Day one at the Syrian peace talks, and fantasy is on the menu
A pale winter sun shines on the calm of the lake, from which snow-clad mountains rise into an azure sky. It sounds like fantasyland – and so it is.
The problem is that everyone at the Syria peace talks in the Swiss resort of Montreux has a different fantasy.
The Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem dreams of going back to the past, to a time when President Bashar al Assad ruled without challenge.
The leader of the opposition delegation, Ahmad Jarba, speaks as if he is at the head of some democratic political party that will turn Syria into Sweden.
In fact, the government’s attacks on civilians have robbed it of any legitimacy it may have once had, and the opposition is a fractious mess of which Mr Jarba represents just a small part.
In the meantime, the Syrian foreign minister gets the prize for the most extravagant rhetoric in an opening speech.
He called the opposition not only terrorists but monsters and Zionist traitors, and accused them of all crimes from cannibalism to slicing open pregnant women. The normally mild and hesitant UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, interrupted his speech to tell him to stop talking and then publicly criticised him for his “inflammatory” remarks.
Mr Jarba’s speech was comparatively measured – although he did produce a picture of a man allegedly tortured in one of Assad’s prisons. His delegation has a British PR agency advising on how to present their message, so the key word is “transition”, which translates as “get rid of Assad”.
So what’s the point? Diplomats from western countries only pretend to be deluded – they know these talks are unlikely to yield results but they hope that forcing the two sides to go through the motions of negotiation will start a process that may, eventually, bring the war to an end.
In the meantime, activists on both sides prowl the press centre trying to get their message out.
The loudest is an Australian-Syrian who shouts at anyone who’ll listen that the rebels play football with human heads instead of a ball. A Chinese reporter earnestly asked him what he thought about the Chinese representative’s speech.
“China!’ he exclaimed. “Now there’s a country that understands about human rights!”
As I said, we dwell in fantasyland in chocolate-box Switzerland.
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