Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 26, 1993 TAG: 9309260024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED BLANCHE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NICOSIA, CYPRUS LENGTH: Medium
He is under intense pressure from the United States - as demonstrated by President Clinton's recent phone calls to him - to endorse Yasser Arafat's pact with Israel and to cut a deal with Israel over the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war. Assad, bitter at Arafat for going behind his back for a go-it-alone deal, is showing no sign of bending.
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Saturday that it was up to Syria to break the deadlock in the countries' peace talks.
"The time has come for the Arab states to be on the giving side," he told Israel television. "They are ashamed to meet with us, they are hiding from us, they want a hidden peace, and we find that unacceptable."
Peres was scheduled to leave later Saturday to attend the U.N. General Assembly.
Asked if he would seek a meeting in New York with Syria's foreign minister, Peres said: "No one has to do me any favors and I'm not going to make any efforts."
Israel's pact with the PLO and Jordan's willingness to be next deprive Damascus of the leverage it hoped to gain from a united Arab front. But without Syria's participation in a peace settlement, Lebanon will stay out, rendering any deal Jordan makes inherently unstable.
Assad apparently intends to charge as high a price as he can for boarding the peace bandwagon.
His room for maneuvering has been severely constricted in the last three years, principally by the collapse of the Soviet Union. But he still holds some high cards.
By controlling radical terrorist groups and by its alliance with Iran, a staunch opponent of the peace process, Syria retains the potential for disruption.
Patrick Seale, Assad's British biographer and an expert of Syrian affairs, said Assad "suspects that Israel made peace with an enfeebled PLO in order to isolate Syria, undermine its negotiating position and tilt the regional balance of power still further in its own favor.
"What Assad wants is an Israeli commitment to evacuate the Golan, not another American guarantee of Israel's security."
Damascus has neither denounced the PLO-Israel accord nor endorsed it, but Assad told Cairo's Al-Akhbar daily last week: "No one but Israel has gained from this. . . . The agreement kept everything in Israel's hands."
Assad has allowed Syria-based radical Palestinian factions to openly challenge the pact.
If his strategy is to keep all options open until Israel signals its readiness to withdraw from the Golan, he may have to a wait a long time.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, with a razor-thin parliamentary majority, says he cannot move too quickly on a deal with Syria after stunning Israelis with his pact with the PLO.
Nissim Zvilli, secretary-general of the ruling Labor Party, acknowledged Sept. 7 that an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan, where there are some 20,000 Jewish settlers, could stir such fierce opposition in Israel that it "might endanger the whole peace process."
Assad's criticism of Arafat for settling for so little after 46 years of struggle indicates he is in no mood to compromise.
Israeli analyst Ze'ev Shiff noted his country's military development and Clinton's commitment to maintaining its "qualitative superiority" does nothing to discourage Syria's own arms buildup.
"Though Israel . . . keeps reiterating its desire for peace, it is arming itself to the teeth as if war was about to break out," Schiff wrote recently.
Assad has internal problems too.
Peace would strip his minority Alawite Muslim regime of one if its main pillars - war with Israel - and open the door to political reforms that would weaken his iron grip on power.
In addition, the 62-year-old Assad suffered a heart attack in 1983 and is reported to have had another in January. He has no known chosen successor, stirring uncertainty about what would happen if he passes from the scene.
by CNB