Syrian local opposition groups launch the Damascus Platform

Syrian local and national figures launched ‘the Damascus Platform, towards a comprehensive National Dialogue Conference’.

 The Damascus Platform’s members aim to organize a Syrian dialogue to discuss political solution of the crisis in Syria.

On November 26, About 320 Syrian opposition figures, Members of Parliament, civil society activists and national independent political activists held a one-day meeting in Kaisar Palace Hotel in Damascus.

Secretary General of the National Youth Party Maher Merhej, a key organizer of the Damascus Platform meeting, said to the Syria Times that the Damascus Platform is not an opposition gathering only but it is open for all Syrian opposition and loyalists who believe in political peace process to end the crisis in Syria.

According to Merhej, all participants agreed on the following Syrian national principles

1.    Affirming  the Syrian sovereignty and unity of people and lands.

2.    Syria is a multi-political state separating religion from state

3.    Condemn the western economic sanctions on Syria and calling to lift them immediately

4.    Preserving the state institutions, on top of them the Syrian Arab Army.

5.    Denouncing all forging interventions in the Syrian issue and resist all kinds of occupation and invasion.

6.    Enhancing the national reconciliations.

“ We as a national local opposition call for a Syrian political solution and are ready to open dialogue with the external opposition platforms of Moscow and Cairo. But for sure we will not talk to the Riyadh Platform because it has a foreign agenda away from the local opposition’s vision and agendas,” Secretary General of the National Youth Party Maher Merhej said to the Syria Times.

“ the Riyadh Platform has agendas that lead Syria to the current situation of six years of war, destruction and didn’t achieve anything.”

Merhej said that the only way to put an end for the crisis in Syria is to sit around the dialogue table and discuss the following files:

1.    Combatting terrorism with all its forms.

2.    Necessity and importance of democratic change.

3.    The crisis’s files.

4.    Bolstering and enhance the deep social national reconciliations.

Interviewed by O. Al-Mohammad