Diplomacy in a broken world
A conversation with Jeffrey Feltman - Part 1

The UN Special Envoy is the public face of UN diplomacy on Syria, yet the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA, formerly DPA) plays a crucial, though often overlooked, role in advancing peaceful resolution to conflict. To learn more about DPPA’s role in Syria and beyond, Syria in Transition spoke with Jeffrey Feltman, head of DPA in 2012-18.

You joined the UN in July 2012 after serving 27 years at the US Foreign Service. How do the reporting lines and institutional cultures differ between the two institutions? 
Feltman: Among the many distinctions, both good and bad, between the UN and the State Department, one difference surprised me in particular: the amount of latitude that UN Special Envoys and Special Representatives heading UN Special Political Missions (SPMs) had in interpreting their mandates and setting their agendas. Typically, an SPM mandate derives from one or more Security Council resolutions negotiated among the Council members, who have to overcome sometimes sharp disagreements about the UN’s role in a particular political context. For Syria, UNSCR 2254 followed earlier resolutions (2139, 2165, and 2191), to which you can add UNSCRs on WPS (Women, Peace, and Security), Children in Armed Conflicts, and others, creating a confusing web of a mandate with wide scope for interpretation. The UN Secretary-General and the DPPA can, and do, offer guidance and analysis, but they aren’t establishing the mandate. The formal reporting requirements of a UN envoy or representative are to the Council. And pity the envoy who does not deliver reports mindful of whatever sharp divisions exist within the Council on the interpretation of the mandate. 

So the relationships between the envoys and UN headquarters differed significantly from those you were accustomed to between US embassies and Washington, D.C.?
Feltman: Yes. US embassies implement the foreign policy agenda of the US President. While they must be mindful of the views of Congress and operate within laws and appropriations passed by Congress, the primary relationship is to the Executive. The leash between Washington and its overseas posts is quite tight when it comes to political and security issues, with daily interactions between the embassy and Washington on multiple levels. Washington instructs US ambassadors. UN envoys and representatives have far greater freedom from the UN Secretariat than a US ambassador has from the State Department or National Security Council. The proverbial “3,000-mile screwdriver” that US foreign policy officials joke that Washington exercises to micromanage overseas missions simply does not exist in the UN context. You could say that the Security Council gives the envoys sufficient rope to hang themselves politically, as some have occasionally done.

Did you initially attempt to use a “3,000-mile screwdriver“ on the special envoys for Syria?
Feltman: Consider the persons who held the position during my UN tenure: Kofi Annan as Joint Special Envoy for the first few weeks I was on the job; then Lakhdar Brahimi as Joint Special Representative until 2014; and finally Staffan de Mistura as Special Envoy for Syria. Kofi Annan, of course, had been UN Secretary-General and was beloved inside the organisation. Lakhdar Brahimi has been legendary in diplomatic circles for decades. Staffan de Mistura, who was in Lebanon as UN special coordinator when I arrived as US ambassador to Beirut, has four decades of experience in some of the toughest conflict situations on Earth. Was I, coming into the UN for the first time, going to have the temerity to try to change UN culture, insert myself between the Special Envoy and the Security Council, to try to micromanage people with vastly higher profiles and more experience than my own – and without any clear authority to do so?

Annan and Brahimi’s roles were further complicated by their dual appointment as joint envoys of the UN and the League of Arab States (LAS), right?
Feltman: The dual reporting chain to the UN Security Council and the LAS created awkwardness. Given Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s bloody crackdown against peaceful protestors, the LAS in November 2011 suspended Syria’s membership, in an uncharacteristically courageous and principled decision. In New York, not only did Syria retain its UN seat, with a permanent representative who almost revelled in Syria’s brutality, but some other member states, most forcefully the Russian Federation, did their best to protect the Syrian government from the consequences of Assad’s butchery. Both Annan and Brahimi had to navigate the contrasting legal status and politics of the Syria file in the two organisations. The joint nature of the position expired with Brahimi’s departure in 2014, in large measure because of his insistence that the dual reporting chain was untenable.

Was it a significant strategic mistake by Brahimi and de Mistura to insist on a divorce with the LAS? Given the LAS’s recent readmission of Syria and the formation of the Arab Contact Group, the UN has become somewhat marginalised. Wouldn’t it have been better to maintain a dual UN-LAS role for the Special Envoy in order to tap into potentially beneficial regional dynamics?
Feltman: While I can intellectually argue either side — that the decoupling either reflected a bow to reality or it was short-sighted — it is a considerable stretch to describe it as a “significant strategic mistake.” In 2013 Brahimi accepted Egypt’s offer of office space in a Cairo palace precisely to enable closer cooperation with the LAS and test for the potential for greater leverage through joint efforts. He tried that for nine months. Nothing really materialised, with Damascus continuing to obstruct the political process. This was despite Brahimi's base in the heart of the Arab world and his ability to speak for a universal and a regional organisation simultaneously. When the Egyptian military overthrew Morsi, Sisi asked Brahimi to return the office space, which at least at the time we interpreted (perhaps wrongly) as the Egyptians essentially kicking Brahimi out. That was end of the chapter of Brahimi being regionally based, and the ground was sown for the subsequent unravelling of the joint role.  

But your question suggests that the LAS’s readmission of Syria last year has led to tangible results that a joint envoy might have been able to utilise had the dual reporting chain continued. Given the example of Syria’s behavior in the 14 months since Arab normalisation has occurred, count me as a skeptic. Whether on creating a conducive atmosphere for the return of refugees or cracking down on captagon smuggling, or on any number of other issues, Bashar al-Assad has remained impervious to both carrots and sticks. Faced with such intransigence, the Arab Contact Group you mention has essentially suspended its meetings on the argument of “what’s the point?” As I interpret it, the Arab governments and the LAS essentially concluded that isolating Assad had not led him to adopt more constructive positions; and now they see that engaging with him doesn’t address their primary concerns either. So I simply don't see the practical value-added leverage that a joint envoy would carry. You and your colleagues have followed the Syria file extremely closely for years; you have real credibility on Syria-related questions. So I welcome your counter arguments.

Admittedly, Chapter 8 of the UN charter on regional organisations is important. I agree in general that the UN needs to work hand-in-hand with regional and sub-regional organisations, even when there's a sizeable imbalance in authorities and reach (as there is between the UN and the LAS). Regional organisations can provide important context and credibility. So in this case, yes, I would have preferred that we’d preserved the joint role of the Syria envoy, even while I don't think it would have made a substantive difference. Nevertheless, in terms of moving the Syrian parties or their external backers to a credible negotiating process, maintaining the dual reporting line would have had marginal impact.

Without dwelling too much on the past, both Brahimi and de Mistura faced significant criticism. In the case of Brahimi, it was said that he held a disdain for the Syrian opposition. He inherited the Geneva Communiqué from Annan but seemingly chose to set it aside. His mantra was, “the parties will only come to the negotiating table when they are exhausted from killing each other.” Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General at the time, had to talk him into convening the Montreux Conference (Geneva II) in January 2014 after nearly two years of minimal progress and a major chemical weapons attack. He resigned two months after. Similarly, de Mistura and his team, some still advising Pedersen, were described as "out of their depth" by diplomats and UN officials alike, including his former chief political advisor. Do you think that these criticisms were fair? 
Feltman: Give me a break. If you have examples of mediators who have not faced criticism, I look forward to learning about them. Of course they faced criticism; that comes with the job. And yes, mediators do sometimes make mistakes or miss opportunities. I’m sure all of us involved in one way or another in the Syria file made mistakes.  

As for the Syrian opposition, it was — like many groups — a mixed bag. Some really top-notch people were in touch with us regularly with ideas and proposals, and my door was always open to them. I get wistful and sad even today just thinking about one particularly principled and constructive interlocutor, now unfortunately deceased, and the potential role that that person could have played in a democratic Syria committed to respect for human rights. Moreover, I remember how we arranged meetings for Ban Ki-moon with opposition leaders, using Ban’s residence as a venue: we wanted Ban to hear directly from the Syrian opposition rather than have their views filtered through UN staff, my own and Brahimi's.  

As Bashar al-Assad increased the tempo and ferocity of his attacks on peaceful opposition, he of course created the terrorist threat that he had used to justify the brutal crackdown since the outbreak of protests. I think that Brahimi has similar questions to my own: what was the nature of the relationship between the opposition figures we would meet and the fighters and protestors on the ground? What was the command and control? How cohesive and representative were the people we’d meet? Had we managed to start a negotiating process in the aftermath of Montreux, I suspect the cohesion and credibility of the opposition would have naturally increased, as both sides rolled up their sleeves to address the serious issues on the table. But it was not the opposition figures who prevented the commencement of a steady pace of negotiations. Damascus was diabolically ingenious in finding ways to undercut the opposition, both by force and by diplomatic means.  

As for Brahimi's alleged disdain, while he was always unfailingly polite to me, my guess is that he had more disdain for me than he did for any Syrians — me, an American in my comfortable headquarters perch pestering him with questions and analysis and showing up in Geneva from time to time, eager for the next stage of an unpromising process.

You described how the UN Special Envoys enjoy relative autonomy. What role exactly was played by DPPA?
Feltman: I want to emphasise that those of us at headquarters did, in fact, have an ongoing strategic dialogue with Annan, Brahimi, and de Mistura. Those in (then) the DPA working on the Syria file were prolific in gathering information and providing analysis on fast-breaking developments that affected the envoy’s work but that his modest-sized team, focused on designing negotiating processes, would not have been able to complete. Somewhere in UN archives is a rich deposit of reports to the Secretary-General and special envoys on Syria-related issues including the significance of changes of leadership in the Syrian opposition, the metastasising nature of foreign terrorist fighters, and the evolving nature of the conflict. With UN headquarters producing analytical content to the Secretary-General and out to the field to the special envoy, this inverted the system familiar to me in my US Government service, where the embassies, with dedicated political sections, reported on developments back to headquarters. In any case, in both the UN and the US examples, the steady drumbeat of political reporting between headquarters and overseas missions is essential to understanding the political context in which bilateral or multilateral diplomacy is practiced. And DPA’s role in this was active and important.

Moreover, I considered my role – and DPA’s role – inside the UN system to be at least, and probably more, important than my role in providing specific guidance to a particular special envoy. Did I really know more than Lakhdar Brahimi about Syria or the Arab states engaged in one way or another in Syria’s civil war? Of course not – that was not my value-added, although Brahimi and I spoke frequently about the regional dimensions of Syria’s conflict.  

Instead, my headquarters perch gave me the opportunity to observe what the UN system as a whole was doing and thinking about Syria. In a system as decentralised as the UN, with various agencies and programmes reporting to different governing bodies and with different mandates, it is a struggle to achieve even a modicum of consistency, especially in cases where a particular member state, as in the case of Syria, is intentionally undermining international law and committing gross violations of human rights but is protected by powerful member states like Russia. (And, lest I be accused of double standards, I am very much aware of other cases where a powerful state shields partners, including repeated American vetoes of Security Council draft resolutions criticising Israeli occupation and military tactics). We in DPA tried to promote a system-wide understanding of how the UN should deal with the particular challenges of the Syrian civil war. The special envoy was represented in these discussions, but forging consensus among diverse UN entities was not his job: finding a viable political path forward was his task.

Read part 2 of this interview in the October issue.