The U.N.’s special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, announced Wednesday that he would step down at the end of November as U.N.-led peace talks in the long conflict continue to stall…
The U.N.’s special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, announced Wednesday that he would step down at the end of November as U.N.-led peace talks in the long conflict continue to stall.
Background
Staffan de Mistura is an Italian-Swedish diplomat and former member of the Italian government. After a 40-year career in various United Nations agencies, he was appointed Undersecretary of State (Junior Minister) for Foreign Affairs in the Italian cabinet headed by Mario Monti. He is currently the United Nations special envoy for the Syria crisis.
In 1971 de Mistura started his career with the UN as a WFP Project Officer in Sudan. In 1973 he was an Emergency Relief Officer in Chad, there he led the first-ever UN airdrop operation. By 1976, he was working as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Deputy Chef de Cabinet, a post he remained in until 1985. In addition, he was given special humanitarian assignments to Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Sudan, Ethiopia, Vietnam and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.
On 10 July 2014, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that he had appointed de Mistura as the new special envoy tasked with seeking a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Syria. De Mistura’s extensive involvement with various humanitarian missions and decades of field experience made him the near-perfect choice for the UN Envoy role. He was personally responsible for the multiple evacuations of Homs (2015), Idlib (2017) as well as the Russo-Turkish military buffer zone in Idlib (September 2018).
Analysis
Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, said Wednesday that he would leave his post at the end of November, closing a chapter of the seven-year war in which diplomacy has frequently been outgunned by overwhelming force on the battlefield.
About half a million people have died in the conflict, which has shredded the country’s social fabric and created one of the largest refugee crises since World War II. As the United Nations’ most senior diplomat working on the crisis, de Mistura showed unwavering commitment to the U.N.-backed Geneva peace process, even as the Syrian army marched toward victory, the space for negotiations shrank, and the centre of political gravity shifted towards separate talks supported by Russia, one of President Bashar al-Assad’s greatest allies.
Speaking at a news conference in New York, de Mistura, 71, said that he was leaving the position for personal reasons. “I am not laying down the charge until the last hour of the last day of my mandate,” he said. The Italian-Swedish diplomat is the third person to resign from this post. His predecessors — former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan and veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi — left their posts in frustration at the global deadlock over how to end the war.
In his closing comments, de Mistura said he had told the U.N. Security Council that Secretary-General António Guterres had instructed him to “verify once and for all” whether a credible, balanced committee to draft a postwar constitution for Syria could be convened. “One month can be a century in politics. . . . I have always been an optimist,” he said.
Diplomats and negotiators working on the Syria crisis veered between frustration at the envoy’s perennial optimism and acknowledgements that he had faced an “impossible task.”
With backing from Russian warplanes and Iranian troops, Assad’s army retook almost all of the opposition’s strongholds over the course of de Mistura’s tenure, even as the U.N.-backed peace talks continued in Geneva. In January, participants at a Russia-backed peace conference in the Black Sea city of Sochi agreed to form a committee to rewrite the Syrian constitution, with the government, opposition groups and the United Nations each picking a third of the committee’s membership. De Mistura, and, by extension, Geneva, tacitly backed it.
The Syrian government’s offensives took a devastating toll on opposition-held areas. Entire suburbs and neighbourhoods of Damascus and Aleppo were flattened. Hospitals were bombed. At times, the bombing was so intense that civilians were unable to bury their dead.
Assessment
Our assessment is that a Turkish, Iranian, Russian Asthana peace initiative is gathering more traction than the Geneva peace process. We believe that the Syrian regime has repeatedly defied UN efforts to establish a ceasefire to halt the fighting. We also believe that Syria is objecting to the UN-led effort to include civil society representatives, religious and tribal leaders, experts and women on a panel to agree on a post-war constitution for Syria that would pave the way to elections.
We feel that De Mistura is stepping down as there is no sign of a breakthrough and perhaps realizes that he might not be able to contribute more to the peace process.
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