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The Vienna Talks are the first serious attempt to end the war in Syria

John Kerry meets with UN Special Envoy for Syria, Austrian and Iranian Foreign Ministers ahead of the Vienna summit, October 29. Demotix Live News. All rights reserved,On Friday, October 30, it became clear that the war in Syria is not a
civil war: it is now a global proxy war, a war initiated by Saudi Arabia and
Qatar to eliminate Arab governments that do not reliably support the Saudi (or
Arab League) position.

When the international community was threatened by the spread of
violence outside the Syrian border, the US and other European countries
intervened to force their regional allies to scale back their belligerence.
Russia also intervened in support of its traditional allies in the region. These
interventions transformed what was at first a regional proxy war into a global
proxy war. That escalation occurred because of several historical and
geopolitical factors.

Russia, with a long-standing strategic alliance with Syria that goes as
far back as the USSR, supported the Syrian government and found itself on the
same side as Iran. Iran has had an alliance with Syria since the Iraq-Iran war,
during which the Gulf States supported Saddam Hussein, who initiated an
eight-year old war that killed nearly one million people.

The US’s primary regional ally is Saudi Arabia. France and the UK, two
countries with billions of dollars in trade and arms deals with Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates sided with Saudi Arabia as well. Turkey,
governed by the AKP since 2002, took the side of the Muslim Brotherhood, with
whom they share an ideological and sectarian affinity and whose armed militia
was crushed in Hama in 1982 by Bashar al-Assad’s father. Jordan, whose massacre
of Palestinians in 1970 caused Syria to send an armored division into Jordan,
sided with Assad’s opponents. These are self-interested actors, brought
together for a single purpose: to overthrow the Assad regime.

These are just a few of the historical and geopolitical reasons behind
the strange anti- and pro-Assad alliances. This was not about defending the
rights of the Syrian people or punishing a belligerent authoritarian with blood
on his hands—all Arab regimes have blood on their hands. None of these
countries on either side really cared about the Syrian people, which is why
most of them have failed to take in any Syrian refugees. Even Turkey, which
initially opened the door to the families of the rebel fighters, is now pushing
them into the sea and driving them into Europe.

For four years, these regional and international actors watched as armed
groups, both Syrian and foreign, moved into towns and cities inviting
retaliation by the armed forces of the Syrian government. Within three years,
nearly 70% of Syria’s infrastructure was destroyed. 200,000 Syrians were
killed, and nearly ten million people were displaced. All this did not move any
sponsors of the armed factions to act. They insisted instead that they had a
moral obligation to continue to arm and finance the armed groups until Assad
was removed.

Then, during the summer of 2015—after the Turkish Islamist party lost
its majority in the June 2015 elections, ISIL launched its first suicide attack
inside Turkey, and millions of Syrian refugees trekked through Turkey and Greece
to Europe—the world began to pay attention.

It was Russia’s assertive show of power that forced some key anti-Assad
actors to reconsider their positions and take the gravity of the Syrian
situation seriously. With Russian forces on the ground, in the air, and on the
seas, Syria’s proxy war became a global war. That fact became evident in the
October 30 Vienna Meeting, where neither the Syrian government nor the Syrian
opposition groups were present. Instead, 17 countries, including
Iran—participating in such talks for the first time—as well as the UN and the
European Union, sat down to draw up a declaration of principles for ending a
war that should not have begun in the first place.

Four months ago, no one familiar with the key players was optimistic that
these countries would suddenly agree on a practical solution to this deadly
conflict. But anyone well-informed of the motives behind the primary actors in
this conflict knows that the stalemate has been caused by the untenable
position of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They have been demanding, and insisted just
days before the start of the Vienna Talks, that Assad be removed through a
political settlement or by force. Their position, once again, shows the Saudi
rulers’ disdain for participatory governance and peoples’ right to
self-determination.

Saudi Arabia has a long history of cooking up such deals, none of which
have worked. Saudi Arabia engineered the Ta’if accord, which mandated power
sharing in Lebanon. As of today, Lebanon has been without a president for 523
days, its parliament has given itself extension after extension instead of
holding new elections, and its government is paralyzed to the point that it
cannot even haul the trash out of its capital city, Beirut.

Saudi Arabia engineered a political settlement in Yemen after the Arab
Spring uprising there. The deal required then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh to
hand over power to his vice president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. Hadi was
supposed to preside over a two-year transition period, during which Yemenis
would vote on a new constitution and elect a new government. Hadi failed to
accomplish those goals, preferring instead to stay in power indefinitely. When
he was pressured by the Houthis and their allies to hold elections, he
resigned, fled to Saudi Arabia, withdrew his resignation, and supported a
brutal Saudi-led war on his impoverished country with the aim of reinstating
him as the “legitimate” president. In that war, Saudi Arabia has thus far
failed to achieve its stated goals, but has managed to hand over the city of
Aden and other southern territories to al-Qaeda and ISIL.

In Bahrain, when 75% of the population rose up against the corrupt
rulers, Saudi Arabia sent its armed forces to crush the protest movement and
bolster the regime there. When the Tunisian people rose up against their
authoritarian president, Ben Ali, Saudi Arabia offered him sanctuary and froze
its investment in that emerging democracy. When Tunisia’s elected government
wanted Ben Ali extradited on murder and corruption charges, Saudi Arabia
ignored the request and continued to offer him protection, undermining the sole
emerging democracy in the Arab world.  

In a sense, the rulers of Saudi Arabia have been consistent. They prefer
a political order imposed top-down, and have never supported a genuine
democratic movement or a democratic process for the transfer of political
power.

Instead, they have preferred to make deals that exclude the people. That
is what they want for Syria as well: a political solution imposed on the Syrian
people without regard for democracy or self-determination. Saudi Arabia does
not promote solutions that are democratic and transparent, and will never
willingly agree to a process that would leave the decision about Assad’s fate
in the hands of the Syrian people. Instead, they must be forced to agree to it.

There are signs that the Vienna meeting might be setting the stage for
that to happen:

First, the US is distancing itself from the Saudi position. After the
meeting, the State Department released a photo of the participants in the
Vienna Talks, showing Saudi Arabia sitting at the end of the table farthest
from where Secretary Kerry was sitting. Importantly, it showed Secretary Kerry
at head of the table, with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on his
left and UN Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura on his right. The US is
finally playing the role of facilitator, not party to the conflict. That is a
good sign, and a hopeful one for the Syrian people.

The nine-point Joint Statement, agreed to by all
participants and issued as a final declaration of the results of the talks,
contains several points that give reason for optimism. The Joint Statement
stresses the need to preserve “Syria’s unity, independence, territorial
integrity, and its secular character.” The participants also acknowledged the
rights of “all Syrians, regardless of ethnicity or religious denomination” to
be protected.

Importantly, the participants asked the UN, “to convene representatives
of the Government of Syria and the Syrian opposition for a political process
leading to credible, inclusive, non-sectarian governance, followed by a new constitution
and elections.” The participants recognized that such a “political process
[must] be Syrian led and Syrian owned, and [that] the Syrian people will decide
the future of Syria.” Responding to some of the participants who wanted to
bypass the Syrian people, claiming that Assad might rig such elections, the
participants declared that “these elections must be administered under UN
supervision to the satisfaction of the governance and to the highest
international standards of transparency and accountability, free and fair, with
all Syrians, including the diaspora, eligible to participate.”

The fact that the participants agreed on these principles is a huge
success. The principles recognize the right of the Syrian people to decide on
the nature of their constitutional rights and next generation of leaders, and
reflect an ability to prioritize the fight against terrorism and identify the
violent groups that must be opposed.

The Joint Statement is explicit in identifying the groups that must be
fought and excluded from deciding the future of Syria: (1) those who want to
redraw national borders (ISIL), (2) those who want to establish a
Sunni-dominated religious state (ISIL, al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam,
The Syrian Islamic Front, and any other group aspiring to impose their own
version of Sharia), (3) any group that promotes a sectarian agenda.

The Joint Statement also explicitly resolves the dispute over the fate
of the current Syrian president by stating unequivocally that the Syrian people
are to choose their next president, not Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, the US,
or the UN. The world community can only help by ensuring that the Syrian people
are able to exercise their rights and carry out their duties under safe, free,
and transparent conditions.

With these principles, it is clear that Saudi Arabia
was rebuked for insisting on the removal of the president of another sovereign
country, particularly before they act to stop funding and arming terrorist and
sectarian fighters in that country. The Syrian people—the dead, those living
under siege, and those displaced—have paid for this proxy war in blood and
tears. They are the only people with the right to decide these matters, not
outside forces who sought to use them to settle a geopolitical score. It is
hopeful that the US is finally embracing a principled solution over the
self-interested positions of allies like Saudi Arabia, who continue to be a
heavy burden on US foreign policy.