Syria Pledges to Aid U.S. in Push for Peace Talks : Mideast: Christopher says Clinton Administration is willing to intervene more actively in new negotiations.

Israel’s toughest Arab adversary said Sunday that it wants to restart Middle East peace talks soon and agreed to cooperate with U.S. efforts to relaunch the negotiations.

“We want the peace talks to resume as soon as possible,” Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh said after meeting with Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

He said the plight of 396 alleged Palestinian militants expelled by Israel to Lebanon was “a human tragedy” but that Syria considers the peace talks “more important.”

His statement means that all the Arab participants in the talks--except the Palestinians--are now willing to return to the negotiations if some kind of compromise can be struck over the deportees.

Christopher, who has been touring the Middle East to try to restart the suspended talks, said he is “encouraged” by Syria’s position.

And, in a potentially important change from the George Bush Administration, the secretary of state said the Clinton Administration is willing to intervene more actively in the negotiations once they resume.

The new stance, which Christopher described as making the United States “a full partner” in the talks, means the Administration will be actively offering its own ideas for resolving Arab-Israeli disputes, other officials said.

That is a role the Arabs have often urged the United States to take, in the belief that only U.S. pressure can force Israel to make key concessions over territory and Palestinian rights.

In earlier rounds of the peace talks, the Bush Administration said the United States could act as a “catalyst” but insisted that it was up to the Arabs and Israelis themselves to work out solutions.

Asked to explain the difference between a “catalyst” and a “full partner,” a senior U.S. official said: “A full partner offers ideas.”

“We intend, if anything, to be more active than the United States has been in the past,” Christopher told reporters after meeting for almost four hours with Syrian President Hafez Assad. “ . . . On a number of issues, the parties are close enough together that they could be assisted by the participation of an outsider.”

Those issues include both the tentative steps toward peace already taken between Israel and Syria, centering on the question of returning the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to Syria, and the Israeli-Palestinian talks on self-government in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, another official said.

The official said Assad was clearly pleased by Christopher’s offer of a more active U.S. role in the talks.

The official said Christopher does not know how Israel will react to the idea, which he plans to explain to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Jerusalem on Tuesday. At the outset of the negotiations in 1991, Israel insisted on direct talks without the United States in the room, to make the Arabs’ implicit recognition of Israel clearer.

Christopher and his aides were clearly buoyed by their meeting with Assad, whom they had considered the only Arab chief of state who could have posed a serious obstacle to renewed peace talks.

“The atmosphere was terrific,” said one.

Assad has sometimes used meetings with visiting U.S. officials to deliver lengthy complaints about Western support for Israel, but in Sunday’s session he was businesslike and cooperative, they said.

And the Syrians deliberately avoided making their return to the peace talks depend directly on the release of the Palestinian deportees, the officials said.

Foreign Minister Shareh said the deportees are “a thorn” that must be removed. But he said the resumption of negotiations is “more important, because it is bound to change the face of this region.”

Syria entered the peace talks reluctantly in 1991, but Assad has become steadily more enthusiastic--partly because Israel has shown itself ready to bargain over the Golan Heights, but even more because he sees the negotiations as a vehicle for improving his relationship with the United States, Syrian officials say.

Christopher has been promoting a possible solution to the deportees issue under which Israel would allow many of the Palestinians to return to their homes early through the decisions of a military review board.

Neither Israel nor the Palestinians themselves have agreed to the idea.