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Clinton not ready to concede defeat on Syria
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is putting a positive spin on this weekend's international meeting on the situation in Syria despite reports of a continued rift with Russia over the need for President Bashar Assad to leave office.
In interviews following the Geneva meeting called by United Nations/Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan, Clinton vehemently denied signing off on a transition plan that could keep Assad in place. The U.N.'s final communique, approved Saturday by the foreign ministers of the Security Council's permanent members and other nations, does not mention him by name.
“I couldn’t disagree with you more,” Clinton told CNN on Sunday when asked if the document fails to require Assad to step down. “I think that what the agreement clearly states is that there has to be a transitional governing body that will be constituted of people who are there by the mutual consent of the government and the opposition. Now, unless I am wildly off base, there is no way anyone in the opposition would ever consent to Assad or his inside regime cronies with blood on their hands being on any transitional governing body.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, however, told reporters after the meeting that nothing in the communique required Assad's departure. And the Syrian government has also touted the meeting as a success for Assad.
"That means that the transitional governing body would exercise full executive powers," the document states. "It could include members of the present government and the opposition and other groups and shall be formed on the basis of mutual consent."
Still, Clinton told NPR that her one-on-one talks with Lavrov on Friday before the meeting have helped convince her that Russia is ready to abandon Assad.
"They have made clear they have no continuing strategic interest in Assad remaining in power," she said. "So I have every reason to believe — both on what I was told by Minister Lavrov yesterday and what he said in our meeting all day today — that they will make the case that there needs to be this transition."
The communique, she told Bloomberg, gives Annan renewed authority to apply his six-point peace plan with the Syrian government and the opposition.
“I think the important achievement was to get a unified [international community] to really endorse Kofi Annan’s guidelines and principles so that he was empowered,” Clinton said. “He can now go to the Assad regime and say we have to start talking about a transition and not be met with 'well, we don’t have to do that,' because Russia and China don’t agree with us. And I believe that it was a significant step forward in giving him the tools that he needs to test whether it is possible to mediate this very bloody, violent conflict.”
