Syria has weighed on my mind for a long time: 15 years of trauma for its people and 15 years of failure in international engagement. I was directly involved in the latter – as a senior member of the United Nations’ Special Envoy’s Office, and later as head of UN OCHA – and so I cannot claim innocence before the Syrian people.

In my time at the UN, I had to attend numerous meetings with senior officials of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, including the Syrian president himself. Some would accuse me and the UN of maintaining this engagement as part of a trade to get better humanitarian access.

The truth is different. Humanitarian agencies and their officials always meet anyone who can either help or impede humanitarian assistance. It’s not a trade. It’s a necessity – as is also true of mediators always meeting the parties to conflict in their efforts to end it.

All of my many meetings with al-Assad were to press for the decisions he needed to take for the welfare of his people. He was one of many people with deplorable power to create and sustain suffering whom I had to meet in my five decades working as a diplomat.

On one occasion, back near the beginning of al-Assad’s hideous war in 2012, I was living in Damascus and........

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