Reconciliation Areas Experience workshop

War puts us in direct confrontation with our problems and crises, so we start looking for various means to try to restore life to the affected areas. Local agreements have always been a milestone in the course of the Syrian war, as they were a primary means to end the military presence of armed groups and thus return institutions and stability to areas that have gone out of state control.

Based on the fact that comprehensive national reconciliation is the main goal of any work, the Nation Building Movement organized a two-day workshop on March 24-25, 2018, on the experiences of reconciliation areas, with the aim of beginning to read the results of these local agreements, with their positives and negatives, with technical experts, activists, community leaders, and members of the committees that made the agreements in a number of areas, with the aim of finding approaches to intervene and benefit from them, and thus moving to build a reconciliation process that restores communication between all the people of Syria, regardless of their orientations and affiliations, and also learning about the vision of the Ministry of National Reconciliation, its plan, and the efforts it has made in those areas.

On the first day, the experiences of some regions that had experienced local agreements were reviewed, such as (Al-Tall, Homs, Aleppo, Barzeh, Daraya, etc.), and the factors that led to reaching these agreements and the necessary measures to be taken were discussed, as well as the negatives that accompanied the agreements and how to overcome them.

The second day was a dialogue about the reality of local administration, with the attendance of a number of city council members and mayors in a number of the areas under study. The available resources and capabilities were discussed, as well as who the active partners in this movement are, and the procedures and means adopted by these administrations in light of the state of war and lack of resources and the extent of the possibility of building on these experiences to empower administrative units in the future.

Solutions were also discussed through working groups that presented their vision for the solutions that must be taken to reach comprehensive national reconciliation in four basic points: local development, social cohesion, local administration, local community, and civil work. In order to set the broad outlines for starting to address these issues on the basis of the compatibility of the priorities and interests of Syrians within the homeland, state, and society.