UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who is leaving for Geneva on Friday to attend a conference on Syria, said he hopes the meeting will be productive.
“I sincerely hope that this Action Group for Syria will be a turning point in our common efforts to address the crisis in Syria,” Ban told journalists on Thursday at a press encounter following his remarks to the General Assembly on the outcome of the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development.
“First and foremost, we will discuss how we can bring this violence to a halt, complete cessation,” he said, reiterating his support for UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s faltering six-point peace plan.
Ban said he “looks forward to progress at Saturday's meeting.”
According to UN estimates, over 10,000 people have been killed in Syria since the beginning of a popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011.
The UN Security Council has so far failed to find a way to settle the conflict. Annan proposed that the conference should be attended by countries that can influence both Syria’s authorities and opposition, including Iran. A similar idea was earlier put forward by Russia.
Russia - along with China - has twice vetoed UN resolutions against Damascus over what it says is a pro-rebel bias, at the same time backing Annan’s faltering peace plan for Syria.
Russia has said the conference should include all permanent members of the UN Security Council (Russia, the United States, Britain, China and France), Syria's neighbors (Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon), as well as key regional players (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran) and international organizations (the Arab League and the European Union).
