DHAKA: Former US president Jimmy Carter on Monday proposed three principles as a basis for Syria peace talks in Geneva: free elections, respect for their results and the deployment of peacekeepers.

Syria peace talks are set to begin in Switzerland on January 22, though the full list of participants is still unclear.

The talks have gone nowhere up to now because each belligerent ‘has been allowed to define the preconditions for negotiations’, Carter, who won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, reports TDS.

While president Bashar al-Assad considers his opponents terrorists and will not talk until they lay down their arms, the fractured opposition is demanding a full regime change, giving Assad no incentive to bargain.

‘No one can win this war,’ argued Carter in an article co-written with American University professor Robert Pastor.

‘It is clear that the parties think they cannot afford to lose because they fear annihilation and this explains why the war will keep going unless the international community imposes a legitimate alternative.’

UN envoys Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi ‘have not been permitted to use their negotiating skills because the principal actors insist on preconditions of victory rather than mutual accommodation essential to bringing the war to an end’, argued the authors.

‘These preconditions aim to win an unwinnable war rather than to forge an imperfect peace.’

BDST: 1624 HRS, DEC 23, 2013
Edited by Robab Rosan, Current Affairs Editor