Syrian sides won’t budge in peace talks

GENEVA - Syrian peace talks appeared bogged down Tuesday, with the United Nations mediator acknowledging little progress has been achieved and with the two sides failing even to agree on an agenda to move negotiations forward.

After a three hour, face to-face meeting, U.N.-Arab League mediator Lakhdar Brahimi said, “We are not making much progress.”

“We need cooperation from both sides here and lot of support from outside,” he added.

In Washington, President Barack Obama said the talks were far from achieving their goal of ending a civil war that has claimed 130,000 lives, destroyed the country and threatens to destabilize the region.

Talks between Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government and the pro-Western opposition began last month, then adjourned after a week, resuming Monday after a 10-day break. But a frustrated Brahimi said the current round was proving “as laborious as it was the first week.”

The Assad government wants the talks to focus on fighting “terrorism.” The opposition wants to talk about a transition government to replace Assad. Brahimi has proposed discussing both, but with apparently no success.

“I’m not sure whether I can impose an agenda on people who don’t want to, you know,” Brahimi said. “How can you, put a gun on their heads? You know, it is their country. This is a huge responsibility they have.”

Each side blamed the other for the impasse.

“Clearly there has been no progress today,” opposition spokesman Louay Safi said, blaming the government for blocking a common agenda.

“These people are not here to come up with a political solution, but they’re insisting on killing people in Syria to maintain the rule of the one person and dictatorship,” he said.

Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad blamed the opposition for “another lost day.”

“This group of opposition, the coalition, is insisting to waste your and our time,” he said. “Today they wasted all the time discussing nothing, saying that there is no terrorism in Syria.”

With no sign of movement, attention was directed at a meeting planned in Geneva on Friday between Brahimi, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov and Wendy Sherman, the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. U.N. officials played down the significance, saying that as co-sponsors of the peace talks the Russians and Americans confer periodically with the U.N.

Monzer Akbik, a senior member of the Syrian opposition delegation, raised the possibility that the delegations may meet separately Friday with the U.S. and Russian officials.

But Mekdad objected to the notion that the two outside powers might try to intervene in the negotiations.

“If this meeting is between the Russians and Americans and the U.N., they are free of course to meet,” he said. “But we stress … that any dialogue, discussion or negotiation must be between the Syrian sides only because they are the ones concerned with such a dialogue.”

In Syria, the government said Tuesday that it had allowed 111 men of fighting age to leave rebel-held areas of Homs after they were questioned and cleared of rebel links, state media said. A U.N. spokesman said it was concerned for the welfare of hundreds of others, who were held back for questioning.

Since Friday, 1,151 civilians, mostly women, children and elderly have been evacuated from the city, Syria’s third largest. Homs has been under government siege for more than a year.

The U.N. child agency said at least 500 children were among those taken out of the city’s rebel-held area. The U.N. agency estimated there were more than 1,000 children trapped in Homs before evacuations began.

On Tuesday, aid workers failed to evacuate anyone or deliver any food, increasing pressure on them to complete the ambitious humanitarian operation before a fragile truce expires, activists and Syrian Red Crescent officials said.

The three-day truce that began Friday and allowed the U.N-Red Crescent operation was extended to six days, now expiring at midnight tonight. But hundreds of civilians are still inside, and continued shelling and shooting between the two sides has severely limited efforts.

Tuesday’s delay was for technical reasons, said Khaled Erksoussi, the head of operations at the Syrian Red Crescent. He said meetings between U.N. and Syrian officials in the city took more time than expected, forcing them to postpone all their activities until today.

Also Tuesday, the Syrian opposition-in-exile denied activist reports that an extremist rebel group conducted a mass killing of Alawites in a contested village in central Syria.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said gunmen linked to a breakaway al-Qaida group entered Maan in the central province of Hama on Friday and killed 20 gunmen protecting the village and 25 civilians.

Opposition official Monzer Akbik said the village was “evacuated of civilians more than six months ago. Those who were killed in that battle were killed in action - no civilians were killed.”

In a statement he accused the Syrian government of spreading lies to tarnish the opposition.

Information for this article was contributed by Zeina Karam, Robert H. Reid, Barbara Surk, Diaa Hadid and Bassem Mroue of The Associated Press.