Clinton to meet Assad in Geneva

By Kesava Menon

MANAMA (BAHRAIN), MARCH 20. The news that the U.S. President, Mr. Bill Clinton, will meet his Syrian counterpart, Mr. Hafez al Assad, in Geneva while returning from the Indian sub-continent has raised the chances of a real breakthrough in the Syria-Israel track of the West Asian negotiations. Since the two Presidents could hardly have decided to meet, substantial ground had already been covered by officials. A perusal of the working paper drawn up by U.S. officials at the end of the last round of Syria-Israel talks in January also indicates that the differences between the two sides are not so wide as their rhetoric since then would suggest.

Mr. Clinton announced in Dhaka today that he would meet Mr. Assad in Geneva. Other details from his press conference were not available, but there is no item of greater importance in the plate of discussions between the U.S. and Syria than the revival of the West Asia negotiations. Talks between Syria and Israel got off to a promising start last December after a gap of over three years but came to a standstill after the second round in January. Syria had refused to get back to the negotiating table unless Israel firmed up a promise to return the Golan Heights in its entirety. Israel insisted that Syria must clearly set out what it was prepared to give in terms of security and normalisation before the territorial issue could be worked out.

At the end of the last round of talks the U.S., playing its mediator's role, had drawn up a document in the form of a draft treaty. This document recorded the positions taken by Syria and Israel on various details of the differences between them.

From the document, it was possible to discern where the two sides were in agreement or close to it and where their differences were still considerably wide. It appeared from the document that Syria was willing to meet Israel's demands on normalisation and water issues almost in their entirety and was also flexible on the security issues. For its part, Israel appeared to have dropped a mention of its hardest position on the territorial (i.e. Golan Heights) issue but without going very far towards meeting the Syrian demand that the border in this sector should be along the lines it was on June 4, 1967.

The leakage of the document in the Israeli paper Haaretz preceded a sudden hardening of the Syrian position on the negotiations as a whole. They insisted that they would not return to the negotiating table unless Israel gave them a written promise to withdraw to the 1967 lines or at least deposited such a promise with the U.S. Israel has not given such a promise as yet but its Prime Minister, Mr. Ehud Barak, has given several indications that a return to the 1967 lines is not absent from his mind. He has declared that four of his predecessors were prepared to return the Golan in its entirety and indicated that his mentor, Yitzhak Rabin, had indeed deposited such a promise with the U.S.

The news about the Clinton-Assad meeting could indicate that the U.S. has been able to nudge Mr. Barak a little further towards a public acceptance of the 1967 line. Just yesterday, the Syrian Defence Minister, Mr. Mustafa Tlas, went out of his way to praise the huge and sustained effort that the U.S. had put in to get some movement on the Syria-Israel talks. In the invitation for a meeting with Mr. Clinton, the Syrian President has also got some cover for the embarrassment caused by the leakage of the working document in which Syria appeared to have made more concessions than Israel.

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Section  : International
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