MOSCOW, September 5 (Itar-Tass) —— Mikhail Margelov, the chairman of the Federation Council International Affairs Committee, will continue a dialogue with representatives of the Syrian opposition. The next meeting is due in Moscow on September 8-9, he told Itar-Tass on Monday.
“A group of participants in the opposition asked me to continue the exchange of opinions that began in June of this year on the developments in Syria,” Margelov said. He said the meeting due in Moscow on September 8-9 would “focus on the processes within the Syrian opposition.”
“This refers to changes in the provisions of its program in the timeframe between the conference in Antalya and the conference in Istanbul,” Margelov said. “The matter is that there is much difference between the two conferences, spaced by only six weeks, in the composition of the participants and in the notions about the country’s future development,” he said.
The Syrian delegation heading for Moscow will represent a broad range of the republic’s political forces from Muslim Brothers to secular and Kurdish organizations. The delegation will be led by Ammar Kurabi, the president of the executive bureau of the Conference for Change in Syria and head of the national human rights organization.
Margelov had a conversation in late June with Syrian politicians and human rights supporters on the premises of the Russian Solidarity Committee of Asian and African Countries. Margelov, the head of the solidarity committee, then summed up the main task of the talks as working out the model of Russia’s interaction with various political forces of Syria towards stopping the armed confrontation between the authorities and the opposition in Syria. “Our consultations were imbued with the idea of putting a stop to bloodshed and launching the mechanism of a real political dialogue between the authorities and the Syrian people,” Margelov then said.