Talks on Syria’s Future Fall Short of Promises, Participants Say

It was billed as the first step in establishing a representative government as Syria emerged from decades of a brutal, one-family dictatorship.

But for some in Syria, the highly anticipated “national dialogue” that ended on Tuesday night fell far short of those promises. Instead, the two-day conference only added to concerns about the openness of the country’s new Islamist rulers to setting up a genuinely inclusive political process.

“We have a lot of objections to how this happened,” said Ibrahim Draji, a law professor at Damascus University who was among the hundreds of attendees at the conference. “There’s no transparency. There is no clear criteria for who gets invited,” he added.

“I’ve been a professor of law for the past 22 years, and I can tell you that this is not an actual national dialogue,” he said.

As the conference opened on Monday, the participants who gathered at the presidential palace in the capital, Damascus, had high hopes that they were about to be part of a historical event and have a hand in shaping the new political chapter in Syria.

Months earlier, the rebel coalition that seized power after ousting the longtime autocratic ruler Bashar al-Assad had pledged to establish a representative government. The first step, they said, would be a landmark meeting where leadership figures from across the country would, together with the victorious rebels, chart a different course for their fractured nation.