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Press TV has conducted an interview with Sukant Chandan, a political analyst and film maker, from London, about the situation in Syria.

- Now that we have heard that basically it’s fallen apart, as far as the talks in Geneva, are you surprised that nothing concrete came out of these talks?

- No, I am not surprised at all. Let’s be realistic. When there’s negotiations of this type which take place after a period - usually many years, sometimes decades - of an armed conflict, negotiations are going to be difficult. They’re going to stop and start. Both parties are going to try to push their respective positions, etcetera.

But in this particular negotiation as with actually most post-conflict or at least negotiations that’s looking to resolve a conflict, you find that those who are standing on more just principles, independent sovereignty against “the greatest purveyors of violence in the world to date,” to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - i.e. the governments in London, Paris and Washington - their backers are obviously not sincere. They’re disingenuous.

They’re going to use the negotiations to delay all the while, as Obama has indicated in his words with the Jordanian King, Abdullah, that he is seeking other means to pressure Syria, and that compounded with the news that’s coming from so-called Saudi Arabia that they are going to equip the death squads with more deadly weapons, while we can see that the kind of trick-nology which the West are known and infamous for.

So, it’s not surprising that the West and their allies who are the Syrians calling for the people who divided Bilad al-Sham, the land of Syria historically, they’re calling the colonizers to come back to bomb their own country and to supply death squads to supply terrorism. It’s not surprising that this is going on, sister.

- Sukant, you just mentioned something. You talked about Saudi Arabia increasing its support, as you call it, for the death squads. I want to look at this. What does this mean from a political perspective, internationally, when openly, basically, they are supporting, they are supplying terrorists? -We’re not talking about people who are simply just against the Syrian government and Syrians who are actually just expressing their dissent against or discontent toward the Syrian government, but openly obvious that they are terrorists. How can they get away with doing this?

- Well, I think we have to go to the source of the problem and the source of the problem is not in Riyadh.

The source of the problem, actually, is in London and in Washington. London is still the world capital of the private-armed mercenary industry and it’s also still the world financial capital of neocolonialism today.

Really, if you study for example the vanguard architect of Western strategy, people like [Zbigniew] Brzezinski in his book “Strategic Vision”, if you read the conflict analyst think-tanks of empire, people like Jamestown and Stratfor, and if anyone can decode from the perspective of our people, the humanity on the planet which resides in the global south majority, you can see that terrorism is an absolute forefront of their strategy to conduct regime change, hegemony and domination across the world.

In terms of PR, it’s not really popular to send in your boots on the ground in Afghanistan, in Iraq, as we’ve seen. So the model is Libya and Syria, particularly. Also the model is what they’re trying with Ukraine and Venezuela, which is very similar to the Arab sting, which is using opposition to provocate the legitimate government of that country, then for the West to use that as an excuse to slap sanctions down on that country and also increasing arm the opposition.

This terrorism and combined with the provocations with opposition and using any division amongst our people be it ethnic, religious, national, between men and women, any division they can find, this is the 21st century neocolonialism and the way they’re working and moving against us.

- Sukant, you talked about that this is the new 21st century of neocolonialism, that we seem to be seeing throughout so many countries in the region and of course also the African continent now.

With the situation at hand with what we’re seeing with the media battle in all of this, what does it take, first of all, to get the message of what the reality is on the ground, for example what’s happening in Syria and elsewhere? How do we get it out to the people that they really realize what is going on?

- A media answer to that is the current platform in which we are engaging with each other, i.e. platforms like Press TV and other media platforms which are effective, efficient and build our general capacity in fighting the media war.

It was the Financial Times that said it itself in 2011 that without Al-Jazeera, for example - that’s the media channel, obviously, of Doha, which hosts the biggest US military base, the monarchy there which has no democracy - so Al-Jazeera is promoting democracy around the world?

Anyway, the Financial Times said that without Al-Jazeera, NATO could not have conducted the successful regime operation and the divide-and-ruin operation against Libya.

Really, it is a battle of hearts and minds and we have to build the capacity of our TV channels of the global south and other allied movements. Press TV is important. Russia Today is important. And there’s a whole array of developing news channels that we have to fight on this level.

- Your take on that, our guest in Beirut said that there are rules in this world and that the government in Damascus must abide by those rules. Your take that now what we have basically coming out of Geneva, as we know, is that opposition is saying the first step is transition government that we have to talk about; and of course, Damascus is saying that terrorism should be talked about first. Your take, sir.

- I think our colleague in Beirut is absolutely correct to quote what he did about the transitional government and I have no problem. I actually positively reflect on that and that is good and correct. I’m not frustrated.

I don’t think the Syrian delegation or their primary allies, Russia and China, are frustrated at all. Actually, I think they’re increasingly confident. I think all indicators point to that.

I think also it’s worth our colleague in Beirut reflecting, and I know we’ve discussed this before, but it’s worth reflecting on the importance of addressing terrorism as a primary strategy of Western hegemony to conduct its domination and regime change operations.

Of course, Lebanon is no stranger, unfortunately, to terrorism and its suffering the direct fallout of Syria. I would argue actually that the conspiracy against Syria was directly targeted also against Lebanon because it hosts one of the greatest non-state defiers and threats to Zionist and Western hegemony in the region, that is the Islamic Resistance Movement of Hezbollah, which decided that in its own interests it needs to enter the Syrian conflict to protect Lebanon. And I think a lot of people would say that that is a wise move.

But back to the confidence, there’s no frustration. There’s a lot of confidence and confidence has increased when General [Abdel-Fattah] Sisi and Foreign Minister of Egypt, [Nabil] Fahmy, has gone to Moscow to meet Lavrov and Putin, and they’ve had a joint statement in defending Syria’s sovereignty against Western interference.

This is a historic blow to Western domination against the region. Egypt is the lynchpin Arab state in the whole Arab nation, if we can it that. I think now, increasingly, there is no doubt now that strategically it’s in the resistance camp in defending the countries of the region against Western conspiracy and Western conspiracies with their allies.

Similarly, Iran as indicating the greater confidence in the region, the Iranian leadership has asked for its youth to prepare for cyberwar against the United States, and send a small armada to the United States water territory in the Atlantic.

- Mr. Chandan, your response [to our previous guest speaker], please, because I want to switch over to some Facebook perspectives. Go ahead, Mr. Chandan.

- I think it’s actually correct of Mr. [Lakhdar] Brahimi to suggest that both things can be discussed. I actually would agree with our colleague in Beirut that that is a correct way forward.

But again I think we have to reflect on the Syrian attitude, which is obviously one of swagger at the talks. And why is that so? Why should a country’s representatives really kind of humor and entertain those that have contributed directly to descending that country into a war with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed at the behest of the primary interests of London and Washington and the closest Gulf allies? We have to be a bit proportionate and understanding that.

Whereas our colleague in Beirut talks about ‘do not call the opposition terrorists’, well he knows and we all know that the opposition is divided, is violently divided amongst - it’s shedding blood amongst itself.

The Syrian government has always maintained since the beginning of this whole mess and debacle that the opposition is divided. They’re very much willing to engage with the non-armed, that’s the non-death squad opposition, which there is in Syria – a patriotic opposition that does not call on the former colonialists, the present day neocolonialists to come bomb their own country, and I think that’s fair.

- Mr. Chandan, your last perspective. Where does this situation have to go? What has to happen, in your perspective, right now that we can start the beginning of the end of this crisis in Syria?

- Just to respond, just very quickly. I don’t think this is a Sunni, Shia thing. I think that’s pretty much what London and Washington likes to think. General Sisi and the Foreign Minister Fahmy is not Shia. They’re Sunni. The PFLP, the PFLP General Command and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad who are supporting ostensibly the struggle against the death squads in Syria are not Shia. They’re Sunni. So, I don’t really go in for this type of sectarianization of the issue.

In terms of where things have to go, what ideally Syria needs to do is to seal its borders because Turkey and the Gulf, and their backers in London and Washington are obviously going to keep feeding in the death squads into Syria. As long as that happens, this conflict will not see an end.

But the strategic end has already started. The death squads are on a strategic loss and the independence movement of the region are towards victory, and I think that’s reflected in all the things that we’ve discussed.