Another boost for Syria

tauringhuang.

Aug 18th 2008
From the Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire

A string of diplomatic successes for Syria's government


The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has been on a diplomatic roll since his triumphant appearance in Paris on Bastille Day. He has had further opportunities to display his statesmanship this month with visits to Iran and Turkey, and a visit by Lebanon's new president, Michel Suleiman, on August 13th and 14th was crowned with the announcement of a widely applauded agreement to establish diplomatic relations. Next week Mr Assad is off to the Black Sea resort of Sochi for talks with the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and in early September he is to host the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who only nine months ago declared that he had severed contacts with the Syrian regime.

Give a little…
The main thrust of Mr Assad's diplomacy has been to convince the West that it has a better chance of achieving the goals of peace, stability and security in the Middle East through engaging with Syria than through trying to put pressure on Syria to break its long-standing alliances with Iran and Hizbullah. Syria's critics maintain that Mr Assad's means of getting this message across has entailed combining the role of arsonist and firefighter—creating problems such as the prolonged constitutional crisis in Lebanon and then using its influence to engineer solutions, for which it is happy to claim credit.

Mr Sarkozy, for one, has chosen to overlook past transgressions and to concentrate on positive outcomes—the election of Mr Suleiman; the Damascus agreement on Syrian-Lebanese bilateral relations; the indirect peace talks between Syria and Israel; the Hamas ceasefire in Gaza; improved security in Iraq; and Mr Assad's agreement to act as a channel of communication to the Iranian leadership. However, the extent of Syria's actual contribution to achieving these outcomes is open to question, and the suspicion remains that Mr Assad's objective is to re-establish Syria's hegemony over Lebanon, albeit in a different form from the past, while bolstering external supports to the Syrian economy through signing the Association Agreement with the EU (which has lain dormant since it was initialled four years ago) and persuading the US to lift its sanctions.

Lebanon limits
The agreement announced at the end of Mr Suleiman's visit had six points, including the plan for exchanging ambassadors, which is likely to be put into effect relatively quickly. The other points cover border delineation, border security, missing persons (from both sides), review of existing accords, and promotion of trade and other economic ties. The agreement represents a significant concession from Mr Assad, inasmuch as Syria has been reluctant to confer such formal recognition on Lebanon's sovereignty and independence owing to long-standing grievances over the way in which the two countries were established in their current form after the First World War.

However, Syria was quick to clarify a number of aspects of the agreement, casting some doubt on the extent of Mr Assad's actual concessions. The Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Muallim, said that the Shebaa Farms, an Israeli-occupied enclave on the western flank of the Golan Heights, would be excluded from the border delineation discussions. After Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, the Lebanese government, with Syria's rhetorical backing, laid claim to the Shebaa Farms, and Israel's continued presence there has been used ever since by Hizbullah as justification for maintaining its weapons in the cause of resistance to occupation. The UN has deemed the enclave to be part of Syrian territory occupied by Israel in 1967. Syria has thus far refused to cede the territory formally to Lebanon. To do so would be to undermine Hizbullah's resistance claim.

Mr Muallim also made a distinction between Syrian and Lebanese citizens who had gone missing during the 29-year period when Syrian troops were deployed in Lebanon and between people who had been convicted of offences. Lebanese human rights groups have recently stepped up their campaign to ascertain the fate of several hundred Lebanese who disappeared after being picked up by Syrian security services. Syria has responded by claiming that many of these people are common criminals, and that up to 700 Syrians are unaccounted for in Lebanon. Mr Muallim also cast doubt on the likelihood of a formal visit to Lebanon by Mr Assad in the near future, noting that certain unspecified conditions would need to be met before this could happen. He also doused speculation that the exchange of ambassadors would result in the disbandment of the joint commission that currently deals with bilateral issues and which was constituted at a time when Syria was in control of Lebanese security affairs.

Noises off
In a reminder of the combustible nature of Lebanese politics, on the morning of Mr Suleiman's visit to Damascus a powerful explosion was set off in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, killing 15 people, including nine Lebanese soldiers travelling in a bus, which appeared to have been the target of the bomb. The incident followed several weeks of intermittent clashes between rival militias from the Sunni and Alawi communities in the city. Variants of such clashes have occurred at regular intervals in Tripoli over the past 30 years, and have often reflected wider political machinations. The bomb attack could mark a resurgence of activity by the extreme Islamist Fatah al-Islam group that fought a three-month war with the Lebanese army in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp outside Tripoli last year. However, it has also been suggested that the attack may have been intended to draw the Lebanese army into an assault on radical Sunni Islamist groups in Tripoli, which would be likely to exacerbate divisions within the wider Sunni community. The ultimate purpose of such destabilising activity would be to ensure that the Sunni-led anti-Syrian front, which holds the majority of seats in parliament, loses the general election scheduled to take place in mid-2009.