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The long-awaited “Syrian peace conference” is going on in Switzerland as I write this week’s column. Dubbed “Geneva II” after meetings on Syria in Geneva last year, the United States describes the main goal of the conference as “establishing a transitional administration to govern Syria by mutual consent,” and hence stop the fighting. The Russian foreign minister tried to cast a positive light on what has been, by all accounts, a very poor first day for the conference: “For the first time in three years of the bloody conflict, the sides - for all their accusations - agreed to sit down at the negotiating table.”
A crucial side was not present, however: No Syrian Kurdish representative was allowed to attend the talks. The attitude of the Syrian National Council (SNC) remains that they will represent the Kurds, no doubt much like the Kemalists represented the Kurds at the 1923 Lausanne Treaty talks. Readers of this newspaper all know how well that turned out for the Kurdish people over the next eighty years. In other words, if any Kurdish delegates wanted to be present at the meeting, they would have to do so under the command of and at the whim of a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated group of Syrian Arab exiles who have questionable authority over any of the groups fighting in Syria, much less any large swathes of Syrian land and people. The Syrian National Council still refuses to recognize the existence of a Syrian Kurdistan or endorse local autonomy for the Kurds or other minority groups in the country.
The United States should have nonetheless pushed for the Syrian Kurds to have a place at the table. The Assad regime, which has been trying to make overtures to the Kurds in order to keep them out of the fighting, would likely have accepted their presence. The Russians even invited Democratic Union Party (PYD) Kurdish leaders to Moscow last summer and promised to invite them to Geneva II as well. Washington insists that the PYD or the Kurdistan National Council of which it forms a part is not fit to sit with, no matter how much territory in Syria it solidly controls, no matter how many jihadists it kills, no matter how many local elections it holds, no matter how much better its human rights record is than the other Syrian armed forces, and no matter how many Arab, Christian and other diverse community representatives it incorporates into its new local governments in Rojava. The murderous, torturing Assad regime and a group of Syrian businessmen who hardly represent anyone but themselves are the ones America wants to meet with instead.
Even the Iranians have also shown a willingness to recognize and deal with the Syrian Kurds and other Kurdish autonomous governments – as long as they are not in Iran, of course. The Iranians lost their brief invitation to attend the talks, however, after American diplomats intentionally scuttled U.N. Secretary Ban Ki Moon’s invitation to them. The Syrian National Council, you see, did not want Iran present in Switzerland either. The group of exiled, hopefully well-meaning and would be political leaders who claim to lead an array of armed forces in Syria, groups that are now losing the war there, thinks it can both control the guest list in Geneva and force Bashar al-Assad to step down as well.
I scoured the mainstream English media on the issue, and just about no one seems to note the absence of the Syrian Kurds at the meeting. Surely the one opposition group with a solid organization, complete control of large swathes of Syrian territory and a functioning transitional government might have something to say at a conference aimed at “establishing a transitional administration to govern Syria”? Who knows, they might have even suggested something related to decentralized political systems that might work to help resolve the civil war.
I suppose there just wasn’t space at the table for the Syrian Kurds, unfortunately. Event organizers had to invite the foreign ministers of some forty countries, you see, along with officials from the UN, EU, Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Co-operation. No once could be expected to save a seat for the Kurds under such circumstances.
How tragic this whole convention in Switzerland appears. While I have no doubt that foreign ministers from Canada, Brazil, Japan, Indonesia, India and other countries will give fine speeches at the event, it might have been nice to get the input of those who, besides the Assad regime, actually have some relevance to what’s happing in Syria. Seeing a political circus like this play out while hapless thousands continue to die in Syria, while Syrian Kurds start to hope for the first time in a long time, makes me happy I’m not a diplomat. Forced to parrot the absurdly convoluted logic and cynical positions of my government, I think I would end up heading to the hotel bar rather than the meeting room, vainly hoping to drink away any thoughts about who is running things in this world.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press).
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