IMESS- PISM Joint Seminar on “Regional Relations in the Light of the Syrian Crisis”
On December 14, 2013, the Institute for Middle East Strategic Studies (IMESS) in collaboration with the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) in Warsaw held a joint seminar on “Regional Relations in the Light of the Syrian Crisis.” The IMESS resident and visiting fellows as well as a number of Ph.D. and postgraduate students from different universities in Tehran attended the session. From the IMESS side, Dr. Kayhan Barzegar, Director of IMESS and Mr. Mohammad Soltaninejad, a visiting research fellow at IMESS, and from the PISM side, Dr. Patrycja Sasnal, the Head of the Middle East and North Africa Project at PISM and Mr. Lukasz Kulesa the Head of the Non-proliferation and Arms Control Project at PISM, exchanged the regional and European perspectives on the afore-mentioned subject. Below is the complete version of this session........
Patrycia Sasnal: Within the EU, there is no one single opinion about what is happening in Syria and the most contentious issue was whether to supply arms to the opposition or not and this was discussed in the middle of this year. If I were to say which countries were for supplying arms, which were against, you probably would not be surprised to hear of course that it was France and the UK who wanted to supply them. But UK shifted its position to a more middle ground one. Poland was also somewhere in the middle and the Polish foreign minister said that no one is kidding here; no one is kidding themselves that we know what should be done. We know that the situation is very difficult and we have no idea what consequences supplying arms to the opposition would have. Now again supplying arms, Austria was against it, the Czech Republic, Finland, Holland, Sweden, Slovakia and Ireland and in favor of, apart from France and the UK; it was also Italy and Spain. They had some reservations but mostly they were in favor.
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