Ahtisaari proposes elections as honourable path for Syrian President

Former Finnish President says UN Security Council shirked responsibility

Martti Ahtisaari

Kofi Annan

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Former Finnish President, and Nobel peace laureate Martti Ahtisaari was not looking at his telephone in his office in the centre of Helsinki, in spite of the fact that he has been seen as a potential replacement for former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who announced on Friday that he would resign the post of UN and Arab League peace mediator for Syria at the end of the month.
      Has UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon been in touch on the matter?
      “I don’t know. I haven’t been looking at my phone recently. I would not want to speculate on such matters”, Ahtisaari says.
     
The former President feels that it is now most important to guide the UN Security Council onto a new path, so that the Syrian crisis might be resolved. He sees elections as one alternative.
      “It should be ascertained if the government of [President Bashar] al-Assad and the opposition can be persuaded to accept such a path, in which new presidential elections would be held in the country. As I understand it, such a move would be allowed by the constitutional amendments approved by al-Assad. This would allow for the possibility of testing if either side is interested, or if they have decided to deal with it through armed fighting.”
     
Ahtisaari does not believe in a UN-authorised military intervention, but he is concerned about chemical weapons in the hands of al-Assad’s administration.
      “Al-Assad’s administration has said that it will not use them against its own people. Such statements would be meaningless if the situation reaches the point in which it is seen as the last option. That is why he [al-Assad] should be persuaded to find a different solution. Elections would be an honourable way out of the situation for him.”
     
Since his resignation, Kofi Annan has sharply criticised the great powers for promoting their own interests in the Security Council. Ahtisaari says that he met with representatives of the council’s permanent member states in New York in February.
      “At the time I was left with the impression that the situation is not nearly as bogged down as has been suggested in the press.”
      Ahtisaari is nevertheless irritated that the Security Council has not taken on responsibility for resolving the crisis.
      “It has bothered me that the talk was always of Kofi Annan’s peace plan. It was not Kofi Annan’s plan. It was a plan of the Security Council, and the council has to bear the responsibility, and not a civil servant who puts the ideas forward”, Ahtisaari said, in defence of his friend Kofi Annan.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Monitoring the Syria ceasefire (22.5.2012)
  Syrian refugees tell HS that rebels hold villages near Aleppo (2.8.2012)

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