GENEVA: Staffan de Mistura, the UN’s Syria envoy, has said he suffers from “chronic optimism”, a condition that will be tested this week when stalled Syria talks resume in Geneva. So far, the civil war has proved an impossible problem for De Mistura, a 70-year-old United Nations veteran with experience in some of the world’s most troubled hotspots. The dual Swedish-Italian national, who is said to speak seven languages and favours pince-nez spectacles over conventional glasses, has an old-world demeanour and would not look out of place in a picture of European diplomats from a century ago.
He was named Syria envoy in 2014, taking a position that Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan both quit amid the stalemate between Damascus and opposition groups.
When talks reconvene on Thursday, it will mark the fourth round of negotiations between Syria’s warring parties moderated by De Mistura.
Despite achieving no breakthrough, he has consistently maintained that incremental progress is being made.
The last round — in which Syria’s lead negotiator Bashar al Jaafari repeatedly referred to the opposition negotiators as terrorists — broke up in April last year as violence flared on the ground.
But according to De Mistura’s official summary of the negotiations, the bitterly opposed sides left Geneva with an agreement on “a number of points of commonalities”, something that was not apparent to observers of the talks.
“I have a terrible chronic disease,” De Mistura told Al Jazeera last year. “It’s called chronic optimism.”
De Mistura has earned a reputation for pursuing unorthodox solutions to intractable problems.
As Syrian forces besieged Aleppo last year, leaving an estimated 250,000 people facing starvation and in desperate need of aid, De Mistura offered to physically escort militants from the Fateh al Sham Front out of the city to ease the crisis. — AFP
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