Road to Release? Ask Damascus : Syria holds the key to hostages in Lebanon

For the first time in 15 years the government of Lebanon can plausibly claim to exercise control over its country’s battered and blood-soaked capital.

The last of the heavily armed militia gangs that had divided and subdivided Beirut into hostile sectarian camps have withdrawn under an agreement reached last year by Lebanese parliamentarians. Like other militias that had left earlier, Maronite Christian leader Samir Geagea’s troops carted away hundreds of heavy weapons and thousands of tons of munitions. The gunmen are making sure that they have the means to fight again another day, should the contingency arise. Lebanon being Lebanon, that tragic prospect seems all too likely.

For now, though, Beirut is no longer a city held hostage, and Beirutis can exult in their release from the organized violence and random thuggery that had made life all but unendurable. Others are not so fortunate. At least 11 Western hostages, six Americans among them, continue to be held by radical Muslims closely associated with Iran. The fate of these prisoners seems at times to have been all but forgotten in the ebb and flow of tumultuous Middle East events. It must not be. Iran may hope to have the final political say about when the hostages are set free. But Syria may well hold the key to their liberation.

It is Syria, with 40,000 “peacekeeping” troops in Lebanon, whose army crushed the military challenge to President Elias Hrawi from Christian Gen. Michel Aoun, and it is Syria that provides backup for the national Lebanese army that has now fanned out to assert the government’s control over greater Beirut.

Western intelligence agencies have long believed that the hostages were being held in Beirut’s Shia Muslim-dominated southern suburbs. With the militias gone, and given Syria’s very efficient intelligence network in Lebanon, it seems inconceivable that Syrian authorities could not now quickly determine if the hostages in fact are still being held in southern Beirut. And if they are not? In that case, they almost certainly have been moved to eastern Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, which almost since the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in the mid-1970s has been firmly under Syrian military control. One way or another, Syria is in a strong position to pinpoint the location of the hostages. And, because of its physical presence on the ground and its ability to control supplies to every village in the Bekaa, it appears to be securely in position to exert pressures for their release.

President Bush is known to have raised the hostage question with President Hafez Assad when the two leaders met recently in Geneva to talk about Persian Gulf policy. Given Syria’s powerful--indeed dominant--role in Lebanon, Washington should be unremitting in insisting on early action from Damascus. The realities of power in Lebanon are obvious. Those realities make it impossible for Syria any longer to either profess ignorance or plead lack of control over what goes on in those areas where its army holds sway.