GENEVA, July 15 (Xinhua) -- A new round of talks will be convened in early September to end the war that has ravaged Syria since 2011, the UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura told a press conference Friday.
"We have just concluded the seventh round of talks. We have made incremental progress, no breakthrough, no breakdowns, no one walked out," the UN envoy told reporters.
The peace process to end the six-year Syrian civil war has been long, but so far unfruitful.
However, after reconvening for a week, some small steps were made toward the goal of de Mistura.
The Italian-Swedish diplomat, who has headed the UN peace efforts in Syria since July 2014, spelled out that during the week-long talks, he asked all involved parties to discuss substantial issues on four topics: governance, constitution, re-elections and anti-terrorism.
The last UN-led talks aimed at brokering a political solution between Syria's warring factions ended on May 19 without going deeper into the scheduled topics.
De Mistura stressed that this week had involved "preparatory work" aimed at getting people "closer to each other" and he had sought to "assist the opposition to start working closely together."
He met and spoke to the Syrian government delegation and opposition members separately, hoping to push them all to finally "sit in the same room."
The UN-led peace talks in Geneva are important in the process for a political solution to the Syrian conflict and the most important thing now is to maintain the peace process in a sustainable manner without disruption or stalling, China's special envoy on the Syrian issue Xie Xiaoyan told Xinhua.
Xie said China supports the UN in playing a leading mediation role and is willing to make positive contributions to the talks to achieve concrete results as soon as possible.
"At present, there are still big differences between and among the Syrian government and the oppositions, so a step-by-step approach should be taken to handle the relatively easier problems first so as to forge more consensus and accumulate mutual trust," he said.
Before Friday's meeting with the press, de Mistura had engaged with members of the UN Security Council in New York by telephone about progress in the seventh round of talks that started on Monday.
UN negotiators have in the past noted the inability of the Security Council to achieve unanimity on Syria as a stumbling block in the peace process, but de Mistura said Friday that he noticed "quite a change in tone" among them.
"It was a meeting in which I detected complete, total and unanimous support to what we are trying to do here," said the UN envoy.
De Mistura noted the precursor to the latest Geneva talks included a May meeting involving Russia and Turkey in Astana, Kazakhstan, followed by an agreement earlier this month in Amman brokered by the United States, Russia, and Jordan for a ceasefire in southern Syria, which coincided with the G20 summit in Hamburg where Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump.
De Mistura also spoke about a contact group set up by France and said he had been "quite intensively" in contact with a team led by French President Emmanuel Macron recently on how France could contribute to working with the UN on Syria.
The UN negotiator cited Macron as saying that "We want to put in a contact group and I feel very comfortable with that ... The only way to have fruitful negotiations is through the UN process."
This meshed with what Chinese envoy Xie said in the interview who stressed that another priority now is to consolidate the ceasefire on the ground and at the same time achieve some periodical results.
"Negotiation itself is not the purpose. Some phased fruits are needed to give confidence to both sides of the negotiations and to the regional and international community," he said.
It is also important to adhere to the principle of self-determination in the political process of the Syrian issue, namely, to let the Syrian people decide their own future, said the Chinese senior diplomat.
