Syria Open to Peace Treaty, Carter Says : Middle East: The former President says Assad has drastically altered his stance on negotiations with Israel.

Former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that Syrian President Hafez Assad, for years a leader of the Arab “rejection front” that is opposed to any relationship with Israel, is ready to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and to engage in direct peace negotiations with Jerusalem.

Carter, who held 7 1/2 hours of talks with Assad in Damascus earlier this month, said the Syrian leader authorized him to report that Syria is ready to talk about a peace treaty to replace the hostile truce that has prevailed since the end of the 1973 Middle East War.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Assad’s attitude toward the peace process is much more constructive than it was before,” Carter said in a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Carter left little doubt that Assad’s acceptance of Israel’s continued existence is based more on a recognition of harsh political reality than on a change of heart.

Assad has not dropped his insistence on an international conference as the vehicle for Middle East peace negotiations, Carter said, but the Syrian president now is ready to move directly from the conference to face-to-face talks with Israel. This procedure is at the heart of the peace plan advocated by former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

Carter said Assad envisions a conference attended by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, China, Israel and the Arab nations as a forum for public debate, while acknowledging that the real negotiations would be held directly with Israel.

“He was ready to adjourn immediately after expressing Syria’s best case to the world, to (move to) direct bilateral talks with Israel in order to resolve all the differences that exist between Syria and Israel,” Carter said.

He added that Assad said he agrees that the international conference should have no power to impose an accord or to veto any pact hammered out between Israel and the Arabs. In the past, Assad insisted that the international panel must have real powers.

Israel has objected to the international conference format because it has feared that the outside powers might side with the Arabs to force a settlement on Israel.

In Israel, a spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said Carter made no mention of any switch in Syrian policy.

“Not a word,” said Avi Pazner, the spokesman. “I was present when Carter met with the prime minister, and there was no talk of something so dramatic.”

Carter visited Israel after his talks with Assad in Damascus.

A State Department official said Assad’s private acknowledgement to Carter of Israel’s right to exist stops far short of a public statement by the Syrian leader.

However, William B. Quandt, a Middle East expert during the Carter Administration and now on the staff of the Brookings Institution, said that Assad seems to have gone beyond his former position.

“My guess is there is some real movement, but it is hard to say how much and how serious and what the intentions are,” Quandt said.

Syria broke diplomatic relations with Egypt in 1978 after the late President Anwar Sadat agreed to negotiate a peace with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Carter said that Assad might have been motivated by a realization that the Soviet Union, Syria’s chief arms supplier, would be unwilling to support another war against Israel.

Carter said he believes that Assad would agree to a treaty that would turn the Golan Heights into a demilitarized zone. Israel captured the Golan from Syria during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and subsequently annexed it.

Times staff writer Dan Williams in Jerusalem contributed to this story.