Observers say Friends of Syria conference to fuel violence further
25 Feb Xinhua
Syrian observers and analysts slammed the Friends of Syria conference
currently underway in Tunis, pointing out that “it would further inflame
the violence in Syria under the pretext of building humanitarian
corridors.”
“The participants of this conference are not standing at the same
distance from all parties of the conflict in Syria, but they are trying
to incite the opposition against the regime,” Janpolat Shkai, a
political analyst, told Xinhua.
He pointed that the conference “will have symbolic success, but will
be a failure in terms of content, ...and will further aggravate the
crisis rather than calm it down.”
Around 70 countries are taking part in the two-day Friends of Syria
Conference convening in Tunis.
The conference gathers top diplomats from the Arab League, the
European Union and the United States, but is marked by the absence of
Russia, which denounced the meeting as one-sided without the
participation of Damascus. China, who also decided not to attend the
conference, said it needed to further study the aim, effect and
mechanism of the conference and it had no idea of the preparations of
the conference. At the same time, China said it is a friend of the
Syrian and Arab peoples. Analysts in Damascus said the last-ditch
squeezing measure aims to unify the Syrian opposition groups and work
for toppling the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Meanwhile, Shkai pointed that “the humanitarian pretext promoted by
the participants of the conference won’t help to stop the wheels of
violence,” stressing that “the conference lost its credibility and
became a tool to achieve certain agendas by some countries.”
Meanwhile, Abdulaziz Kheir, a Syrian opponent, said the Tunis
conference has little chance of success, stressing that a more diverse
participation is needed to achieve the desired balance of international
stances.
Another political analyst, Ahmad al-Haj Ali, regarded the conference
as “a new phase to aggravate the Syrian crisis,” pessimistic of any
serious results out of the conference.
He said the Western powers went to the UN Security Council and Human
Rights Council to gain support for their scheme but failed and after
that, they invented something new to internationalize the Syrian crisis.
He further charged that any attempt to impose humanitarian corridors
would be a new cover for smuggling weapons to the armed groups. Ali
Haidar, a moderate analyst, warned that the conference will escalate the
violence in Syria through arming and financing the rebels under the
banner of “humanitarian corridors.”
Meanwhile, Bassam Abdullah, an international relations professor at
Damascus University, told Xinhua during a recent interview that the
conference should be called “the enemies of Syria,” pointing out that it
came to give a new breath to the “ fractured” opposition abroad.
“I can’t understand how the United States can be a friend to Syria
after all the sanctions that it had imposed during and before the
unrest, which targeted the Syrian people only,” he said.
In Tunis, representatives of the Damascus-based National Coordination
Body, announced their boycott to the conference, due to what they called
“the suspicious role” of some countries in the conference.
|