Many of the who attended this week’s National Dialogue conference in the Syrian capital Damascus had never imagined they would be able to enter the building in which it was held.
“Honestly, it’s an indescribable feeling,” said Ammar Alzeer, a photographer from the coastal city of Baniyas, who had been invited to discuss media freedoms at set up to work on guidelines for a new Syrian government. “For a while, I couldn’t believe that we were in the People’s Palace. That’s its name but we knew it was really the palace of [Syria’s former dictator] Bashar Assad. Now we feel that this place is truly ours.”
“The fact that the Syrian people are in the same palace where used to live is cause for optimism in itself,” adds Mohammed Alaa Ghanem, senior policy advisor for Citizens for Secure America, or C4SSA, a Syrian advocacy group based in Washington. “Both yesterday and today. I’ve seen amazing diversity within this conference: Men and women, young and old, people from different walks of life, different religions, Muslim, Christian, Druze, you name it. Yes, there are people missing who should be here. But the Syrian people are finally in the ‘People’s Palace’ and that’s very positive.”
Plans for a new government
In mid-February, Syria’s foreign minister would be chosen in early March. The small interim government currently running the country was chosen by rebel group, , or HTS, which led the December assault that ousted Assad’s regime. HTS was formerly affiliated with extremist groups like al-Qaeda but since it took over the Syrian government, HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, now the country’s president, .
In January, al-Sharaa, even after a new government is installed, announced work “on an inclusive transitional government that reflects Syria’s diversity,” and a process that would eventually lead to “free and fair elections.”
The 600 attendees at the conference were meant to help guide that process, splitting into working groups to focus on six topics.
For those who couldn’t be there, there was an online questionnaire asking what they thought the country’s most urgent priorities were. An estimated 10,000 Syrians around the world responded.
By and large, attendees thought discussions at the one-day event had gone well.
“Nothing was off limits,” Alaa Ghanem told DW. “We didn’t get any instructions beforehand that we should only discuss this or that.”
Of course there were different opinions within his group, he added. “But any disagreement was very respectful.”
Not all positive
There were also complaints about the conference.
Some attendees questioned whether all those who should have been there actually were, and whether there was enough representation from .
Various claimed they had either not been invited or had chosen not to come. The new Syrian government is still in conflict with Syrian Kurdish groups who controlled northeastern parts of Syria during over a decade of civil war. It remains unclear whether some Kurdish groups want to maintain that control and exactly how they will “rejoin” a unified Syria.
Others criticized the working groups’ conclusions, saying these were simply the same things that had been discussed by Syrians for years and that they brought nothing new.
The principle complaint though was about the way the meeting was organized. This led to it not being taken seriously, critics noted.
“There’s a lack of transparency on the criteria for selecting participants … and there’s been no transparency about whether invitees were invited in their personal capacity or their representative capacity,” Sawsan Abou Zainedin, chief executive of Madinya, a UK-based organization that advocates for Syrian civil society, told DW in Damascus.
“The very tight time frame has also been a very big concern,” she continued.
Quite a few of the problems at the National Dialogue stemmed from this, attendees agreed.
Before the National Dialogue, a seven-member preparatory committee said it had met with around 4,000 people during over 30 different meetings right around the country, in just under a fortnight. The committee said it also received more than 700 written submissions. But only two days before the conference, the organizing committee’s spokesperson told journalists he still wasn’t sure of the exact date of the National Dialogue.
Invitations to the event then apparently went out very quickly, just a day before it was to take place, and while the committee was still travelling around the country.
This caused confusion and also meant some invitees, including prominent members of the Syrian opposition who now live outside of the country, couldn’t make it.
“Building the future of Syria cannot be reduced to a one-day event,” Abou Zainedin argued. “Today should be the beginning of a long journey of dialogue.”
Some critics also blamed the international community for putting pressure on Syria’s interim leaders to move so quickly, making the contingent on a new government. Experts say is imperative for a successful transition in the war-ravaged country.
“The National Dialogue should have been a much longer process, and even a much more inclusive process,” Labib al-Nahhas, director of advocacy group Syrian Association for Citizens’ Dignity, told the Qatari TV network Al Jazeera this week. “But because the international community is waiting to see what kind of transitional government will come out of this, and it has to be announced at the beginning of next month, it didn’t give Syrians enough space and time to do it.”
What happens next?
Although the results of the National Dialogue conference will be nonbinding, they won’t just be “advice,” the preparatory committee has said.
A statement was prepared at the end of the conference that emphasized the rejection of all forms of discrimination, respect for human rights and the principle of peaceful coexistence, among other points — including criticism of Israel for violating Syria’s territorial integrity that same day. As observers also quickly pointed out, the statement was secular and did not make religion a framework for future governance.
London-based activist Abou Zainedin says she would like to know more about how the results of the conference will be used. “We need to be clear about the process so we can track the outcomes,” she explains.
“The litmus test of whether this conference is successful is whether or not the recommendations produced by us, the delegates, will be taken into consideration and how they will be adopted in transitional arrangements,” C4SSA’s Alaa Ghanem concluded after the conference. “If they’re not taken into consideration, then this whole thing is just for show. But right now, I’m optimistic.”
Edited by: Anne Thomas
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