{"id":16276,"date":"2018-09-25T09:23:14","date_gmt":"2018-09-25T09:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=16276"},"modified":"2018-09-25T09:23:14","modified_gmt":"2018-09-25T09:23:14","slug":"world-bank-report-warns-gaza-strip-economy-is-in-free-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=16276","title":{"rendered":"World Bank report warns Gaza Strip economy is in \u2018free fall\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nGENEVA: When your job has been labelled \u201cmission impossible,\u201d failure may be the most likely outcome.
There is no doubt that the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has persevered through extraordinary challenges during four-and-half years in the role.
But as the UN peace drive has dragged on without evident success, Syrian President Bashar Assad\u2019s forces have steadily gained ground, pinning the opposition into their last bastion of Idlib while showing little interest in negotiating an end to the bloodshed.
De Mistura has meanwhile been criticized for doing anything necessary to keep the UN talks alive while letting them devolve into negotiations without substance.
The veteran diplomat\u2019s defenders applaud his flexibility and creativity while facing an obstinate Assad regime.
But questions have mounted over the future of the UN peace effort, with this week\u2019s General Assembly serving as yet another deadline missed, while France warned Monday a \u201cperpetual war\u201d loomed in the Middle East unless a Syrian peace accord is reached.<\/p>\n

De Mistura briefed the Security Council last week about his faltering bid to create a committee to revise Syria\u2019s constitution, a project conceived at separate negotiations in Sochi led by Iran, Russia and Turkey.
He had voiced hope the committee would be agreed before the General Assembly, where the Syrian conflict that has killed more than 360,000 people since 2011 will top the agenda.
But for Emile Hokayem, senior Middle East fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, trying to create the committee is \u201cmotion without movement\u201d that will not help Syrian reconciliation.
\u201cIt\u2019s a waste of jet fuel and diplomatic credibility. This is something that is obviously not relevant at all.\u201d
De Mistura told the Security Council the government and opposition had not yet agreed on the makeup of the committee.
The actual work of revising Syria\u2019s constitution therefore does not appear imminent, while the UN\u2019s broader mandate of negotiating \u201cpolitical transition\u201d in Damascus appears to be on the backburner.
De Mistura warned the Security Council that endless \u201cconsulting\u201d had risks. He later told reporters that next month he might be able to discuss \u201cwhat could be the beginning of the constitutional committee.\u201d
For Hokayem, the constitutional project is an example of a chronic problem with the Geneva process, where diplomatic targets keep shifting in the absence of achievement.
Throughout, Assad has been able to nominally claim he is participating in UN talks while pressing a military campaign.
\u201cThe UN should be reflecting first about whether this is worth the effort… and, more importantly, whether they are serving the Syrian people at all,\u201d Hokayem said.
\u201cWe never get a sense from de Mistura that enough is enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

A European diplomat, who requested anonymity, praised de Mistura for believing in \u201cthe art of the possible\u201d and using the constitutional committee \u201cas a mechanism that potentially breaks a log jam.\u201d
But he also warned that endlessly extending the dialogue was dangerous.
\u201cThe suspicion of course that many of us have, including me, is that the regime and its backers simply want to play this along, that it\u2019s just a talking shop, so we must be clear that that can\u2019t happen,\u201d he said.
In an email to AFP, de Mistura\u2019s office defended the constitutional reform effort as \u201can important milestone itself and viable entry point for other reforms to come,\u201d including UN-supervised elections, a key plank of the Geneva process.<\/p>\n

For David Harland, the director of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, de Mistura\u2019s missteps are an extension of the UN\u2019s broader decline as a peacebroker.
Harland\u2019s criticisms are not strictly those of an outsider: UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres named him to a special advisory group on conflict mediation.
In the two decades following the end of the Cold War, when permanent Security Council members were less bitterly divided, Harland credited the UN with playing a central role in striking deals to end several conflicts, including Iran-Iraq, Guatemala, Cambodia and Lebanon, among others.
Since 2008, the UN\u2019s peacemaking record has largely been defined by failure, Harland argued in a paper presented at the Oslo Security Forum.
There are many reasons why \u2014 like an increasingly dysfunctional Security Council \u2014 but some are internal UN shortcomings evident in de Mistura\u2019s mandate, Harland argued.
One example is a lack of agility.
\u201cPrior to the mid-1990s, UN envoys were usually supported by a small personal staff,\u201d whereas they have lately expanded into larger \u201cspecial political missions,… including advisers dedicated to everything from gender equality to the demobilization of child soldiers.\u201d
De Mistura, who habitually references the importance of his \u201cwomen\u2019s advisory board,\u201d has a staff of 92, his office said, listing its total budget over the past three years at approximately $50 million.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GENEVA: When your job has been labelled \u201cmission impossible,\u201d failure may be the most likely outcome.There is no doubt that the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, has persevered through extraordinary challenges during four-and-half years in the role.But as the UN peace drive has dragged on without evident success, Syrian President Bashar…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":16277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}