July 20, 2008	Sunday	Rajab 16, 1429

GENEVA: The neutral Swiss venue chosen for the first meeting of an Iranian nuclear negotiator and a senior US envoy has its own special place in the history of diplomacy one replete with both success and failure.The Hotel de Ville, or city hall, is hallowed ground for historians and experts of international law. In 1864, it was here where a dozen European governments laid out the first Geneva Convention on the rules of warfare and recognized the Red Cross.

Eight years later, an arbitration panel met in the 15th-century complex in Geneva’s Old Town to settle an Anglo-American dispute arising from the US Civil War. It ordered Britain to pay the United States $15.5 million in damages for the heavy losses inflicted on 22 Union ships by a British-equipped Confederate frigate Alabama.

The room where that meeting was held is now known as the “Alabama”.

On Saturday, it was the same room where senior officials from the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany met with their Iranian counterparts to encourage Iran to suspend nuclear efforts in exchange for incentives.

The multilingual “Geneva spirit” has encouraged diplomacy.

Geneva was the site of negotiations between Chile and Argentina over the Beagle Channel, and Egypt and Israel over the Taba Strip. It had its heyday when both Washington and Moscow extolled the city after the first summit between Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985 signaled a new phase in Cold War relations.

Three years later, the superpowers completed a treaty scrapping intermediate-range missiles and signed a UN-backed accord setting a Soviet troop pullout from Afghanistan both after years of talks between diplomats in Geneva.

But since the end of the Cold War, the city’s success rate has dropped.

On-and-off negotiations dragged on in Geneva through the 1990s between warring factions in the former Yugoslavia. It took Nato-led airstrikes in 1995 to stop the fighting and force leaders into talks that led to the Dayton peace deal.

In December 2002, an independent Geneva-based organisation thought it had sealed a cease-fire deal between Indonesia and rebels in the province of Aceh after three years of work. But it was opposed by hardline army generals who, in May 2003, persuaded the government to launch a massive military operation.The two sides reached a peace treaty two years later in Finland, after Aceh was devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami.

And then there was Geneva’s latest peace deal, an alternative Mideast initiative worked out after two years of secret talks between Israeli opposition figures and Palestinians. The so-called “Geneva Accord” would have mapped out borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state, but it was never officially endorsed by either side.

Geneva’s most famous and disappointing moment as a centre of world affairs started in the Hotel de Ville in 1920, when the city hosted its first session of the League of Nations. In the 1930s, the organisation could do little to prevent Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany or Italy’s war in Ethiopia.

The United States never did joined the League, and it eventually collapsed in World War II.

—AP