GENEVA — After months of delay, the United Nations said Monday that Syria’s government and the opposition would hold their first direct negotiations Jan. 22, in an attempt to end that country’s civil war.
But the precise agenda for the negotiations in Geneva, as well as a complete list of participants, remained unresolved.
The fixing of a date was announced Monday after a meeting of senior diplomats from the United Nations, United States, and Russia. It was welcomed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who told reporters at UN headquarters in New York that he regarded the impending negotiations as a “mission of hope” to halt the nearly 3-year-old conflict in Syria.
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Ban said his expectation was that the antagonists would come to the January meeting, known in diplomatic shorthand as Geneva II, with the intention of creating a transitional government with full executive powers. That was also the objective of an international conference held in June 2012, known as Geneva I.
More than 100,000 people have been killed and almost 9 million driven from their homes in the chaos, which has sent tremors of instability through the Middle East.
“At long last and for the first time, the Syrian government and opposition will meet at the negotiating table instead of the battlefield,” Ban said. It will be the first face-to-face meeting of the two sides since the start of the war.
Ban’s announcement, coming a day after the successful negotiation in Geneva of an interim agreement to freeze parts of Iran’s contentious nuclear program, added to a sense of diplomatic momentum aimed at resolving two of the most vexing international problems.
“I would simply say that it was a good weekend for diplomacy,” Martin Nesirky, Ban’s spokesman, told reporters in New York.
But it was also clear that difficult and perhaps insurmountable issues still confronted the start of peace talks that Russia, which supports the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad, and the United States, which supports what it calls the moderate opposition, first proposed in May.
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Hours after Ban spoke, his special representative on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, who helped settle on the date of the negotiations, told reporters in Geneva that it had not yet been decided who would be invited to participate.
Brahimi, who has met periodically with Russian and U.S. diplomats, said at their last meeting, in early November, that deep divisions within Syria’s opposition had been the most immediate obstacle to holding a conference.
Since then, the Syrian National Council, the opposition coalition in exile, has decided to participate. But who will be the lead representative of the opposition has not been settled.
Brahimi said he would meet U.S. and Russian officials again in Geneva on Dec. 20, hopefully for the last time before Geneva II, and that he hoped both the Syrian government and opposition would name their delegations before the end of the year.
The basis for talks between Syrian rebels and the government of Assad also remains unclear. Opposition groups have insisted that Assad leave office as part of any settlement, but government officials have said Assad will not resign and may even run for re-election next year.
Brahimi “has the idea that everybody just needs to start talking, and once that happens they will find a way forward,” a senior European official in Geneva said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with diplomatic practice.
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The participation of Saudi Arabia and Iran in Geneva II also remains undecided. The Saudis are major supporters of the armed opposition in Syria, while Iran is Assad’s most important regional ally. Both have an enormous interest in the direction of any peace negotiation.
Diplomats have said the successful outcome of the Iran nuclear talks here might make Western governments more amenable to Iran’s participation in Geneva II. But the United States and Saudi Arabia, for now, remain opposed.
Brahimi sought to use the fixing of the date for the Syria negotiation as a reason for both sides to start confidence-building measures, lowering levels of violence and releasing prisoners. But he also appeared careful to temper any expectations.
“Being realistic,” he said, “a lot of things that need to happen will happen after the conference has started, not before the conference starts.”
International relief agencies are hoping that movement on peace negotiations will at least provide an opportunity to increase access to Syria’s displaced civilians, including around 2.5 million in areas cut off from any humanitarian assistance.
A Geneva II conference “must not be talks for the sake of talks,” Nigel Timmins, who heads the Syria response effort of Oxfam, a leading aid group, said in a statement Monday. “They must be backed up by measures that will make a real difference to those ordinary Syrians who have been suffering for so long.”
The diplomats involved in the talks over Iran and Syria have played down reports that the two developments were connected. But a senior member in the main, Western-backed Syrian opposition coalition expressed hope the nuclear deal would transform Iran into a ‘‘positive regional player,’’ and lead it to relinquish its support for Assad.
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‘‘We hope the Iranian nuclear deal will provide impetus for a Syria deal,’’ Abdelbaset Sieda of the Syrian National Coalition told the Associated Press. ‘‘The Iranian government must cut relations with the regime and leave the choice to the Syrian people.’’