By Selen Temizer
ANKARA
Three former UN envoys for Syria resigned as Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad stalemated peace talks on the civil-war country.
The world watches whether the newly appointed Geir O. Pedersen, the UN special envoy for Syria, will find a solution to the eight-year-long crisis in the civil war-torn country.
The veteran Norwegian diplomat Pedersen assumed his post on Tuesday.
Pedersen is the fourth person to hold the position after Staffan De Mistura, who announced his resignation earlier in October.
Mistura had been running intra-Syrian talks since late 2017 seeking to draft a new constitution for Syria and establish requirements for UN-supervised elections.
Before Mistura, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Algerian envoy Lakhdar Brahimi quit the post in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
Annan plan
Annan was the UN-Arab League envoy for Syria, and he negotiated a six-point plan with the regime in Syria.
The first talk was held in June, 2012 at the UN headquarters in Geneva.
Annan resigned on Aug. 2, 2012.
Algerian envoy Brahimi took the position after Annan for 21 months.
Brahimi resigned in May, 2014 following the failure of the peace talks, expressed regret for his inability to ensure a coherent international response to the humanitarian crisis.
The talks resumed on February 2017 and continued the whole year after Mistura assumed the post.
Mistura has been running intra-Syrian talks since late 2017 seeking to draft a new constitution for Syria and establish requirements for UN-supervised elections.
Over four years on the role, as special envoy, Mistura announced his resignation during a Security Council meeting on October last year.
Mistura continued his post till the end of 2018 as the Syrian constitution meetings were ongoing.
Who is Geir O. Pedersen?
On October 2018, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres named Pedersen as the new UN special envoy for Syria.
Born in Norway’s capital Oslo in 1955, Pedersen had been serving as Norway’s ambassador to the People’s Republic of China since 2017. He also served as permanent representative of Norway to the UN between 2012 and 2017.
The veteran diplomat served the UN in various roles, including special coordinator for Lebanon in 2007 and 2008, and personal representative of the secretary-general for Southern Lebanon from 2005 to 2007.
He also worked as director of the Asia and Pacific division in the Political Affairs Department.
Pedersen was Norway’s representative to Palestine in the late 1990s.
In 1993, he was a member of Norway’s team to the Oslo negotiations that led to the signing of the Declaration of Principles and the mutual recognition between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel.
