Diplomacy in a broken world
A conversation with Jeffrey Feltman — Part 2

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 mentioned that during your leadership, DPA worked to promote a system-wide understanding of how the UN should deal with the particular challenges of the Syrian civil war. Could you provide an example of these efforts?
Feltman: I am particularly proud of the work that DPA did in 2017 and 2018 (with further work after my April retirement) on trying to define how the UN should respond to proposals, some from within the UN itself, that we initiate reconstruction projects in regime-controlled areas and resume a standard developmental model. In other words, by offering development programmes we embrace a government credibly accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, against the backdrop of an ongoing conflict. UN country team officials in Damascus, under pressure from Syrian officials (and in some cases succumbing to an astonishing degree to what in diplomacy is called “clientitis” - identification with, and pandering to, the hosts), were eager to move forward. Even had the usual donors to UNDP – a club that does not typically feature generosity from the Russian Federation – been willing to crank open the financial spigots, we in DPA and the special envoy’s team considered unconditional reconstruction assistance in regime-controlled areas to be a reward for atrocious behaviour as well as further disincentive for Damascus to deal seriously with the issues in UNSCR 2254. 

In a series of often rancorous meetings in 2017 we developed a set of “Parameters and Principles of UN Assistance in Syria.” This basically reinforced the imperative to deliver humanitarian assistance wherever it was needed as a priority, and widened the UN’s ability to work on “early recovery” projects such as restoring water, sewage, and electrical networks for displaced or refugees returning to shattered towns. UN support for full-scale reconstruction and development projects was clearly linked to a credible political solution in line with 2254 and the Annan-era Geneva Communique. I believe that this remains more or less UN guidance to this day, with some flexibility added to allow support for earthquake relief in 2023. 

The considerate and holistic approach outlined in the “Parameters and Principles” document does not appear to have been mainstreamed. 
Feltman: Almost from the start, some representatives in UN agencies tried to undermine this guidance to placate their hosts in Damascus. Good faith adherence to the UN mantra of “delivering as one” would have entailed a better approach, with  agencies on the ground in Damascus citing the principles to regime officials pushing for reconstruction support precisely in order to build incentive for credible, constructive Syrian government representation in the UN’s political process. Too many UN officials in Damascus instead tried to ignore the “Parameters and Principles.”

One strategy to undermine the “Parameters and Principles” has been to expand the scale and scope of early recovery assistance. The UN’s Early Recovery Strategy 2024-28 envisions comprehensive infrastructure rehabilitation, claiming it as humanitarian by emphasising that all actors are supposed to adhere faithfully to the principle of Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP). Especially in regime areas, that is arguably delusional. Isn't there an obvious role now for DPPA to lead on the work you've done to ensure that the humanitarian label of early recovery assistance is not exploited?
Feltman: I like your ‘delusional’ accusation. I find it just unfathomable that UN officials who took their oath of office on the Charter are so eager to support with as much UN support as they can get away with a regime that is headed by a serial killer. My guess — my hope — is that those UN officials are going to find that available resources will fall far short of their ambitions. It would be uncharacteristic of all those Arab states that normalised with Assad to fund UN reconstruction programmes (even those disguised as humanitarian). Europeans, yes, fear uncontrolled migration; and Italy has made the unfortunate announcement that it will deploy an ambassador back to Damascus. But will European donors bankroll massive Syrian reconstruction when resources are constrained by the need to support Ukraine? Doubtful. 

As for DPPA, I have not been in recent touch with my successor (and, yes, we always had good relations) and do not know her thinking on this subject. You should ask her. But having served under both Ban Ki-moon and Antonio Guterres, I would assume that DPPA is under far closer scrutiny from the 38th floor than DPA was under Ban. Rightly or wrongly, Guterres sets the agenda for the Secretariat with a far heavier hand than Ban applied. Guterres is cautious when it comes to political files. And if the Russians remain as furious with the “Parameters and Principles“ paper as they were when it first came to public light, and no powerful member states are pushing back against what UN officials in Damascus are recommending, if you were Guterres with global headaches to shoulder, is a battle over interpretation of the “Parameters and Principles“ one you'd choose to wage? Neither DPPA nor the Special Envoy's office can enforce compliance without Guterres disciplining the agencies, funds, and programmes.

In 2013-16, the Secretary-General's statements and occasional briefings to the Security Council were vocal and principled, explicitly referring to war crimes and urging the Council to transfer the Syria file to the International Criminal Court (ICC). That changed noticeably afterwards. What do you believe were the reasons for this shift? 
Feltman: Let me give you an example. In 2016 DPA and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) led a process to examine the issue of accountability you mention. We established an accountability working group to consider what mechanisms were possible and what legal frameworks existed to pursue accountability for war crimes by the various parties to the Syria conflict. Even if, as you allege, the special envoy’s briefings to the Security Council over time made fewer references to accountability, the commitment by the UN to pursue accountability, if anything, intensified. While I don’t remember any conscious decision, perhaps de Mistura dialled back accountability references as a way to induce the parties to come to the table, knowing that his public de-emphasis was balanced by the fact that we at HQ had plunged more deeply into the subject. Progress in designing accountability options, of course, does not mean accountability is guaranteed. Unfortunately, by this point, Bashar al-Assad had surely concluded that UN member states will not insist on tangible consequences for the atrocities committed under his misrule.

Staffan de Mistura took the momentous decision to endorse the Astana process, including the Constitutional Committee initiative. That was a major development because it diluted the UN’s mandate to facilitate the political process as stipulated in UNSCR 2254. It quickly became clear that the Assad regime and its allies used the Astana de-escalation process as cover to pursue military victory. This suggests a decline in the self-confidence of the UN political mission. Were these decisions primarily driven by the respective envoys’ personal judgements, or did they align with your overall strategy on Syria?
Feltman: I can’t speak for de Mistura in terms of his proposal to observe the Astana meetings, but it is true that we at HQ, after a lengthy debate with him and his team, did not second-guess him or try to block his travel. By January 2017, when the Astana meetings first convened, the situation on the ground in Syria had evolved significantly.  The massive Russian military investment and intensified Iranian and Hezbollah presence propped up and ensured the survival of the Assad regime (even if their collective efforts failed to restore Damascus’ full control over the country). I accept the argument that the UN could not ignore the influence and roles of Russia, Iran, and Turkey in Syria. Nor do I think that de Mistura, with all his experience with unsavoury characters in conflict situations, was naïve enough to believe that his presence in Astana would create such Russian and Iranian goodwill that they would force Assad to deal constructively with the UN’s Geneva process. With the benefit of hindsight, however, we can all see that the two processes, Astana and the UN-facilitated Geneva constitutional process, have not created reciprocal positive momentum.  

It seems that the Syria file is not receiving much attention at UN headquarters these days. Does DPPA have leeway that it isn’t fully utilising?
Feltman: Does your question suggest that, as opposed to UN headquarters, there’s a lot of attention being paid to Syria these days in world capitals? It is worth keeping in mind that the UN is a tool, a mechanism, a framework. UN member states can choose to use this mechanism to address issues of concern or not; and I don’t see much clamouring from UN member states in either the Security Council or other legislative bodies for the UN to focus its efforts on resolving the Syria conflict. To take one example, all the work inside the Secretariat that I mentioned previously on trying to establish accountability mechanisms will not result in tangible accountability procedures without member state agreement.

While this meeting took place after I retired from the State Department but just before I joined the UN – meaning my predecessor as DPA head attended, not I – the Action Group for Syria meeting of June 30 2012 provides a useful reminder of high-level attention to the UN’s efforts to resolve the Syria crisis, as well as a time capsule glimpse into a somewhat less polarised international community. Chaired by Annan, the meeting brought together the foreign ministers of all five Security Council permanent members as well as Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait, and Qatar, along with the EU foreign policy chief and the Secretary General of the League of Arab States. It’s hard to imagine these states convening today on Syria, let alone agreeing today on the 2012 Geneva Communiqué’s breathtaking language demanding the creation of a transitional governing body with full executive powers. Lakhdar Brahimi through his personal profile was able to maintain high-level member state interest in the UN processes centred in Geneva, but his departure coincided with an unfortunate decline in member state engagement with the UN on Syria.

While it’s true that the UN Special Envoy can only work with what he gets from the conflict stakeholders and the Security Council, these stakeholders use official UN positions to legitimise their policies. Doesn’t this give the UN discursive influence that could allow it to establish itself as a credible point of reference and thought leader for Syria diplomacy? 
Feltman: I think it depends on the circumstances as much as the weight of the envoy. When Annan got consensus behind the Geneva Communiqué and Brahimi support for the four points coming out of Montreux, each found ways of bridging the differences between Russia and the West, between the various external backers of the Syrian parties. But the evolution of the Syrian conflict since 2014 (where the regime no longer feels itself under any kind of existential threat) along with other external factors — Russia's war on Ukraine, Israel's catastrophic military response to the October 7 massacre — has made it extraordinarily difficult to find common ground. The Syrian parties and their external backers have to agree on the need for a negotiated solution under UN auspices. That is not the case now, and I don't see how the most talented and experienced UN envoy can force the relevant actors to the table if member states choose not to use the UN as a conflict resolution tool.  

Geir Pedersen seems to interpret his mandate narrowly, issuing routine reminders of the need to adhere to UNSCR 2254 rather than offering leadership or taking proactive measures. What are your thoughts?
Feltman: Geir Pedersen became special envoy after I had already left the UN, although he and I worked together constructively in other capacities. I am sure he is very much aware that Assad is playing political games in receiving other UN officials of Geir’s rank while consigning Pedersen to the black hole of the Syrian MFA, where constructive ideas go to die. Two can play this game, of course, and Geir could shuttle between regional and P5 capitals, in a reciprocal snub of Damascus. He’s clearly decided that he needs to maintain the Damascus contacts, such as they are. He has the file; I don’t. Plus he has a team of smart, experienced UN staffers, backed by an outstanding Middle East Division at headquarters. I’m not going to second-guess his approach.  

Yet at this point, I personally am sceptical that either engaging or ignoring Damascus will advance UNSCR 2254 implementation as long as member states remain uninterested in utilising the UN process and exercising collective leverage on Assad. I once had a conversation with an Arab official from a country then moving forward with normalisation with Syria. This official acknowledged that normalisation would probably not accomplish much, but then neither did the Arab suspension of Syria from the LAS. Time to try a different approach, this official suggested, without indicating even a flicker of hope of success. What benchmarks, this official asked, might be good to include in a transactional, step-by-step menu by which to monitor Syria’s compliance? Inter alia, I suggested that Bashar al-Assad receiving Pedersen would be a tangible, verifiable step we could all see. The official waved off my suggestion dismissively, reinforcing my impression that without strong member state support the UN can go through the motions of a political process on Syria but will not achieve progress.   

I just realise, however, that I have inadvertently, albeit unconsciously, largely let myself off the hook for UN failures on Syria during my tenure, first by underscoring the relative autonomy of UN envoys and second by citing the waterfall of member state interest in the UN’s political work on Syria. 

You seem modest about your role as DPPA chief in shaping the UN’s Syria policy during your tenure. Everyone we’ve spoken to — from Syrians to diplomats and UN officials — still remembers and speaks highly of your leadership at DPPA, which is said to have rallied the entire HQ behind the Department and established clear UN-wide policy and guidance. In hindsight, is there anything you would have done differently?
Feltman: With my global responsibilities as head of DPA, I admit I exercised a fair amount of “scheduling triage,” spending less time on conflicts where a UN envoy or representative had a mandate and more effort on conflict prevention or management in situations without a dedicated UN envoy. Perhaps I should have carved out more time for regular consultations with the Syria envoys, not to micromanage them but to brainstorm with them on what options the UN had to try to establish a credible political process that could have saved lives and created conditions for that transitional governing authority with full executive privileges; and to consider how to recreate and maintain that high-level of attention and support from key member states that existed during the Annan and Brahimi tenures.

Perhaps also I should have used my position to push for an unvarnished, candid, public acknowledgment of the reality that, unless that surge of member state interest reflected in the Action Group for Syria could be restored, the UN was not going to “solve” the Syrian crisis any more than the UN will “solve” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Russia’s war on Ukraine. But as in the case of the Colombia peace process between the Santos government and the FARC guerillas, the UN’s role can become essential in a peace agreement negotiated elsewhere, in terms of monitoring, trust-building, and endorsement. But I have to wonder if the UN’s Office for the Special Envoy for Syria, despite the creative leadership of an experienced Norwegian diplomat, serves mainly as a convenient disguise - for the UN and Security Council members alike - of the fact that (despite the continued suffering of Syrians inside and outside Syria) global attention has moved on. Does anyone at this point really believe that the UN’s constitutional process will achieve results?  

Pedersen has been at the helm for five years and may be inclined to retire. What advice would you give to Pedersen’s successor?
Feltman: Is Geir leaving? I had not heard that. If he does, my advice to any successor would be, "don't take the job.” In fact, when I picked up rumours that Geir was considering the position, I called him to say just that.  

Part 1 of this interview was published in the September issue.