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MONTREUX / SYRIA PEACE TALKS PRESSER WRAP
STORY: MONTREUX / SYRIA PEACE TALKS PRESSER WRAP
TRT: 3.57
SOURCE: CH UNTV
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
1. Wide shot, press conference room
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General:
“Enough is enough. The time has come to negotiate. Syrians must come together to save their country, protect their children, and find a peaceful path to a better future. Syrians have a long history of living together. They must recover all they have lost.”
3. Close up, journalist holding tablet
4. Pan left, dais
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General:
“Therefore, there is no better solution than political solution. There is no military solution and while this political negotiation goes on, we have to provide necessary humanitarian assistance to save lives and to keep people living with dignity.”
6. Med shot, presser
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Joint Special Representative of the United Nations and the League of Arab States for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi:
“Tomorrow I am going to meet them separately and see how best we can move. Do we go straight on Friday into one room and start discussing or do we talk a little bit more separately? I don’t know yet. What we will try to do is to talk about how to end this bloody war.”
8. Med shot, dais
9. Wide shot, presser
10. Wide shot, John Kerry arriving at press conference room
11. SOUNDBITE (English) John Kerry, United States Secretary of State:
“There is no one who has done more to make Syria a magnet for terrorism than Bashar al Assad. He is the single greatest magnet for terrorism that there is in the region. And he has long since, because of his choice of weapons, because of what he has done, lost any legitimacy. Who can imagine that tomorrow or in a week or a month you could suddenly say, Ok, it’s alright, you can leave Syria? I think everybody here understands, as we have come to understand, that people in the region who support the opposition will never stop because of what he has done and how he has done it.”
12. Med shot, journalists
13. SOUNDBITE (English) John Kerry, United States Secretary of State:
“Today you heard a universal condemnation of Assad’s violent assaults and his use of starvation as a weapon of war which is by the way a war crime.”
14. Med shot, cameras
15. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Bashar Ja' afari , Permanent Representative of the Syrian Arab Republic to the United Nations:
“The format of today’s meeting was somehow disappointing to us. The reason is that, -initially speaking as you are all aware- there were 30 countries enlisted in the list of invitations up to two days ago. Then it seems that the organizers of this meeting and the Secretariat of the United Nations decided to add ten more countries. So, we have today 40 countries seemingly preselected in a way that most of them would be anti-Syrian delegations”.
16. Wide shot, presser
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said “Enough is enough. Time has come to negotiate”.
Speaking to reporters during a press conference after the opening session of the peace conference on Syria (Geneva II) in Montreaux, Switzerland, Ban Ki-moon stressed that “Syrians must come together to save their country, protect their children, and find a peaceful path to a better future”.
He added that Syrians have a long story of living together and they must recover all they have lost.
Ban stressed that the goal during these days negotiations is clear: “to fully implement the Geneva Communiqué, which has been endorsed by the Security Council, and which calls for a transition through a number of steps”.
Asked about what kind of solutions are being proposed, he underlined that “there is no better solution than political solution. There is no military solution and while this political negotiation goes on, we have to provide necessary humanitarian assistance to save lives and to keep people living with dignity.”
Ban also stressed that it is still not to late to end the bloodshed and find a peaceful and democratic future in a united Syria; adding that this can be started today, “now, by allowing full humanitarian access to all in need, specially in besieged areas where people have gone without aid for months”.
In that sense, the Joint Special Representative of the United Nations and the League of Arab States for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, said that tomorrow he is going to meet the Syrian government and the opposition delegations separately and “see how best we can move.”
He added: “Do we go straight on Friday into one room and start discussing or do we talk a little bit more separately? I don’t know yet. What we will try to do is to talk about how to end this bloody war.”
In a following press conference, the United States Secretary of State, John Kerry said that these meetings are only the beginning to find a solution; adding that “today people can more clearly understand how alone Assad is in standing up for himself, not for Syria. And the resolution to this crisis cannot be about one man’s insistence, or one family’s insistence, about clinging to power. This needs to be about empowering all of the Syrian people.”
Kerry stressed that “there is no one who has done more to make Syria a magnet for terrorism than Bashar al Assad. He is the single greatest magnet for terrorism that there is in the region. And he has long since, because of his choice of weapons, because of what he has done, lost any legitimacy. Who can imagine that tomorrow or in a week or a month you could suddenly say, Ok, it’s alright, you can leave Syria? I think everybody here understands, as we have come to understand, that people in the region who support the opposition will never stop because of what he has done and how he has done it.”
Finally, Kerry stated “today you heard a universal condemnation of Assad’s violent assaults and his use of starvation as a weapon of war which is by the way a war crime.”
Also speaking to reporters, the Permanent Representative of the Syrian Arab Republic to the United Nations, Bashar Ja' afari expressed his disappointment with today’s meeting.
He said “the reason is that, initially speaking -as you are all aware- there were 30 countries enlisted in the list of invitations up to two days ago. Then it seems that the organizers of this meeting and the Secretariat of the United Nations decided to add ten more countries. So we have today 40 countries seemingly preselected in a way that most of them would be anti-Syrian delegations”
Today's meeting, designed to give international support to the efforts to resolve the deadly conflict that has torn Syria apart, will be followed on Friday by talks between the Syrian parties at UN headquarters in Geneva in what will be the first time that the Government and opposition meet at a negotiating table since the conflict started in March 2011.
The basis of the talks is full implementation of an action plan adopted in the so-called Geneva Communiqué of 2012, adopted at the first international conference on the conflict, and which calls for a transitional government to lead to free and fair elections.
The Geneva Communiqué sets out a number of key steps for a Syrian-led transition, starting with the establishment of a transitional governing body with full executive powers and providing for the restoration of public services and full observance of human rights.
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