The United Nations' envoy to Syria admitted in a confidential memo that the UN would be unable to monitor or enforce any kind of ceasefire that comes out of negotiations in Geneva, Foreign Policy's Colum Lynch reported last weekend.
The memo, entitled the "Draft Ceasefire Modalities Concept Paper," asserted that Syria will still be far too dangerous following the talks for UN peacekeeping forces to monitor a ceasefire without significant risk to their own lives.
"The current international and national political context and the current operational environment strongly suggest that a U.N. peacekeeping response relying on international troops or military observers would be an unsuitable modality for ceasefire monitoring," a team working with Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy, wrote in the paper.
“There will be a direct trade-off between a desire for the highest level of credibility in a ceasefire monitoring process … and tolerance for physical risk," the paper said.
An immediate ceasefire is step one of a a four-point peace plan for Syria created by Iran, a staunch ally of Assad. The proposal also calls for the establishment of a national unity government, the anchoring of minority rights in the constitution, and internationally supervised presidential elections in Syria.
But the concept paper drafted by de Mistura's team seemed to imply that Syria's government and its allies — rather than an independent monitoring body traditionally deployed to war zones by the UN — will be expected to enforce the ceasefire.
Syria will "remain highly fragmented, volatile, and militarized" for the foreseeable future, the memo said. "In such a situation, it would be extremely challenging to deploy international monitors to conduct observation tasks on the ground."
The situation is further complicated by the presence of Iran-backed Shiite militias fighting on behalf of the Assad regime — and Russian warplanes continuously targeting rebel groups backed by the US, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.
As such, the UN memo called for a more "realistic" approach to fomenting peace instead — one that would involve "national counterparts" and "local forces."
The former US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, warned against this strategy in an open letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry just last month.
"A ceasefire without an impartial force to enforce it will not succeed in Syria," Ford, now a researcher at the Middle East Institute, wrote in December.
He continued:
The US and other states need to agree about (1) a force that would robustly monitor a ceasefire, if one can be secured; (2) how to improve local security, and (3) what the UN Security Council will countenance when the ceasefire is violated and an international force identifies the responsible party(ies).
The revelations in the de Mistura memo come as analysts question how effective the negotiations between Syria's regime and the opposition will be in ending nearly five years of civil war — especially as doubts remain over whether the opposition will participate in the talks at all.
Before talks began on Friday, Syria's main opposition council — the Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee (HNC) — said it would be boycotting the Geneva conference until Syrian president Bashar al-Assad halted airstrikes and lifted sieges on rebel-held territories in accordance with a UN resolution to which the government agreed in December.
Members of the HNC ended up traveling to Geneva on Saturday in an effort to pressure the regime's delegation — led by Damascus' chief negotiator, Bashar al-Jaafari — to make good on its promises. But an ISIS-linked suicide bombing just outside of the Syrian capital on Saturday threatened to derail the talks even further, as the government and the opposition bickered over who was to blame for the attack that killed more than 70 people.
In any case, it is now clear that the UN's top official charged with steering the conflict towards a resolution seems less than optimistic about his ability to do so.
"There is … a risk of mission creep," the UN paper stated. "As such, it is imperative to clearly articulate those roles which a monitoring mission would not be capable of doing."
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