SYRIA: STATE OF PLAY AND THE ARAB NORMALIZATION?
Gudrun Harrer in conversation with Ibrahim Hamidi
Syria: State of play and the Arab normalization?
In one of many signs of a thawing relationship, in March the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan received Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad in Abu Dhabi. The UAE is the driver of the reintegration of Damascus in the League of the Arab States which froze Syria’s membership in 2012. To bring Assad in from the cold is a long-standing Russian project, too. The USA and the European countries oppose this development and continue to ask for progress in the Geneva talks which aim to draft a new Syrian constitution.
Ibrahim Hamidi is a Syrian journalist and the senior diplomatic editor for Syrian affairs at Asharq Al-Awsat, a pan-Arab newspaper based in London. He is one of the founders of Salon Syria, a website to train Syrian journalists and promote freedom of expression. Hamidi was the Damascus bureau chief of the Arab daily newspaper Al-Hayat for 22 years, and contributes to several other international media outlets and think tanks. Hamidi’s work focuses on strategic issues in the Middle East, with special insight into Syria’s internal and regional politics. He is also a research fellow and co-founder of the Syrian Studies Center at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Gudrun Harrer, Senior Editor at Der Standard, Lecturer on Modern History and Politics of the Middle East, University of Vienna and Diplomatic Academy of Vienna