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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Millennium Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters As Syria joins the peace process
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Syrian leader Hafez Al-Assad holds a trump card: without Syria's involvement there cannot be a comprehensive peace in the Middle East. To maximise the impact of this card, Assad has avoided direct contact with Israel throughout the peace process, keeping contacts between Syrian and Israeli negotiators below the decision-making level and refusing to participate in any event that would bring him together with Israeli leaders such as the funeral of King Hassan of Morocco. In a nutshell, he has built his whole strategy on an 'all or nothing' approach: either the total restitution of the Golan Heights in exchange for all peace, or no relations whatsoever.
A number of reasons have recently led Assad to adopt a less rigid stand: he accepted to enter into direct negotiations with the Israeli leadership without receiving an unequivocal assurance from Barak that Israel is ready to meet Syria's condition of total withdrawal from the Golan Heights up to the pre-June 4, 1967, borders.
One can only speculate why Assad has taken this decision. His health is said to be deteriorating. He would prefer to wrap up a deal with Israel himself rather than leave such a complex task to his successor, all the more so if it is true that he is grooming his son, Bashar, to take over after him. More importantly, Barak has threatened to pull out of Lebanon before next July, even unilaterally. Certainly Hizbullah's systematic skirmishes against Israel's self-proclaimed 'security zone' in southern Lebanon have been a central element in the decisions to pull out, but the Israeli leader may have also sought to embarrass Syria with its own military presence in Lebanon and, because of the importance of undisturbed Syrian-Lebanese relations, that is a factor that Assad cannot disregard.
But another factor could be Assad's perception of President Clinton's calculations. The president has gone through the Monica Lewinsky ordeal. He has suffered a major drawback with Congress refusing to ratify the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organisation was a complete fiasco. The only plausible card he can still use is that of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Clinton is certainly tempted to do anything in his power to be able to announce before he end of the year 2000 that he has been the American president who brought peace to the Middle East.
Actually, Assad is not the only protagonist betting on Clinton's keenness to make such an announcement before his term is over. By encouraging the intensification of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Barak is demonstrating that he too can take advantage of Clinton's insistence on striking a deal before the end of the year. He obviously believes it is Arafat, not himself, who is under time constraints to yield to US pressure, however demanding the Israeli negotiators might be.
Barak has made it clear that he now favours the creation of a Palestinian state, not so much because he is interested in the implementation of Palestinian rights, but rather because final agreements with the Palestinians must be endorsed by a Palestinian body that, in case of violations of these arrangements, could be made accountable in terms of international legality. Neither the PLO nor the present Palestinian authority qualify in this respect.
Therefore, it can be expected that a statement on peace will be delivered by President Clinton before the end of the year announcing the creation of the Palestinian state and that, thanks to its existence side by side with the state of Israel, the Palestinian problem will have been fundamentally resolved. The issues that remain unsettled will be taken care of by the multilateral negotiations or through other channels.
Moreover, with Assad's acceptance to resume negotiations with Israel without having guaranteed that the latter will evacuate the entire Golan, future Syrian-Israeli negotiations will become divided into two stages: a preliminary stage where principles will be established, and a second stage where these principles will be implemented. In the new round of negotiations, Israel is requiring that a 'framework agreement' be agreed upon, a proposal categorically rejected by the Syrian side which sees it as a manoeuvre to bypass Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and also the so-called 'Rabin Legacy', according to which the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin committed himself, on 3 August 1993, to then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher that Israel would withdraw from the whole of Golan, a pledge that was confirmed by Clinton in a message he sent to Assad in June 1995.
Thus, Syria too will have been dragged into a 'step-by-step' procedure that would cancel the edge it had acquired thanks to its former 'all or-nothing' approach. For the Palestinians, it is understandable that they adopt such an approach given that they did not originally have a state of their own and actually refused a state extending only to part of historical Palestine in line with the UN 1947 Partition Plan. On the other hand, because Syria's sovereign rights over the Golan cannot be challenged, Syria can uphold the principle sanctioned by Resolution 242 of 'land-for-pace', of the total restitution of the Golan in exchange for total peace. A 'framework agreement' would take Syria into negotiating the details of the counterpart for total withdrawal before the latter is acknowledged. Why should it accept such a procedure?
Now, with both the Palestinians and the Syrians threatened by a 'step-by-step' approach that could ultimately finish up with peace being announced and becoming the frame of reference without many of the key issues (Jerusalem, the settlements, borders, refugees, etc.) being resolved, both the Syrian and Palestinian negotiators have a common interest in opposing piecemeal arrangements and upholding the 'all-or-nothing' approach that has acquired still greater clout with Clinton's keenness to declare an overall agreement within months. Meanwhile, however, a meeting between Assad and Barak is more likely than a meeting between Assad and Arafat. This alone is enough to abort all the cards the Arab negotiators could eventually bring together.
