High-Level Talks in a Low-Key Location

Arrayed with signs proclaiming “Peace” in English, Hebrew and Arabic, this Colonial-era town at a wide spot in one of the country roads made famous by John Denver braced Sunday for its moment in the international spotlight.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel is scheduled to meet Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh of Syria at noon today in a local hotel, with President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright looking on, to begin what U.S. officials describe as the most hopeful peace talks in half a century of antagonism between the two Mideast nations.

“This is a very big deal,” Albright said Sunday. “This is a huge, historic opportunity. Talks at this level have never taken place between Syria and Israel.”

At the same time, she cautioned that the bargaining will be difficult and could be prolonged. The Americans, Israelis and Syrians all insist that the talks are open-ended and could stretch on for some time.

Shepherdstown merchants say they can hardly wait.

The town--about 65 miles northwest of Washington--is joining other secluded sites where American mediators have preferred to stage international negotiations.

President Carter chose the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., to mediate peace talks between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin in 1978. Clinton chose a U.S. air base in Dayton, Ohio, to host talks in 1995 between Serbs, Croats and Muslims warring over Bosnia-Herzegovina. And the Clinton administration chose the Wye Plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1998 to restart peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The spots are close enough to Washington to be convenient for participants and far enough away to minimize distractions--like the international press corps.

Still, as many as 1,500 journalists are expected to be in town for the talks. If the press contingent does turn out to be that big, it will almost double Shepherdstown’s normal population of 1,600.

“We’ve rented our rooms upstairs to press,” said Kevin Connell, owner of the Yellow Brick Bank, an haute cuisine restaurant among the town’s more numerous country-cooking spots. “What I’ve heard is that they have taken every room for 50 miles.”

Connell said his restaurant will be “fully staffed” during the conference, in anticipation of what may--or may not--turn into a commercial bonanza.

High-level face-to-face meetings between Israel and Syria are certainly rare enough: Last month’s preliminary encounter in Washington was the first ever.

But for Shepherdstown, a village with a three-block-long commercial district that looks much the same at the dawn of the 21st century as it did in the middle years of the 18th, the talks are a very big deal indeed.

There is no daily newspaper published here, but the day Shepherdstown was announced as the site of the talks, the Journal in nearby Martinsburg broke out what one reader described as the “Second Coming type” to proclaim that Shepherdstown and all of West Virginia’s eastern panhandle were back on the map.

Despite the aura of history that surrounds Shepherdstown, the Barak-Shareh talks will be held at the Clarion Hotel and Conference Center, a nondescript, privately owned complex just outside town.

Local lore holds that five miles of fiber-optic cable were installed during construction of the center, which the U.S. government frequently leases for conferences. For the Israeli-Syrian talks, the center will be closed to the public.

For this meeting, there will be a press center at Shepherd College, a 129-year-old liberal arts school in the center of Shepherdstown, several miles from the conference site. That arrangement is virtually the same as the one that was in place for the Wye Plantation talks, when the press was also kept at a discreet distance on a college campus.

Founded in the early 1730s and incorporated in 1762, Shepherdstown claims to be the oldest settlement in West Virginia. A decade after it was incorporated, when George Washington was raising the army that fought the British, the town contributed more soldiers per capita than any other community in the original 13 colonies.

Almost a century later, during the Civil War, Shepherdstown was turned into a massive hospital for casualties from the nearby battle of Antietam, the bloodiest two days in U.S. military history. Unlike most of the surrounding towns, where Civil War divisions were pronounced--and often still fester-- Shepherdstown was officially neutral during the war. As a result, Colonial-era buildings along the main street were spared the artillery and fire damage that affected such other towns as nearby Harpers Ferry.

Whether the Shepherdstown talks will attain the historic importance of the 1978 Camp David negotiations, for example, remains to be seen. However, in assertions made as Barak and Shareh left their respective countries for the United States, both sides indicated that they were ready for serious and tough bargaining over Syria’s demand for the return of the strategic Golan Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, and over Israel’s insistence on ironclad security guarantees and a normal diplomatic relationship between neighboring countries that have been in a formal state of war since 1948.

“We don’t need to wait for another millennium, another century or even another 10 years to find a way to make peace with our neighbors,” Barak told reporters on the tarmac at the Tel Aviv airport.

And the official Syrian daily Al Thawra said that the government was approaching the talks with “open minds and a truthful desire to bring about a just and comprehensive peace.”