MONTREUX, Switzerland — The expectant melancholy typical of resort towns in the winter has given way here, at least in the center of this lakeside village, to something edgier, as if a piece of the Green Zone had levitated here from Baghdad.Knots of police officers in bright blue windbreakers outnumber pedestrians. A swath of grand Beaux-Arts hotel buildings and the town’s conference center, the site of the Syrian peace talks opening Wednesday, have been cordoned off. Their wrought-iron fences have been covered in white plastic sheeting, like a hazardous waste site.Montreux could not seem farther from Syria. Its vistas, indeed, match a stock image of peace and beauty idealized by many Syrians too poor to travel outside their country; it is common there to find bare cinder-block dwellings decorated with generic photographs of alpine lakes.Here, Lake Geneva glows beneath clouds that wreath the mountaintops, dusted with white above the snow line. Spired chalets look down from the cliffs. Along the shore outside the conference zone, little moves but ducks and couples pushing double strollers. But as dozens of foreign delegations and more than a thousand journalists trickle in for the conference, they bring echoes of the Syrian war.
“I’ve never in my life seen a town so besieged,” said Fernand Thomas, a white-haired taxi driver, complaining of the street closings that forced a change in city bus routes and dug into his business. “They are afraid of a bomb or something.”The contrast between Swiss order and conflict-zone chaos has been amplified by the haphazard prelude to the meeting, which Mr. Thomas called “the most important conference we have ever had here,” an assertion that many Syrians, keeping their expectations low, might dispute.
On Monday, the meeting seesawed close to cancellation over the last-minute invitation, and equally abrupt disinvitation, of Iran. On Tuesday, the Syrian government delegation spent hours stuck in Athens when ground service crews refused to refuel their chartered plane, making them miss key sideline meetings and prompting a pro-government Syrian journalist to grouse, “It’s like kindergartners in a playground.”The local police have had to grapple with the insistence of certain delegations that they not share a hotel, and preferably not bump into one another, except, theoretically, at the negotiating table. Uncertainty swirled about whether any actual fighters would show up, except representatives of the only major faction that recognizes the leadership of the exile coalition’s largely notional Supreme Military Council.Problems have extended to the very mundane. The geopolitically grander venue of Geneva had to be shelved because hotels were booked for a luxury watch convention. That brought the event to the eastern tip of the lake, better known as the home of the annual jazz festival where a fire at the Casino de Montreux inspired Deep Purple to write the rock anthem “Smoke on the Water.”Logistics were still being ironed out as delegates arrived, ranging from Mexican diplomats to representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. Journalists became edgy waiting to pass through a single airportlike security check to reach the press center, then repaired to its lakeside terrace for restorative espressos.
An Agence France-Presse reporter was thrown out of the conference hall — journalists are restricted to the press area — but not before triumphantly spotting the defunct place card for the banished Iranians.Syrian antigovernment activists and citizen journalists who normally spend their time in refugee camps and border towns in Turkey popped in and out of the press center, where on Wednesday dozens of representatives of Syrian state-owned news media are expected to join them, undoubtedly coming face to face during smoke breaks on the narrow terrace.Despite the cold and gray, and the ferment among opposition factions who say the meeting is a waste of time, the activists projected a certain air of buoyancy. For all the complaints from some opponents of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria that the conference restores his aura of legitimacy, it also confers it upon the opposition. What began with waves of protests that would have been unimaginable in Syria before 2011, then turned into an armed insurgency, has become, for a few days, the focus of global diplomacy.Adnan Hadad, who helped set up the antigovernment Aleppo Media Center, acknowledged that people in that northern Syrian city at best ignored the conference and at worst would consider him a traitor for going.“Most of the fighters, they don’t understand politics — not even the basics, let’s be honest,” he said. “They didn’t get a chance to experience politics. In their minds, this will end when they reach the palace of Bashar al-Assad and slaughter him.” “It’s not realistic; it’s very emotional,” he continued. “To me, a military end is not going to happen, not from either side. The negotiations seem to be the only rational thing.”Rami Jarrah, 29, grew up in a dissident household and rose to prominence documenting the early Syrian protests.
He was arrested and tortured, and now works outside the country to promote the opposition and aid refugees. But even he said he could not justify advocating years more of fighting; there is little to offer the displaced if the war continues indefinitely.“We are being patient on whose cost?” he asked.He added: “There is that level of dignity that people ask for, and it’s that Assad is out of the picture. Give us the excuse to accept a deal. Something so we can look in the mirror.”A few minutes later Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, arrived in Switzerland and announced, according to Syria’s state news agency, that “the presidency and the regime are ‘red lines for us and for the Syrian people.’ ”
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