Syria’s Assad Visiting Egypt After Icy Decade : Mideast: He hopes to forge a new Arab axis for negotiating regional peace. It’s his first trip to Cairo since 1977.

Syrian President Hafez Assad arrived Saturday for his first visit to Egypt since the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, launching talks aimed at establishing Syria as an active negotiating partner to the Middle East conflict for the first time in more than a decade.

Arab diplomats said Assad’s summit with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would focus on repairing Syria’s bitter rift with Iraq and the Palestine Liberation Organization and in forging a new, united Arab axis for negotiating peace in Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied territories.

Assad, a recluse who rarely travels outside Damascus, had not visited Egypt since former President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem in 1977. Flying directly to Alexandria from Damascus--and bypassing Cairo, home of Israel’s only embassy in the Arab world--Assad embraced Mubarak to the sounds of a marching band and a 21-gun salute and also extended a warm handshake to the Iraqi and PLO ambassadors.

The summit was the fourth between Mubarak and Assad since Syria in December became the last Arab country to restore diplomatic relations with Egypt after the chilly years that followed implementation of the 1978 Camp David accords.

The two presidents met behind closed doors for more than three hours and emerged without fully briefing their Cabinet ministers, who had assembled for separate talks, Egyptian Information Minister Safwat Sharif said.

But Egyptian Foreign Ministry sources said the talks, if successful, could pave the way for bringing in the historically hard-line Syrian government as an active partner in the Middle East peace process and coalescing the feuding Syrian and Iraqi governments behind a permanent resolution to Lebanon’s 15-year-old civil war.

Saudi Arabia has also become involved in a behind-the-scenes effort to reconcile Syria and Iraq before the next Arab League summit meeting in Cairo in November, Egyptian sources said.

“The idea is if we mobilize enough force behind it, maybe it will work out,” said one official.

The summit comes at a critical juncture in the Middle East, where peace efforts have been stymied by a new hard-line government in Israel, on the one hand, and the suspension of a dialogue between the United States and the PLO on the other. With the peace process at a standstill, Arab leaders are re-evaluating old rivalries in an attempt to forge a new, unified front against conflicts that have bedeviled the region for decades, several Western and Arab diplomats said.

“The change of heart in Israel toward extremism is pushing everybody to reconsider the situation,” said one Egyptian official.

Few were expecting immediate and dramatic movement from Syria, which has long scoffed at efforts to negotiate peace with Israel. Egyptians diplomats said they expected Assad would point to Israel’s recent slowdown in efforts to set up a dialogue with Palestinians as an example of why the current peace process is doomed to fail.

“Our argument will be that we better form a unified Arab stand if we’re going to get anywhere,” an Egyptian official countered.

There also were some indications that Syria may be re-evaluating its relations with Iraq, governed by a rival wing of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, which were stormy for years and finally collapsed when Syria supported Iran in its eight-year-long war with Iraq.

“The day will come when matters will be straightened out and a reconciliation achieved between the two sister states (Syria and Iraq), but I can’t predict when,” Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh said in an interview with Egypt’s state-owned Middle East News Agency. “It is natural that the two leaders will discuss ways of improving the Arab situation by deeds, not words . . . and of remedying the negative and developing the positive.”

Likewise, there have been some signs of thawing relations between Syria and the PLO, which have been frozen since 1983, when PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat was expelled from Syria.

“Why not?” the PLO’s ambassador to Cairo, Said Kamel, said Saturday after shaking hands with Assad. “We are all looking for that, and we are struggling for that, because we are struggling for our national rights. We are calling always to have reconciliation with everybody.”

Assad has already said he would welcome Arafat in Damascus, but the PLO leader has so far demonstrated only lukewarm interest. An unidentified PLO official told the British news agency Reuters that Arafat might be amenable to a reconciliation but only if Assad agrees to free thousands of Palestinian prisoners held in Syrian jails and to release confiscated PLO funds and weapons.

Egyptian officials and other Arab diplomats say Mubarak is hoping that, even if total reconciliation is impossible, enough ground can be covered to allow the Iraqi and Syrian leaders to meet productively at the upcoming Arab League summit meeting.

Ultimately, they said, bringing Syria, Iraq and the PLO into the peace process as partners is the only way to permanently resolve Mideast conflicts. Syria and Iraq are the main power brokers in Lebanon, for example, with Syria backing the government of Elias Hrawi against Iraqi support for the rival Christian Forces leader Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun.

Any permanent resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, they said, will have to determine the future of the Golan Heights as well, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967.

One Egyptian official said the new push to reconcile Syria and Iraq follows indications that Aoun, entrenched against the Hrawi government in Christian-dominated East Beirut, may be willing at last to negotiate a settlement with Hrawi--an opportunity that cannot be fully capitalized on unless Iraq and Syria are willing to act as partners to the process.

Ultimately, the Egyptians would like to see Damascus, Riyadh, Cairo and the PLO working as partners to resolve conflicts throughout the region, one source said.