GENEVA (AP)
-- Syrian government anger over a U.S. decision to resume aid to the
opposition prompted the U.N. mediator to cut short Tuesday's peace
talks, but he said no one was to blame for the impasse and that the
negotiations would continue.
A deal to allow
humanitarian aid into Homs remained stalled, with the Syrian delegation
demanding assurances the U.S. aid will not go to "armed and terrorist
groups" in the besieged city.
U.N.-Arab League
mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said he was relieved that the government and
opposition said they will remain in the daily talks through Friday, as
planned.
"Nobody's walking out. Nobody's
running away," he told reporters. "We have not actually made a
breakthrough, but we are still at it, and this is enough as far as I'm
concerned."
Tuesday's talks were the fifth day
of negotiations regarding the civil war, focusing on opposition calls
for the formation of a transition government in Syria and help for Homs.
But
there has been little progress toward resolving a key issue of whether
President Bashar Assad should step aside and transfer power to a
transitional government.
Russian Foreign
Minister Sergey Lavrov, whose country has been a key Syrian ally, said
Moscow wants to avoid "another obsession with regime change because of
somebody's personal animosity, personal hatred to a particular
individual."
"Imagine Assad disappears. Who is
going to keep it together? There is no answer," Lavrov said in
Brussels, where a Russia-European Union summit was being held.
Brahimi said he decided to cut short Tuesday's talks "without any request or pressure from anyone."
He confirmed that the Syrian government delegation had talked at length about its opposition to the resumption of U.S. aid.
"We
believe this is not the best present to the Geneva conference," said
Faisal al-Mikdad, Syria's deputy foreign minister, calling the American
decision "another manifestation of U.S. support for "terrorist groups"
in Syria.
"This proves again that the United
States is not interested in the success of this process, and we believe
the U.S. has to desist and stop its claims that it is interested in the
success of this conference," he told reporters.
American
officials said Monday the U.S. has restarted deliveries of nonlethal
aid to the Syrian opposition, more than a month after al-Qaida-linked
militants seized warehouses and prompted a sudden cutoff of Western
supplies to the rebels.
The officials said the
communications equipment and other items are being funneled only to
non-armed opposition groups, but the move boosts Syria's beleaguered
rebels, who saw their international support slide, in large part because
of the extremists among their ranks.
"Any
notion that we support terrorists is ludicrous. The Assad regime is a
magnet for terrorists," U.S. State Department spokesman Edgar Vasquez
said in a statement.
Vasquez accused the
Syrian government of "evading the core purpose of the Geneva talks,"
which is to reach a negotiated political solution for ending the war and
suffering of Syrians.
Brahimi opened the
morning session reviewing the principles of the Geneva Communique of
June 2012, a broad but ambiguous proposal endorsed by Western powers and
Russia to provide a basis for negotiations. Assad's role in any
transitional government was a red line during those negotiations and
left vague. The U.S. and Russia disagreed about Assad's role, but they
signed the communique.
Murhaf Joueijati, a
member of the opposition Syrian National Coalition's negotiating team,
said Tuesday's session was cut short to give Syria time to make its
proposal about the future of the country within the context of the 2012
accord.
On Monday, the government presented a
working paper on Syria's future, which Joueijati said the opposition
rejected because it "had nothing to do with a transitional government."
Assad's
family, from Syria's Alawite minority, has ruled the country since
1970, pulling other religious minorities into its political orbit while
rebellions by members of the Sunni majority were crushed. Today's civil
war began as a peaceful uprising for freedom and rights in March 2011,
but it has deepened the country's sectarian divide and that could add to
the difficulties of forming a transitional government.
Joueijati accused the government of holding up the delivery of aid to Homs, which has been under siege for nearly two years.
One
complication in doing that and evacuating the city's residents is that
the opposition delegation does not control armed groups inside Syria,
including al-Qaida-backed militants, who do not feel bound by agreements
reached in Geneva. These groups gained control of Syria's uprising as
it evolved into an insurgency.
---
Juergen Baetz in Brussels contributed.
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