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Kassioun Editorial 1037: The Sixth Round Test
Information indicates that there has been agreement to hold the sixth round of meetings of the small group of the constitutional committee, to take place during the second half of next month.
The convening of this round comes after nearly nine months of interruption in the committee’s meetings, and a lot has happened during these months, whether at the local, regional, or international levels.
The first thing that should be noted in the committee’s reconvening, and perhaps also the most important previous results, is the losing bets of the extremists on both sides who were frantically seeking during the period since the last meeting, to go around the idea of a political solution as a whole, and to return to the previous proposals. Those proposals include things of the type of “it’s over” and “military victory”, as well as of a similar type from the other side, which rejects any gradual approach and insists on the solution with a “knockout blow”, which they ask outside sides to undertake.
Therefore, the next meeting within these coordinates is still revolving around the initial tasks performed from the beginning of the committee’s formation, which is primarily to preserve the political process in the ICU and prevent its death, and in essence to preserve that process as the implementation of UNSC Resolution 2254. Secondarily, as a key that secures the minimum for building the joint Syrian dialogue not only to lay the foundations for drafting the constitution, but also to implement all the provisions of UNSC Resolution 2254, in particular, with regard to the transitional governing body, which needs a Syrian-Syrian consensus on its definition, authorities, and formation.
Given the null outcome of the previous five meetings, to which the extremists on both sides contributed, what is primarily required in the next meeting is not to repeat the disruptive, obstructive and irresponsible behavior of the past rounds.
What is new in this round, and within the new international coordinates, including the Russian-American dialogue, and the successive American withdrawals from the Middle East, in addition to the Syrian catastrophe reaching an unprecedented level in its severity and destruction of the Syrians wherever they are. What is new is that whoever will continue to obstruct in this round, whether by means that have become known or by inventing new ones, will condemn themselves to exiting the political process as a whole, and at a minimum, will be marginalized within that process.
Again, the constitution is one of the important provisions of 2254, but its implementation cannot be completed without starting to implement the other provisions. This process requires a combination of two factors: international-regional related to understandings that can be accomplished, and implicitly the required role of the Astana tripartite in this context, a role that needs a qualitative leap in which it crosses the threshold it had reached and stopped at nearly a year ago. The other factor is internal related to the extent to which patriotic Syrians from all sides are able to unite their forces and efforts to break the will of the extremists, warlords, and the big corruptors who have no interest in ending the catastrophe, and whose lust for plundering and preserving the plundering pushes them to try to hold on to the old international balance, and the West in particular, with all the very dangerous pitfalls that this entails with the various dimensions, especially the national dimension.
