Russia, UN: Syrian conflict should be settled by Syrians

Russia and the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon are unanimous in their conviction that the dragged-out political conflict in Syria should be settled without any interference from the outside, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday. "The settlement of the Syrian crisis can be found along the lines of All-Syria dialogue involving all Syrian forces, without outside interference," the minister said. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has expressed the hope that the international conference on Syria will be convened at an earliest possible date. As he held talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov here Friday, he said he hoped the organizers of the conference would be able to bring all the conflicting parties to the table of negotiations. In the meantime, Sergei Lavrov said on his part after the talks with Ban Ki-moon that the conference on Syria should be convened under the UN auspices. “We paid special attention to the situation in Syria,” he said. “The destiny of Syria and the /Middle Eastern/ region and, on top of that, the future line of actions of the international community in the field of crisis settlement will depend in many ways on how the current dragged-out conflict is settled.” The clues to untangling the crisis can be found only by following the path of a pan-Syrian dialogue involving all the parties to the conflict and ruling out any outside interferences. “Russia and the UN are highly interested in seeing Syria remain an integrated sovereign state,” Lavrov said. “We discussed preparations for the Syria conference today. This initiative is supported by many countries and the UN Secretary General reiterated his support for the conference.” According to him, the essential thing now is to settle the organizational issues ‘which are not a few”, as well as to determine the list of Syrian participants and the foreign countries that will be invited to delegate their representatives.