The United Nations plans to precede its internationally brokered peace talks between Syria's warring sides next month with a one-day meeting of foreign ministers in the Swiss city of Montreux, officials said Tuesday, Dec 17, according to the Associated Press.
A daylong gathering for speeches by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and more than two dozen other foreign ministers is planned for Jan 22 at a Montreux hotel.
The session is taking place at the opposite end of Lake Geneva to the UN European headquarters because a luxury watch fair has taken up all the hotel rooms in Geneva, Khawla Mattar, a spokeswoman for the UN's special envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, told reporters Tuesday.
Montreux, home of the famous jazz festival, was chosen because it has the facilities for such a high-profile gathering. Mattar said the foreign ministers will demonstrate "that there is global interest in solving" the Syria crisis.
The conference will break up for a day, she said, and reconvene on Jan 24 in Geneva for the start of actual negotiations between Syrian President Bashar Assad's government and armed Syrian opposition groups.
Mattar said the negotiators would set the timeframe for the negotiations at the start and continue working through the weekend — and around the clock — until they are finished.
Brahimi is to meet on Friday with U.S. and Russian envoys to make final preparations for the conference including the selection of which nations will be invited.
The last UN estimate in July put the death toll from the 3-year-old Syrian civil war at 100,000, though activists more recently gave a figure of 120,000.
Along with 6.5 million internally displaced people, there are 2.3 million Syrians who have fled the country during the war. Most of those are scattered in refugee camps and informal settlements across Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. On Monday, the UN and other aid groups said they would need $6.5 billion to help the displaced Syrians in 2014, the largest-ever appeal for a single crisis.
