutal crackdown on the protesters. However, this too was watered down, and Al-Assad is likely at most to feel that he has carefully to consider his next steps as a result of last week's meeting. Sources present at the meeting said it was clear that Russia and China, firm allies of the Syrian regime who have twice vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on Syria, were not going to allow the meeting to checkmate al-Assad. "They were using their influence over the meeting in a very clear way with hardly any serious resistance from the US," said one source, adding that the low-level representation of countries in dialogue with Syria, such as Brazil, South Africa and India, was another indication of their reluctance to put more pressure on the Syrian regime. While the meeting called for an immediate end to the violence in Syria and for the military to be withdrawn from the country's towns and cities, it offered no roadmap for the implementation of these demands. There was no indication of what would happen if they were not met, aside from further threats to freeze the assets of members of the Syrian regime. Al-Assad will not have felt any need to change course as a result of the meeting, instead finding in it an indication of the inability of the international community, and for that matter the Arab world, to come to an agreement on how to handle the situation in Syria. The only concrete demand was that put forward by the Qatari prime minister, who demanded that Arab peace-keeping forces be sent to Syria to provide security for civilians. This demand was not agreed on by those present, despite support from the meeting's host, Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki. According to some Arab and Western diplomats involved in the Syrian issue, participants had arrived in Tunis with no clear idea of a plan of action to deal with the situation. As a result, the meeting was more like a brainstorming session than a proper high-level meeting, they said. "The fact of the matter is that the decisions that some key participants wanted to have taken in Tunis were impossible for all the participants," said another Arab participant, adding that there had been no consensus either among the Arab participants or internationally about the correct way forward. There had been no consensus on proposals to send peace-keeping forces to Syria, and no consensus either on proposals put forward by some European countries to arm the Syrian opposition. "The opposition is already armed, and if this increases we will be getting into a fully-fledged civil war. Who is going to take responsibility for that," the Arab participant asked. However, there was also a growing realisation at the meeting that the end of the Al-Assad regime was likely to come sooner or later. "Behind the bloody one-off battles lies a picture of Syria slipping out of the regime's control," suggested a recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG). The fact that the Al-Assad regime had failed to stop the demonstrations after one year showed that they would not stop until the regime had fallen, the ICG report stated, adding that no one believed in the symbolic gestures of reform that the regime had been making. However, the ICG report also said that the main Syrian opposition group outside the country, the Syrian National Council (SNC), had failed to offer an alternative to the Al-Assad regime since it was formed last September. "This is precisely the point," said a Cairo-based diplomat from one of the countries in touch with the Al-Assad regime. "There is no replacement for Al-Assad, and it is too risky to push harder for him to fall." Finding a replacement for Al-Assad may be the most challenging task faced by former UN secretary-general Kofi Anan, who has accepted the post of joint UN-Arab League envoy on Syria. In the words of one diplomat who is helping to brief Anan, there are two ways in which this might be done: either by convincing Al-Assad to step down and to delegate power in parallel with the formation of a coalition government, or by getting the opposition and a segment of the regime to agree on a unified scenario for the future of Syria and then forcing Al-Assad to accept it.
