Peace Perks May Have Swayed Syria

For the Arab world, it was a Ramadan surprise--the thunderbolt news that Syria and Israel had decided to resume peace talks after nearly four years of stalemate.

Almost nobody in the region had expected anything so sudden or dramatic to come out of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s tour of the Middle East this week, and Arab analysts were divided over whether the announcement Wednesday of the upcoming talks in Washington meant that Israel or Syria had blinked first.

The news, which came on the eve of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, has required all players in the region to urgently update their calculations to see who wins and who loses from the development. A few optimists are even beginning to ponder what the Middle East will be like if the last confrontational states with Israel decide to bury the hatchet.

Some, like Jihad Khazen, the former editor of the respected pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, believe that a deal between Israel and Syria is as good as done and that an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a peace treaty with Beirut will surely follow.

In a column in Al Hayat on Friday, Khazen predicted that peace will reign in the Middle East by next autumn.

“The start of Syrian-Israeli negotiations . . . was always harder than their completion,” Khazen wrote. “Now that it has been agreed to return to the negotiating table, it is no longer difficult to expect them to end in an agreement, and with it the advent of comprehensive peace . . . by next September.”

But that peace “may not be just,” Khazen said, especially if Israel decides that it can afford to take a hard line with the politically weak Palestinians once it has sewn up its deals with Syria and Lebanon.

Why did Syrian President Hafez Assad agree now to negotiations without first obtaining--as he had been demanding--a public acknowledgment by Israel of its willingness to return all of the Golan Heights, which it has occupied since 1967?

The widespread belief in the region is that the 69-year-old Syrian leader is sensing his mortality and acted mainly because he believes that the task of making peace with Israel would be too difficult for anyone else to accomplish. Moreover, by making sure that the deal is done during his lifetime, it becomes that much easier to assure his wish that his 34-year-old son, Bashar, be his successor.

“Assad knows from experience and political shrewdness that the Golan is too complicated an issue to be left open for Bashar to deal with,” Egyptian analyst Nabil Abdel Fattah said.

The economic factor also is at work. Syria’s economy badly needs an injection of foreign capital and technology, and getting closer to the United States is one way to accomplish that.

By playing the peace card, Assad apparently is hoping to develop a relationship with Washington similar to that enjoyed now by Egypt and Jordan, two states that made peace with Israel and were rewarded with large sums in U.S. assistance.

Significantly, in Damascus, the Syrian capital, the official dailies Al Baath and Al Thawra emphasized Syria’s wish to get closer to Washington--and portrayed the decision to negotiate as a goodwill gesture toward the United States.

“Syria has provided this opportunity to the U.S. to allow the Clinton administration to crown its efforts by making a landmark achievement on the Middle East peace process before the coming U.S. presidential elections,” Al Thawra said.

Syrian government officials had been signaling for months that they were serious in wanting peace and were ready to be flexible to satisfy Israel on all the other issues--diplomatic recognition, security arrangements, water-sharing and timing of an accord--if Israel would only agree to the fundamental demand to restore all of the Golan.

Since the election of Ehud Barak as Israel’s prime minister made it seem possible, there has been an almost palpable hope and desire among the Syrian public for an honorable peace. After more than half a century of tension and war, the young generation in particular would like to move on to other issues, such as moving the country into the Internet age and integrating with the global economic system.

For Assad, achieving the return of the Golan has been a life’s mission. If he can manage it now, it will redeem the country’s wounded pride and prove that his three decades of rule have not been a failure.

His enhanced stature no doubt would boost the chances of keeping the leadership within his immediate family.

Bashar’s ascension to the Syrian presidency is far from assured. Many analysts believe that the country’s Sunni Muslim majority will strive to put one of its own in as president rather than another of the Assad clan, who are from the Alawite religious minority.

There are some indications that the question of succession has become more acute in recent months in Syria amid persistent rumors that Assad’s health is failing and that different branches of his family are at loggerheads.

There have even been rumors of a “major confrontation” within the Assad family in the Latakia area of Syria as recently as October, resulting in an unknown number of deaths. According to media accounts and a diplomatic source, a clash occurred between forces loyal to Assad and those belonging to Rifaat Assad, the president’s out-of-favor younger brother.

If the reports are true, then the jockeying for succession was reaching a critical stage this autumn--another possible reason why Assad needed a breakthrough on the peace front.

Analyst Fattah, for one, believes that “Syria was pushed into talks because of the internal Syrian power struggles.”