Syria Trumpets Clinton-Assad Talks as Epic

By MARK FINEMAN and NORMAN KEMPSTER

Jan. 16, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

DAMASCUS, Syria —

At the height of President Clinton’s European tour last week, the 14 million residents of this highly structured, tightly controlled nation were bombarded with news of an event of historic--even epic--proportions.

“A meeting between the two giants,” declared one of the state-run daily newspapers that deliver Syria’s official line each day.

“A strategic turning point that will decide the future of the region for years to come,” announced another.

“Over the past 20 years, no summit between two world leaders has received as much attention as this,” proclaimed a third.

The focus of the hyperbolic Syrian spin was not Clinton’s meeting with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, an event that merited barely a mention here in the capital of a nation that was once among Moscow’s closest Middle East allies. Nor was it the nuclear disarmament treaty signed by Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk last week.

The event that was the subject of Damascus’ rhetorical blizzard was the summit scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. today in Geneva between Clinton and Hafez Assad, the authoritarian Syrian president who has outlasted five of his American counterparts and a litany of U.S. legislation aimed at isolating his regime.

So intense was the hype and so high are the expectations surrounding today’s summit that everyone from Clinton Administration officials in Washington to the diplomatic corps and Syria’s intellectual elite in Damascus found themselves trying to temper it.

They have warned that the Clinton-Assad meeting is unlikely to produce an immediate, concrete breakthrough in the stalled Middle East peace process, nor will it alter overnight America’s strained relations with a nation that it has long viewed as a renegade.

Yet among even the most cynical of those analysts, officials and diplomats stressed that the meeting will likely be a landmark of the Mideast’s painful path to peace--a watershed that most agreed will help pave the way for a future peace agreement between Israel and its most bitter, best-armed neighbor.

“You’re not going to come up with a peace treaty in a three-hour meeting,” one Western diplomat said in Damascus. “In the next three to six months, you will see something. The peace process demands they do something. And this meeting is the first real key to unlocking the impasse.”

Sadik Azm, a Damascus University professor and prominent Syrian intellectual, agreed. “There is a consensus now that this peace agreement is going to go through. Not immediately--maybe in three months or six months. Maybe a year. But this is the first time there has been this kind of certainty here. There is skepticism, resignation and some healthy cynicism. But there also is optimism, in the sense that this meeting opens up a bold new game. It is a turning point.”

The official mood in Damascus continued to be decidedly upbeat on the eve of the summit.

“We are optimistic,” Information Minister Muhamed Salman told The Times in a rare interview Saturday night in Damascus.

Outlining the basic position Assad will bring to the summit table today, Salman said: “Syria considers Israel its enemy because Israel occupies part of its land, and also Israel occupies part of Lebanon’s land. When Israel will withdraw from the occupied territories, there will be some change for Syria.

“But nobody should expect Syria will compromise on its land.”

In Jerusalem, Israeli Environment Minister Yossi Sarid said Saturday that Israel will give back all of the Golan Heights--the strategic plateau that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War--if Syria pledges that it is ready for full peace and normal relations, the Associated Press reported.

Salman repeated Syria’s harsh criticism of the agreement for limited Palestinian autonomy in the Gaza Strip and Jericho signed in September by Israel and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, which broke ranks from Syria and the other Arab delegations in the peace process to negotiate the accord in secret.

“Peace cannot be in pieces,” he said, echoing Assad’s longstanding demand for a comprehensive peace settlement between Israel and all its neighbors simultaneously. “After the Gaza-Jericho agreement, the situation worsened in the occupied territories, and it spread more instability through the region.”

But Salman concluded on a positive note. “We really seek and cling to peace.”

And, when asked whether the Syrian people would support any such agreement with Israel, Salman said: “The trust President Hafez Assad enjoys from his people will make the majority of the people back all of the steps the president takes.”

It is not the first such meeting between an American President and the cunning, calculating Syrian leader whose name means “lion” but whose shrewd tactics more often are likened to those of a fox.

It is an event that Washington insiders and Syrian analysts described as a task fraught with far more risks for Clinton than for Assad.

In summits that have spanned two decades, Assad has met Richard Nixon in Damascus and Jimmy Carter and George Bush in Geneva--the summit site of choice for a Syrian leader who has never been to America and has always insisted that U.S. presidents meet him halfway.

In each summit past, American presidents have met with Assad when they had compelling reasons to do so:

* Nixon, on a Middle East tour, unsuccessfully sought to shift public attention away from Watergate two months before his resignation in 1974.

* Carter tried, also unsuccessfully, to broker a Middle East peace process in 1977 similar to the one that began in Madrid in 1991.

* Bush used it to appeal for, and win, Assad’s backing for America’s international military coalition to drive Iraq from Kuwait in 1990.

Clinton requested today’s summit with Assad through Secretary of State Warren Christopher last month, hoping that it will serve as a dramatic gesture of reassurance that the Syrian strongman remains the pivotal player in the peace process.

This is a center-stage role that Assad, who views himself as the chief architect of the future Middle East and a singular leader in the region, has assumed for years and one that fueled his personal outrage after Arafat secretly negotiated the accord with Israel.

With talks between the PLO and Israel mired in details and their historic agreement to begin Palestinian self-rule in the occupied Gaza Strip and Jericho now delayed by weeks, Clinton is gambling that the attention he lavishes on Assad will jump-start the equally crucial peace talks between Israel and Syria, which also holds the key to similar accords with Lebanon and Jordan.

For Assad, who remains in firm control of Syria and wields ultimate influence over neighboring Lebanon, the summit is virtually risk-free.

Analysts said his position remains remarkably unchanged from the one that met Nixon two decades ago: The return of the entire Golan Heights in exchange for a peace treaty with his Jewish neighbors.

“The absolute red line for him is the sovereignty of Golan,” Azm said. “I think everything else is negotiable. He’s a very smart, shrewd tactician. He knows how to play his cards. And, after the PLO agreement, he has kept all his options open.”

Further, in a police state where Assad controls the media and all levers of power, last week’s summit hype was testimonial to how another Syrian described the task for Syria’s president: “Here, whatever he (Assad) does is always presented as a success before it happens. Even if nothing happens in Geneva, it will be described here as, ‘The president stood fast in the face of Clinton’s demands.’ ”

State Department officials and analysts in Washington agreed that the meeting will be a far more daunting task for Clinton, particularly after the grueling week of crucial, complex and far-reaching diplomacy that preceded it.

Assad, perhaps the smartest and certainly the most meticulous leader in the region, has been preparing for the session at least since December.

Rhetoric alone is critical in meetings with a leader as formal and copious as Assad; William B. Quandt, a former National Security Council expert on the Middle East, noted that the Syrian president can take a single slip of the lip far more seriously than it was intended. To illustrate, he described just such an incident from Nixon’s 1974 summit with Assad.

“Nixon said the American strategy was to get the Israelis to pull back on the Golan in a step-by-step fashion, which was our policy,” Quandt recalled. “Then he said, ‘When they reach the edge, they will topple over.’ Assad loved it. He took this as an American commitment that we would try to bring about full Israeli withdrawal.”

Still, Quandt believes that, on balance, the Clinton-Assad meeting is likely to advance the peace process.

“There are times when meeting with leaders who are not exactly paragons of democracy and human rights is in the interest of U.S. foreign policy,” he said.

As for the American agenda today, U.S. officials said it will be limited to Middle East issues.

They held out little hope for Assad’s longer-range goal of reshaping his entire relationship with America--a decision dating to the Soviet Union’s collapse to moderate his policies and reach out to the United States and the West.

Assad’s ultimate aim, analysts said, is to get his nation off the American list of nations sponsoring terrorism and the accompanying U.S. economic sanctions; the State Department has already indicated that will not occur at least until Syria makes peace with Israel.

But officials added that Clinton intends to press Syria on an array of bilateral issues, among them Assad ending his support for terrorist groups headquartered in Damascus and improving his regime’s human rights record.

The Syrians have jailed an estimated 4,000 political prisoners for years, despite the recent release of 3,500 others.

Given the circumstances surrounding the summit, some American critics cautioned that the young President may not be nearly tough enough.

“Clinton must resist Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s inclination to appease Assad with diplomatic concessions for merely returning to the talks” with Israel, the conservative Heritage Foundation said of today’s meeting. “This would only reward Assad for his delaying tactics and stiffen his future negotiating demands. In Geneva, Clinton should press Assad to reverse Syrian policies that threaten American interests, not reward him for participating in peace talks that serve his own interests.”

A senior State Department official denied that Christopher has tried to “appease” Assad.

The official added that Christopher, who will attend the Geneva summit, has established a rapport with Assad and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a step vital to American efforts to broker a Mideast agreement.

Another senior State Department official suggested that Clinton may break with his predecessors’ practices and meet for a second or third time with the Syrian leader.

“To deal with Assad effectively over time, you have to create a relationship,” the official said. “Clinton has at least three and maybe seven more years in office.”

In Damascus, where Assad is expected to keep his office longer, similar optimism prevailed.

“People don’t expect any major breakthrough, in the sense that there will be a great document or agreement,” Azm said. “But sometimes in these situations, people in power understand each other in ways that escape us.”

Fineman reported from Damascus and Kempster from Washington.

The Syria Summit

American Presidents have met with Syrian leader Hafez Assad when they have had compelling reasons to do so:

Richard M. Nixon

Unsuccessfully sought to shift public attention away from Watergate two months before his resignation in 1974 . . .

Jimmy Carter

. . . tried, unsuccessfully, in 1977 to broker a Middle East peace process similar to the one that began in Madrid in 1991.

George Bush

. . . appealed for, and won, Assad’s backing for America’s international military coalition to drive Iraq from Kuwait in 1990.

Bill Clinton

. . . hopes for reassurance that the Syrian strongman remains a pivotal player in Mideast peace process.

WHAT CLINTON WANTS