Taking stock of Lakhdar Brahimi

The Geneva 2 Conference failed, first, because the United States decided to support the Saudi position rather than honor their signature on the Geneva 1 communiqué and, secondly, because it was chaired by Lakhdar Brahimi was not an impartial broker but served precisely Washington instead of seeking peace.

On the advice of Russia, Syria had accepted that the special envoy of Ban Ki-moon would chair the sessions. Moscow hoped at the time that Washington would keep its promises. Damascus remembered that twenty-five years earlier, at Taif, Brahimi had not been an opponent of Syria. However, the vote by the U.S. Congress granting funding to Al-Qaeda at a secret meeting [1], the lack of legitimacy and authority of the delegation of the Syrian opposition, the cancellation of the UN invitation to Iran on the eve of the conference and the keynote speech by Secretary of State John Kerry heaping all the responsibility on Syria [2], not to mention the hurdles put by the European Union to physically prevent the Syrian delegation from travelling to Switzerland [3] showed that Moscow had either miscalculated or been deceived.

The Montreux session was exclusively designed to put Syria in the dock, making it fall into a trap. Indeed, the United States had itself drafted the statement by the opposition and released two days earlier a supposedly independent report - actually a hoax sponsored by Qatar - comparing Syrian prisons to Auschwitz [4]. Though Walid al-Muallem reasonably addressed Syrian public opinion, John Kerry and his allies, for their part, spoke to the rest of the world to impose their propaganda.

The Geneva talks were an opportunity for Lakhdar Brahimi to frame Syria’s inflexibility and to blame her for the war of which she is the victim. Thus, in the eyes of the world, the victims became the executioners. He allowed talk about terrorism, while all the same time evoking the issue of transitional government. Then he accused Syria of not playing the game even though the discussion on terrorism had resulted in the clear endorsement of the "opposition" delegation of the abuses perpetrated by the jihadists.

Since the U.S. shieft, Lakhdar Brahimi has transformed himself into a relentless accuser of Syria. On March 14, before the United Nations General Assembly, he accused her of turning down international humanitarian aid and of starving her own people [5]. He presented the situation in Yarmouk Camp as Syria’s deliberate intent to starve the Palestinians, ignoring that the Palestinian Authority supports Syria and has thanked her for what she is doing in Yarmouk. Above all, he never ceased to assert that the conflict was between the government and some of its citizens and could not find a military solution. This is concealing the West’s ten-year involvement in prepararing for this war, the way in which they triggered it by sending snipers into Deraa and spreading disinformation about the torture of children. It is also ignoring the presence of foreign fighters, even though Mr. Brahimi had previously admitted they were at least 40,000. Even though this figure is three times lower than what it actually is, it is enough to indicate that this is a war of aggression comparable to that that suffered Nicaragua in the 80s.

In retrospect, it appears that Syria was wrong to follow Russia’s advice and trust Lakhdar Brahimi. His appointment was in itself a foreboding of the failure to come: while his predecessor, Kofi Annan, had resigned, saying the mission impossible due to the division of the Security Council, Brahimi himself had accepted it with a smile.

Then, Lakhdar Brahimi had combined his role as Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General with that of Special Envoy of the Secretary General of the Arab League, from which Syria was improperly excluded. He was therefore judge and jury.

At the time of Brahimi’s appointment in August 2013, I wrote an article about his past and submitted it to a major Syrian newspaper - I did not yet have the privilege of writing for Al-Watan. I reported his engagement in 1992 among the ten members of the Algerian High Security Council [6]. This so-called champion of democracy then annulled the results of democratic elections, forcing President Bendjedid to resign, placed janviéristes generals in power triggering a terrible decade of civil war, which the Algerian people still bear the scars and from which only the United States profited.

At the time, the leader of the Algerian Islamists, Abbasi Madani, took the
pseudo secular Syrian, Bourhan Ghalioun (future president of the Syrian
National Council) as a political advisor. The armed Islamist faction GSPC
(renamed in 2007 Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) was trained in handling weapons alongside the Islamic Fighting Group in Libya (renamed in 1997 Al-Qaeda in Libya); most fighters of the two groups are today incorporated into the armed groups in Syria.

Very worried about the consequences of these revelations, some Syrian
officials opposed their publication. According to them, the dissemination of such an article would have been interpreted, including by Russia, as a desire to break away on the part of Syria. So I published it in Algeria, on Mr. Brahimi’s turf, in El-Ekhbar, the country’s second daily [7]. It provoked a storm against him there.

Let’s observe today the legacy of Lakhdar Brahimi : even before taking part in
triggering the Algerian civil war, he had negotiated the Taif Agreement (1989) for the Arab League which divided Lebanon along religious community lines and
which, today, make it anything but a sovereign state. Mr. Brahimi is also the
one who negotiated the Bonn Accords (2002), installing the Kabul Karzai clan in power on behalf of NATO. Finally, as for the famous report - to which he gave his name - of the UN Commission he chaired for the Peacekeeping Operations [8] dedicated to "humanitarian intervention", the new name for colonialism. Above all, he endorses the drift of the Organization which invented interposition troops to impose the peace of the great powers instead of observers to monitor the application of a negotiated peace between the parties in conflict. He advocated to base this global governance on a doctrine of intervention and a supra-national intelligence service called "Decision Support", which Ban Ki-moon entrusted ... to NATO . " [9].

Moreover, Mr. Brahimi has never been a "bargainer" or a "mediator" in the conflict. His mandate, signed by Ban Ki-moon, asks him to use his "talents and his extraordinary experience" to lead Syria to a "political transition, in accordance with the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people [10]. And "transition" here does not mean transition from war to peace, but from a sovereign Syria to an enslaved Syria without
Bashar el-Assad.

Lakhdar Brahimi, who presents himself as a former Third World militant, has never served the people of the Third World - not even his own - and has never
broken with the major powers. He does not deserve the respect that we have
accorded him.