UN says Syria talks resume on January 29
UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said Monday the new date for the start of long-awaited peace talks on the conflict in the Arab country is January 29.
“The date in which we will be in a position to issue invitations will be tomorrow and the date in which we can open the talks will be the January 29th,” the UN official said in a briefing with reporters in Geneva.
De Mistura said he is trying his best to have the broadest possible spectrum of the opposition groups in the talks.
“I am personally careful about the issue of invitations to avoid a repetition of what happened in Geneva II,” said de Mistura, adding that UN Security Council Resolution 2254 is very clear about who should participate in the talks.
He said the criteria for issuing the invitations will be the inclusiveness and substantive weights of the parties that will attend the talks, adding that women and civil society members will also have a considerable say in the negotiations.
The UN envoy said the resolution has given him the mandate and the task to finalize the efforts on the list of Syrian participants.
He said the agenda of the talks will be governed by the resolution.
No concessions on talks
On Sunday, a senior Syrian government official said Damascus will not make any new concessions in the upcoming Geneva peace talks.
“We will not make new concessions at [the] Geneva peace talks,” said the assistant regional secretary of al-Baath Arab Socialist Party, Hilal al-Hilal.
De Mistura said main priorities of the talks will be to discuss the possibility of a broad ceasefire and the possibility of stopping the threat of Daesh Takfiri terrorists.
He also said there will be no official opening ceremony for the talks on January 29, adding that the format of negotiations will be in the form of "proximity talks" that could be “a staggering six-month process.”
“This will not be a Geneva 3 conference,” he said, adding, “The time has come to try to produce an outcome.”
Answering a question about what role the Geneva Communiqué will play in the future talks, he said the document, which was issued in June 2012 in earlier stages of UN-sponsored talks on Syria, “will be still considered as the umbrella for everything we are going to do.”
He added however, that the UN will accept no precondition from any party to start the talks.
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