DAMASCUS, July 5 (Xinhua) -- The postponement of the Geneva conference on the Syrian crisis has prompted various speculations, most of which consider it not only benefits the Syrian administration, but also serves Western powers that backed the Syrian opposition.
While stressing that Washington and Moscow "are both serious, more than serious and committed" about holding the Geneva conference on Syria, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that there were still differences with the Kremlin over the conference and suggested that it might not be held before September.
The conference was supposed to group representatives of the Syrian government and opposition around one table in Geneva.
Convincing reasons behind the postponement were not provided, but local Syrian analysts gave their own interpretation of the development, one of whom said that among other reasons, the United States and its Western allies hope the Syrian administration could defeat or weaken radical Islamist groups ahead of the negotiations.
Maher Morhej, head of the Syrian Youth Party, said neither the United States nor the European countries like to see the growing influence of the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front in Syria. Rather, the West may want the Syrian army to fight those groups and weaken it so that the Nusra Front would no longer pose threats to future political agreements.
The Syrian army has recently made sweeping victories on the ground against the opposition, prompting the latter to ask their Western backers for qualitative weapons to turn the tide in favor of the armed opposition.
The United States and EU agreed to render weapons to the vetted opposition, not the Nusra group, and some opposition groups revealed that weapon shipments had already arrived in Aleppo province in northern Syria via Turkey.
Morhej, however, said that although weapons have reached the hands of the Syrian opposition, they are not the kind of weapons that could tweak the balance in favor of the opposition fighters, "otherwise we could have seen some advancement in the rebels' fighting power, but we haven't seen that so far."
"If they wanted to give qualitative weapons to the opposition, they could have already done that... but they haven't really taken that decision yet," he told Xinhua.
"The West has an interest in marginalizing the Nusra Front... they believe that Nusra group must be eliminated," he added.
He noted that the Syrian army's sweeping victories would surely empower the Syrian administration's position at the negotiation table in the face of the fractured opposition.
Earlier this year, the United States designated the Nusra as a terrorist organization after the group announced its alliance with the Iraqi wing of al-Qaida and claiming credit for deadly explosions that had rocked Syria over the past two years of conflict.
The lack of unified international stance and the recent changes in Qatar and Egypt were also reasons behind the conference delay, noted Morhej.
Yet, other analysts think that the United States wants to prolong the crisis in Syria by postponing the conference.
Sharif Shihadeh, a Syrian lawmaker, told Xinhua that "America doesn't seek a serious political solution to the Syrian crisis, and it's unable to unify the Syrian opposition to come with one vision."
Shihadeh also slammed Western powers' talks about achieving balance on the ground between the opposition and the government troops so that both parties could have equal shots in Geneva, saying such remarks are "unrealistic."
"It's impossible for the armed opposition to tilt the balance of the fights in its favor," he contended.
Meanwhile, Fayez al-Sayyegh, a political analyst, said the Washington, by delaying the conference, wants to weaken Syria's regional role in favor of Israel. "The United States doesn't want Syria to have an influential regional role," he told Xinhua.
Deputy Information Minister Khalaf al-Muftah also slammed what he called America's "double standards" because "it speaks something when meeting the Russians and agree on a political approach and later changes its stances when it meets pro- opposition countries and pledge armament support to the rebels."
Al-Muftah said the exiled Syrian opposition is linked with foreign agendas, adding that such opposition wants the Geneva conference to be a venue for claiming the authority in Syria.
"They (opposition parties) place preconditions to hinder the conference," he said.
Syria's National Coalition (SNC), the main Western-backed opposition group in exile, said recently that any meeting should end with the departure of President Bashar al-Assad. For its part, the Syrian government said it was ready to go to the conference but without any precondition and rejected the opposition's stance toward Assad's presidency.
On May 7, both Moscow and Washington said they had decided to hold an international conference in Geneva designed to facilitate a solution to the Syrian crisis through political dialogue.
The planned, yet delayed, conference is a follow-up to last year's international meeting in Geneva that drafted a peace roadmap for Syria but was never materialized.
|
