Syria: Back to Square One for Good-Faith Negotiations
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 26 May 2014
Rene Wadlow – TRANSCEND Media Service
With the resignation of Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi as the UN-League of Arab States mediator in the Syrian conflict, I fear that we may be “back to square one” in terms of negotiations in good faith. After the failure of Geneva II where the Syrian government representatives and those of different armed opposition movements were unwilling to discuss seriously, often refusing to meet in the same room, the resignation of Lakhdar Brahimi was openly discussed, including by him. During Geneva II, Brahimi had to walk between the two rooms in the UN Palais des Nations − one where the government representatives sat and the other filled with some representatives of the armed opposition. Fortunately, the rooms were on the same floor. However, the negotiations got nowhere. Although Brahimi is a skilled and experienced negotiator and had all the UN Secretariat help he needed, no advances were made.
Although an NGO representative does not have the standing of official mediators, I have been involved since the early days of the armed uprising in Syria in discussions with some members of opposition groups met in Paris and Geneva and with the Syrian Ambassador to the UN, Geneva, to find ways to encourage negotiations in good faith. My hope was to find issues that were negotiable and thus to create a sort of agenda for face-to-face negotiations. I knew from the start that there were certain issues that were not negotiable. The departure of President Assad and the creation of a transition government on the Yemen model always seemed to me to be a “non-starter”, although the Geneva I negotiations which were only between US and Russian diplomats had pushed for such a transition.
However, I was never able to draw up an agenda of issues on which the parties might negotiate. My hope was that some of the issues such as those for greater inclusiveness and a wider base of groups in the government which had been the early March 2011 demands when the protests were non-violent and there was no mention of the departure of Assad might serve as a basis for negotiations in good faith.
There is the classic problem in intra-state conflicts in trying to know what the different groups represent and if the agents in Europe are really mandated to speak for the group. Thus, I had no way of knowing if representatives of Syrian groups met in Europe could commit the groups they said they represented. The same problem exists for official mediators, but they have more access to information and could move between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan and Lebanon to speak with groups which I could not.
Given the difficulties of the situation and the continuing violence, we have to see if there are some alternatives to proposing face-to-face negotiations as each side sets conditions which will not be met. Thus, my proposal to revive an approach set out in the early 1960s by Charles E. Osgood to reduce US-USSR tensions at a time when there were no real negotiations going on. Osgood called his approach “The Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-reduction” (GRIT) which he later renamed “The Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension-reduction” keeping the GRIT shorthand. Soviet writers referred to it as the “Policy of Mutual Example”, but their title lost the graduated and reciprocal aspect. (1)
The basic pattern that Osgood was proposing was that the tensions/arms race spiral may offer the model for its own reversal. Just as no unilateral measure to increase arms would change the basic equilibrium of the arms race, so no reduction in arms would change the basic equilibrium but might reduce tensions. Each unilateral increase was usually met with an effort to “catch up” and even to “get ahead”. Thus unilateral decreases would not be of a nature to decrease “national security” which was the stated aim of both the US and the USSR. Each state would carefully monitor their own initiatives on the basis of their own evaluation of the reciprocal actions taken by the other side. However, unilateral actions might not be of the same nature. The reduction of nuclear warheads by one side might not be met by similar reductions but by other actions such as reducing the number of military bases
The Soviet Union and the US were both states and, as far as arms policy was concerned, rather similar with a small number of people at the center taking decisions on military policy. The situation in Syria is different. On one side is a government with a small number of people at the center making decisions. No doubt there are advisors from Iran and Russia, but we do not know how actively they advise and with what details. On the other side, there is a fairly large range of armed opposition groups, no doubt also with foreign advisors, but we do not know which or how detailed the advice is. In between, there are refugees, internally displaced, and some civil society groups but with relatively little impact on decision-making of either the government or the armed opposition.
For Osgood’s GRIT “Unilateral initiatives must be as unambiguous and as susceptible to verification as possible.” The problem with the Syrian situation is that nothing is unambiguous, and measures can be taken as “self-interested” and perhaps even “a trap”. There are two examples that I use in my discussions as models for unilateral initiatives that might justify reciprocal action. One was the government’s granting Syrian citizenship to some 250,000 Kurds whose earlier requests had been refused or postponed. The second measure, a partial response to earlier demands to enlarge the governmental base was to have two non-Ba’ath political figures join the government as ministers. Both initiatives were self-interested, but no government or group takes an action in which self interest is absent. There have also been a few − very few – cease-fires to allow humanitarian relief.
Osgood had hoped that GRIT would be part of a policy framework. He wrote “Graduated Reciprocation in Tension-reduction is not a collection of isolated acts, to be tried on like the bonnets in a lady’s wardrobe as the occasion permits. Rather, it is an over-all policy and as such it demands a complete analysis and reorientation of thinking about international relations. If our positions on questions like Algeria and Goa and our tactics in places like Berlin and Laos are to be anything other than opportunistic, then we must have an explicitly thought-out policy framework within which positions and tactics on specific issues like these can be consistently decided.”
I am not sure that anyone in Syria has an overall policy framework, but lacking face-to-face negotiations, we might see if graduated reciprocation might work.
NOTES:
(1)Charles Osgood set out his proposals in An Alternative to War or Surrender
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1962)
The Canadian peace researcher Alan Newcombe devoted two issues of his Peace Research Reviews to GRIT, January and February 1979 (Dundas, Ontario)
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René Wadlow, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and of its Task Force on the Middle East, is president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of World Citizens. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 26 May 2014.
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