The Montreux-Palace hotel will host the start of the peace talks.
From BBC News, January 20
Montreux is about to find its place in history.
One of the claims to fame of this idyllic Swiss city is that it provided one of the settings in Ernest Hemingway’s acclaimed novel A Farewell to Arms.
No one has any illusions Syria’s warring parties will put down their guns anytime soon in peace talks set to be launched there today.
Montreux will only mark the ceremonial start. Representatives of dozens of invited nations will sit down with prepared speeches certain to exhort fighters on all sides to end the profound suffering of their people and find a negotiated way out of this deepening crisis.
Then, on Friday, when delegates to a luxury watch fair leave their Geneva hotels, Syrian delegations will move there to begin negotiations in a process mediated by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. That is, unless the process collapses from the start in Montreux. “We really don’t know what will happen,” admitted one official involved in the preparations.
But, in the absence of any other strategy, it’s become the only game in town, at least for some of the key players.
Everyone is Hurting
Among Syrians, and their foreign backers, there is disarray, disagreement and doubt.
The 11th-hour invitation to Iran – one of President Assad’s key backers – by the United Nations, and then the removal of that invitation, was a diplomatic debacle over a war that is no longer just about Syria.
Behind the scenes, wrangling among major players and payers like Saudi Arabia and Qatar played out in a political tug of war involving the array of opposition factions.
The slim thread that keeps this process going is the hope that, over time, a negotiated escape from a devastating war will eventually emerge. But it will be years in the making.
