The event will be presented by Pedro Villena, the General Director of Casa Árabe. Participants: Juan Serrat, Ambassador of Spain; Julio Albi, Ambassador of Spain, and Natalia Sancha, a journalist who specializes in the Middle East. 

The first of these conferences will deal with the topic of conflict in Syria and the action taken by the European Union. To discuss this, Casa Árabe has invited two ambassadors of Spain who were at the helm of the Spanish Embassy in Damascus immediately prior to and during the beginning of the conflict in Syria, Juan Serrat (2005-2010) and Julio Albi (2010-2012), as well as a journalist who specializes in the Middle East, Natalia Sancha. Sancha currently resides in Beirut. 

After five years of civil war in Syria, the huge number of internally displaced persons, refugees and deceased continues to rise, as has the destruction of the country’s infrastructure. The purpose of this conference is to analyze the origin of this conflict, understand the divisions between the different political factions and their religious dimension, and explore the role of the international role-players involved.  

Juan Serrat, a Spanish diplomat since 1971, has been stationed at Spain’s diplomatic missions in Senegal, Equatorial Guinea, the United Kingdom, Morocco, Brazil, Syria and Venezuela. He was Spain’s Consul General in Jerusalem. From 1982 to 1984, he was the Director for Eastern Europe, and in 1998, he was named the Assistant Director General of Property Management Affairs, and later the Assistant Director General of General Service Inspections. He was the Ambassador to the Arab Republic of Syria from 2005 to 2010.

Julio Albi has been a Spanish diplomat since 1973. Albi has been stationed at Spain’s diplomatic missions in Senegal, the United States, Italy, Honduras, Ecuador, Peru and Syria. He has held several positions at the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. He has also been a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of History since 2009. He was the Ambassador to the Arab Republic of Syria from 2010 to 2012.

Natalia Sancha, an independent journalist and photographer who specializes in the Arab world, has been living in Lebanon since 2008. Since 2011, she has covered the wave of popular uprisings in the Middle East and the later conflicts in countries such as Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria, as well as the resulting flow of refugees and their impact on the region. She is a contributor to the daily newspaper El País for Lebanon and Syria. She also publishes analyses on regional politics in the publications Egypt Independent, La Voz de Galicia, Jadaliyya, Esglobal and Política exterior. Her photographic work has been published by agencies such as AP, AFP, Transterra Media and MaxPPP, and journals and magazines including Sumus and Revista 5W.  She has worked at the Spanish thinktanks Real Instituto Elcano and Fundación Alternativas. She is a co-author of the book Siria. La primavera marchita (Syria, the Wilted Revolution), coordinated by Antonio Pampliega, in the “A contraluz” collection (Libros.com). She graduated with a Master’s degree in Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, having received a Fulbright Fellowship.