Twice in one week, the 150 members of the newly created Syrian Constitutional Committee walked into the United Nations offices in Geneva to begin their work. The optics were good: for the first time since the uprising began, rival sides faced each other to talk about constitutional reform. The history was less promising: the Council Chamber was also the scene for meetings of the ill-fated Geneva process, where the talking went on for years with no outcome while the civil war raged on. With no timetable or end date set, there is every chance this constitutional committee could go on disagreeing endlessly.
And yet, in the opening speeches last week, there was a glimmer of hope. The head of the Syrian government’s delegation, Ahmad Kuzbari, made a surprising suggestion. He would, he said, be willing to consider amendments to the constitution “or even a new constitution that would improve the reality of our people.”
Syria’s constitution was last amended in 2012, during the uprising against Bashar Al Assad, by a committee that he himself appointed. Since then, as the uprising escalated into civil war, the regime has maintained the constitution would not be amended, and certainly not by outside powers. As recently as February this year, Al Assad told the Syrian parliament he would not “bargain” over the country’s constitution. Doing so, he said, “could have a bigger price than the war itself.”
So what could have persuaded the regime to give up this bargaining chip so suddenly?
The answer is that, after years of opposing it, the regime appears to have come round to the committee’s usefulness as a forum for post-conflict negotiation. The constitutional committee now offers the best chance for the Syrian regime to negotiate a post-conflict settlement with the opposition, but without appearing to have agreed to talk to people it calls terrorists – without even having to set foot in the same room.
Al Assad himself has endorsed the discussions, albeit at arm’s length, telling state television last week that while his government is not part of the negotiations, the delegation does “represent the government’s view.”
If the Geneva-led process was biased toward the West, the Astana process, and this committee which has grown out of it, is tilted toward the regime. Crucially, all the countries backing the Astana process have a stake in the current regime’s survival. However, although the meetings take place on European soil, the committee remains hamstrung, however, by a requirement for any agreement to be reached through consensus or a 75 percent majority vote. This makes it almost impossible for the regime, which has chosen one third of the delegates, to be out-voted. It also means there is no better way on offer for the regime to engineer a way to return to the fold of nations that is backed by the UN.
But to do that will require a new constitution, or something that can be accepted as new. The most direct path back to what the regime would define as the status quo might be termed “land-plus-a-constitution for peace.” It is a formulation that would give almost everyone involved in the civil war a sliver of what they wanted – but would leave those who fought for freedom unsatisfied.
The regime might accept a small rewrite of the constitution that left most of the 2012 document intact. In fact, the opposition have already suggested this is the limit of their ambition. Yahya Al Aridi, spokesman for the opposition delegation, said last week that “70 percent” of the current constitution could be salvaged.
A UN-backed constitution that paved the way for new elections would probably satisfy the international community, or at least those parts of it that can be satisfied. Russia could use the constitution to argue that foreign troops – except for its own, naturally – should depart.
On the ground, with the ambitions of Syria’s Kurds now crushed by the US withdrawal and Turkish attack, the regime would retake Idlib but perhaps allow Turkey a sliver of land in the northeast. That could then be used a dumping ground for all the refugees who refuse to make peace with the regime, ending the migration issue for Turkey and swelling the border region to keep the Kurds away.
Thus, the three red lines that the regime has repeatedly outlined, and which Kuzbari reiterated last week in Geneva – the territorial integrity of Syria, the departure of foreign troops and no external interference in its politics – would broadly be satisfied. The core of Syria, from Aleppo to Damascus, would be back under the regime’s control and it could plausibly argue that it had maintained the territorial integrity of the country and put an end to foreign interference.
Those left unsatisfied would be those who chose to remain in exile and the families of those lost to conflict or forgotten in the dungeons of the regime. The new constitution and agreement would carry the imprimatur of the opposition, the UN and the Russian government. Those who might oppose it will be dead, in exile or struggling to survive in cities far from home. It is not for them that any new constitution will be written.
Faisal Al Yafai is currently writing a book on the Middle East and is a frequent commentator on international TV news networks. He has worked for news outlets such as The Guardian and the BBC, and reported on the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.
