Category: Syria

Text of interview with Bushra Kanafani

Interview with Ms. Bushra Kanafani, Director of the Foreign Media
Department at the Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs

Conducted for Just World News by Helena
Cobban, Jan. 15, 2008.

Q:  I’d like to
ask your views about the recent Annapolis conference.  What
persuaded Syria to take part, and how do you view the outcome?

A:  The question
of Golan is a national priority for us as Syrians– the people and the
government.  It is wrong for any international conference on the
Arab-Israeli issue to ignore Golan.  Golan needs to be on the
agenda.  That was why we went.  We agreed that the
Palestinian question could have priority.  But at least Golan
should be on the agenda, even if it is not given equal prominence.

Right now, we are not sure about the status of the Syrian-Israeli track
in the negotiations.  We still see no sign of willingness from
Israel or the United States– at this point– to resume the Syrian
track of negotiations.

Q:  How about the
position of the other members of the ‘Quartet’?

A: The Russians have
talked about holding a follow-on international conference in Moscow,
but they have announced no decision yet– perhaps because there are
still so many difficulties.

The US administration is stressing the Palestinian track for their own internal reasons.

If there is a Moscow conference, its content is still unknown.  So
far we have no reason to think there will be such a conference. 
If there is one, we would go– for the same reason we went to
Annapolis: to make sure that the Golan question is on the agenda.

Q:  Do you have
any reason for new hope regarding achievements on the Palestinian track
since Annapolis?

A: Unfortunately
not.  There is nothing to indicate that there is any hope…

Continue reading “Text of interview with Bushra Kanafani”

Syria’s policy, post-Annapolis

The director of the Syrian Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Press Department
yesterday expressed disappointment with the outcome of the Arab-Israeli
peace conference held in Annapolis, Maryland, in late November. Syria
had sent its deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mikdad, to participate in
the conference.  But the Foreign Press department head, Ms. Bushra
Kanafani, told me in an exclusive interview yesterday that she was not sure where the process launched at Annapolis
was now headed. 

Ms. Kanafani expressed pessimism that the Palestinian-Israeli
negotiating track that was re-launched there was headed for success.
“As we see it” she said, “the priority for Palestinians is not in these
peace talks
but to make a reconciliation among the Palestinians themselves.”

At the time of Annapolis, Syria had scrapped plans to host a “summit
conference” involving Hamas and many other anti-Fateh Palestinian
movements.  That conference has now been rescheduled for January
23-25.  Ms. Kanafani was at pains to point out, though, that “its
aim is to rebuild Palestinian national unity…  Mr. Abbas has
been invited.”

Regarding the Syrian-Israeli track, she expressed no expectation that
anything would be happening in it any time soon.  A follow-up
session that the Russians– who are members of the US-led “Quartet”,
along with the UN and the EU– had considered holding in Moscow in
mid-January has not eventualized, and there are no other current
prospects for any activity on the Syrian-Israeli track.

At the time of the Annapolis talks, government leaders and
pro-government media in Tehran openly criticized the decision of the
Syriuan government– a long-time Tehran ally– to participate. 
Several analysts in the west meanwhile expressed the hope that
including Syria in the Annapolis process could succeed in “flipping”
Syria away from its relationship with Tehran.  But despite
those  Iranian criticisms of Damascus in November, that seems not
to have happened.  Ms. Kanafani noted in the interview that
throughout the whole period in the 1990s when Syria was actively
involved in peace negotiations with Israel, Damascus’s ties with Iran
were never broken, and she indicated she saw no reason for them to
suffer now.

Ms. Kanafani also discussed some intriguing aspects of
Syria’s burgeoning security relationship with the US-installed Iraqi
government.  She expressed Syria’s hope that the Arab League’s
attempt to resolve Lebanon’s lingering government crisis could soon be
successful.  She discussed Syria’s current views of its
relationships with Turkey (good) and Saudi Arabia (not so good.) 
She also expressed a view of the importance that Syria sees for the US
role in the peace process that would be surprising to those Americans
who consider Syria an implacable foe of US interests and influence in
the Middle East.

Less than two miles away from Ms. Kanafani’s office in the Foreign
Ministry, hundreds of Iraqi refugees were lined up in a large, well-run
reception facility the Syrian Red Crescent Society (SRCS) runs to
process their claims for the food boxes and other support the SRCS has
been giving to then regularly.  Large numbers of Iraqis– perhaps
more than one million– have found refuge in Syria from the turmoil and
sectarian killing that has plagued their homeland over the past three
years. Syria has also hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees from
Palestine for 60 years now, and in summer it 2006 hosted half a
million refugees from Israel’s assault on Lebanon.  The violence,
instability, and suffering in these neighboring Arab countries feels
very real indeed in Syria.

The text of Ms. Kanafani’s interview will follow. It is now here.

Syria, Annapolis, and after

The winter weather is cold, bright, and beautiful here in
Damascus.  On Thursday night there was a huge public
firework display, launched from most of the length of the
restaurant-studded road that runs along near the top of the massive
mountain that shlters Damascus from the northwest, Jebel
Kassioun.  The fireworks were celebrating the beginning of the
year during
which Damascus has been designated– by the Arab League– to be the
“Arab Cultural Capital”.

The diplomatic arena that the government here is trying to navigate
is decidedly less sparkling. Back in late November President Bashar al-Asad made a
last-minute decision that
Syria (though not he personally) would participate in the Israeli-Arab
“summit” meeting that President Bush convened in
Annapolis.  That was not an easy decision, coming after many years
of
active US hostility to Syria and seven years of intentional US
stonewalling on Syria’s
repeated requests for the resumption of Syrian-Israeli peace
negotiations.  Indeed, on several occasions over recent years,
when
high-level figures in the Israeli government started discussing
the possibility of resuming the negotiations on this track, those
exploratory feelers were nipped smartly in the bud by the Bush
administration– particularly by Bush’s NSC person running Middle East
affairs, the notorious Elliott Abrams, and by people in VP Dick
Cheney’s office.

Syria’s decision to go to Annapolis was also a tough one because it was
strongly opposed by the Iranians, who have been key allies of Syria
ever since the 1978 Islamic Revolution in Iran. And it was politically
quite controversial at home in Syria, too, given the depth of
anti-American feeling here.

But Asad made the decision to take part, in line with his (and before
him, his father’s) longheld diplomatic position of strong commitment to
seeking a negotiated settlement to the 60-year state of war with
Israel, including crucially Israel’s complete withdrawal from the
portions of sovereign Syria that it has occupied since 1967.

Continue reading “Syria, Annapolis, and after”

Golan, the human story

Much of the western media follows the Israeli-initiated habit of thinking and speaking about the issue of Golan only in (very threatening) strategic terms. But Golan is also– like the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza– a frequently heart-rending human story, one of dispossession, exile, oppression, and the splitting-up of families.
You can read a lot about the human dimension of Golan in Golan Days, a series of five articles that I published in Arabic in al-Hayat in 1998. They were the result of research/reporting trips I had made to Israel, occupied Golan, and Syria earlier that year.
Note that Israel unilaterally annexed Golan in 1981. But that act of Anschluss was quite illegal under international law. During the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of the early and mid-1990s, Israeli premiers Rabin and Peres promised the U.S. that, if they could win the security, economic, and political measures they desired from Syria, then Israel would be ready to withdraw from the whole of the Golan.Those negotiations failed after that Israeli offer was abruptly pulled off the table by Ehud Barak in 2000.
Meanwhile, throughout and since the 1990s Israel’s policy of implanting settlers on the broad, fertile expanses of Golan’s land has continued, though not with the fervor and frenzy of the settlement project in the West Bank. In 2006, there were 18,105 settlers on Golan, according to this table from the Foundation for Middle East Peace (which is an excellent source on the Israel’s settlement project in the West Bank, too.)
Before Israel occupied Golan in 1967, there was a population of around 130,000 Syrians in the area, mainly farmers. This 2000 map (PDF) from FMEP shows you the ghosts of the villages and towns that they left behind them– the empty grey circles and squares there. Tragically, in the fighting of 1967, nearly the whole of the indigenous Syrian population of Golan fled or was forced out. Their national army, which had previously held the whole of the Golan plateau, had suffered a humiliating rout.
Only a small number remained– mainly followers of the Druze religion, who lived in winding villages clinging to the slopes of Jebel al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon). You can see their five villages in grey near the top of the map. Nowadays, they have, I think, around the same population as that of the Israeli settlements– but living under very different circumstances from the land-pampered settlers. You can read a little about the lives of the Golan Syrians who still live in their family’s ancestral homes, in Parts 1 and 2 of my Golan days series.
Also, you should go look at the two installments of an English Al-Jazeera documentary called Across the Shouting Valley, that are available on YouTube here and here. They very movingly portray the human and many other dimensions of the Golan issue. They have some interesting interviews with settlers; and they have many beautiful shots of the Golan landscape, too.
(Great job, Al-Jazeera!)
The second installment there has a short interview with an Israeli settler called Effie Eitam who is also a leader of one of Israel’s rightwing parties. But in general, the political profile of most of the settlers in Golan is significantly different from that of the West Bank settlers. For starters, Golan is not generally considered by most Jews to be part of the historic “Land of Israel”. So there is very little of that intense, religio-nationalist fervor that marks the activities of many West bank settlers. Secondly, putting settlements on the Golan was overwhelmingly a project of Labour governments in Israel, who put them there for reasons that– at the time, in the late 1960s– were much more justifiably “for security reasons” than most of the settlements in the west Bank. (Since then, of course, the development of long-distance missiles means that possession of the high ground in Golan is no longer the strategic “ace in the hole” that it once was.)
But the result is that the 18,000 Golan settlers are much more likely to be long-time Labour supporters than most of the West Bank settlers. And though many of their most vocal community leaders are staunchly on the hawkish, pro-territorial expansion wing of Labour, there are many others who are not– including a very interesting farmer called Yigal Kipnis whom I met and talked to back in 1998, as you can see in Part 4 of the series.
Read in particular, his views on the possibility of Israel withdrawing in the context of a peace treaty:

    “We need to remember that we came here in 1967 to protect our own settlements inside Israel, and to protect our water rights — not to take any extra land. Our presence here was and is still intended to provide that protection. But if we have a peace agreement with Syria, the situation would be quite different — provided those things were protected.”

(Yigal still lives in the settlement of Maale Gamla. He and I kept in touch in a rough fashion after that. Some time later he enrolled in a Ph.D program in Haifa University– and wrote his whole thesis there on the Israeli political aspects of the Golan issue. I met him again recently in Washington DC. I want to help him get some of his work made available in English– it seems like fascinating stuff!)
Anyway, it has long mystified me why the Syrians have not done more to explain some of the human dimensions of the Golan issue, which are often just as heart-rending as all those “Let y people go!” campaigns that US Jewish organizations ran in favor the Soviet Jews back in the 1980s. Instead, the Syrians have allowed the Israeli narrative of Golan as “simply a strategic question– and an Israelo-centric one, at that” to dominate all discussion of the Golan issue in the west. Human-interest-centered stories about political issues may seem trite. But still, they do have a great power to help frame the way that people think about the political issues involved… But from the way Golan is presented in the western media, you’d think that it is just a single, steep and potentially very threatening strategic escarpment and has no human dimension at all. Not true!
(You could call this the “vertical” view of Golan– as opposed to a “horizontal” view that takes into account the fact that there’s a huge expanse of lovely, fertile land up there; and that there are people from both nationalities who have histories, lives, and claims there.)
I guess in my wondering– and discussing with a few Syrian friends– why the Syrian government has not done more to “humanize” the issue, I concluded that could perhaps be explained by two factors: (1) a lingering sense of shame about the extent and seriousness of the collapse that the national army’s whole network of positions in Golan experienced in 1967, and (2) a reluctance to do too much to empower and/or mobilize the Golani Syrians within the national political system.
By some counts, the “nazeheen” (displaced persons) from Golan and their descendants now number more than a quarter million. And of course, under international law (and human logic) they have every right to be able to return to their ancestral homes and properties there.
Unlike the Palestinians displaced in 1948 and 1967, the Syrian nazeheen did have a government that provided them with the basic services they needed to survive and to get a fairly good start in life: basic housing, health, and education services. And like many displaced persons throughout history they have actually, in general, done pretty well in the Syrian economy and professions, and in the Syrian migrant-labor community in the Gulf. But Syria’s Baathist government is chronically wary of seeing any auto-mobilization of sub-groups within the society, so maybe its failure to present the wrenching human dramas of the split and dispossessed families more effectively to the outside world has something to do with that, too.
So if the Syrian-Israeli negotiations do get resumed in earnest in the days and weeks ahead, I’ll probably try to follow up on some of these human interest stories.

Golan: Getting it straight

Whoa there, AP! The generally well-regarded US newswire is putting out an extremely tendentious little “fact-box” today, on the situation in the Israeli-occupied Golan. Tendentious and, need I add, one-sided.
For example, here:

    • LOCATION: Plateau at southwestern corner of Syria overlooking Sea of Galilee and northern Israel.

Note to AP: The occupied Golan also overlooks a huge stretch of Syria, including the national capital, Damascus. And from the top of Jebel al-Sheikh, the area’s highest mountain– known by the Israelis as Mount Hermon– Israel’s military is also currently able to dominate a large chunk of Lebanon, too.
Guess it depends on whether we have an Israelo-centric view of the Middle East, or not?
Then, the AP has this:

    • HISTORY: Syrian soldiers shelled northern Israel from the Golan Heights between 1948 and 1967. Israel captured the territory in 1967 Mideast war. Israel annexed it in 1981, though no country recognized that.

The last two sentences there are correct. The rest of the graf is unbelievably one-sided. Yes, Syrian soldiers used Golan between 1948 to shell Israeli forces– but those forces were busy consolidating Israel’s military control over areas to the north of the Sea of Galilee that were supposed to have been completely demilitarized under the Armistice Agreement of 1949. UN records from the 1949-1967 period make clear there were infractions from both sides of the Israel-Syria Armistice Line– but more from the Israeli side than from the Syrian side.
Finally, the AP box gives us this:

    • DISPUTE: In 2000, Israel-Syria peace talks broke down. Israel offered to withdraw from all the Golan Heights down to the international border in exchange for full peace. Syria insisted on recovering land across the border that it captured in 1948, including the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

This is simply not true. At Geneva, Ehud Barak notably did not agree to withdraw to the international border, which according to the maps drawn between Syria and Mandate Palestine ran either along the water-line along the northeast quadrant of the Sea of Galilee, (as in this recent BBC map or this CIA map), or in some versions through the Sea of Galilee roughly at the twelve o’clock and three o’clock lines. Anyway, in those days Syria had certain valuable rights as a littoral (coast-line) power on the SoG, including rights to fish, undertake water-borne transport on it, maintain small ports, etc.
In 1994, during the heart of the negotiations that Syria and Israel maintained from 1991 thru 1996, Israeli PM Rabin told the American mediators that in return for an array of other security measures, demilitarization, normalization of relations, economic links etc, he would be prepared to withdraw Israel’s forces to the international border; and in the negotiations that continued between then and the defeat of his successor, Shimon Peres, at the Israeli polls in spring 1996, that was the basis on which the negotiations continued. (In Israel, it became known as the “Rabin deposit.”) During marathon sessions at the Wye Plantation in Maryland in January 1996, the two sides came very close to concluding all the elements of a final peace agreement.
Peres’s success, Bibi Netanyahu, was not interested in proceeding with those talks. The talks resumed only some months after Ehud Barak was elected in 1999. But when he inveigled Bill Clinton into presenting his “final, final offer” to Syrian president Hafez al-Asad in May 2000, the extent of the promised Israeli withdrawal had mysteriously (or not) shrunk from the Rabin Deposit. Now, Barak insisted on Israel maintaining control off a strip some 100 or so metres wide around the whole of the SoG coast-line. Not surprisingly, Asad demurred. Less than a month later he had died of a heart attack…. and a few months after that, as we know, the Palestinians’ second intifada started, and then Barak lost at the polls to Ariel Sharon.
So, friends at AP: Please let’s not keep that very tendentious, and indeed inaccurate, listing of “facts” up on your newswire. The way you present this material matters. It matters both to the way you are viewed around the world– whether as fair-minded and accurate, or neither of those things. And it matters because your material affects the way many Americans (and perhaps other people elsewhere) think about these issues. If you want to make it look like the Syrians have always been wrong and the Israelis blameless, that matters.
By the way, since the Golan issue is now going to be discussed at Annapolis, people might want to take a look at this series of articles I published in Al-Hayat in 1998, on the human geography of the area.
Also, since I see that my 2000 book on the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of 1991-96 is now listed by the publisher, the US Institute of Peace, as out-of-print, you might want to get a used one from Amazon.
I think I’ll contact USIP and see if we can maybe have them put the final chapter of the book up on the web… (Note to certain carping commenters here: I have never had a royalty agreement with USIP for sales of this book, since they had helped fund some of the research for it. So when I mention the book here, it is certainly not from a desire to increase my earnings.)

Pelosi and Damascus, part 2

When we left Nancy Pelosi earlier this week she was still in Damascus. Yesterday, she was in Saudi Arabia. (She said she raised with her Saudi governmental hosts the Kingdom’s lack of any female political figures.)
But the controversy continued to swirl around her visit to Damascus. When she was there she announced she had delivered a message to Pres. Bashar al-Asad from Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, whom she’d met with the day before, to the effect that Israel “was ready to engage in peace talks” with Syria. She also announced that she had found Asad ready to resume the peace talks, as well.
Olmert immediately undercut her, arranging for a message to be posted on his website saying that there was no way Israel could talk with Syria until Syria had met several preconditions including ending its support for what Israel calls terrorism, etc etc.
Was this a big humiliation for Pelosi? The WaPo editorial writers evidently thought it was (or, that it should be seen in that way.) They tried to rub in this humiliation by penning an editorial viciously critical of her, under the headline Pratfall in Damascus.
It declared,

    any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush’s military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

One big problem: The editorial writers there seemed to have taken completely at face value Olmert’s claim that Pelosi had fabricated the content of the message he wanted to send to Damascus, and to have completely discounted her claim that she did not.
Why on earth would the editorial writers of the Washington Post choose to take the word of a foreign politician over that of the duly elected Speaker of the US House of Representatives?. (Also, why should they criticize her for seeking to lead the House of Representatives in exercising its completely constitutional power of the purse?)
There are many possible explanations of what happened re the “Pelosi message”. One is that she is a careful politician and proven good listener who conveyed exactly the message she had been asked to convey. The other is the WaPo/Olmert story that she dangerously bungled this small piece of discreet international communication… Then, of course, there is also the hand of the Bushites, who as we saw earlier were apoplectic that Pelosi should even dare to visit Syria at all.
Here are some possibilities worth considering:

    — Perhaps Olmert deliberately set Pelosi up from the get-go, as a presumed favor to his equally embattled buddy George Bush, or
    –Perhaps Olmert didn’t set her up beforehand; but after sher had made her (interesting but quite evidently non-operational) comments in Damascus about her various diplomatic contacts until then, the outraged Bushites called Olmert and asked him to issue the retraction? (This, remember, after several seemingly credible reports emerged late last summer that the White House intervened during the 33-day war in Lebanon to prevent Olmert from sending out peace feelers to Damascus…)

Anyway, whatever the truth of the back-story there, one thing seems fairly clear: Olmert has certainly not enhanced the way that this very experienced and politically significant Speaker we now have in Washington will view him in the future. And nor, for what it is worth, has the WaPo editorial board.

Pelosi’s spring break in Syria

(This post has been cross-posted to ‘The Notion’.)
If it’s spring break in Washington, then that must be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi– accompanied by, my goodness, the perpetually pro-Israeli Tom Lantos!– heading for Syria this week.
Pelosi’s delegation is currently in Lebanon. AP’s Zeina Karam writes there that the Speaker,

    said she thinks it’s a good idea to “establish facts, to hopefully build the confidence” between the U.S. and Syria.
    “We have no illusions, but we have great hope,” she said.
    … Pelosi, who is leading a congressional delegation on a fact-finding tour of the Middle East, said she would speak to the Syrians about Iraq, their role in the fight against terrorism, their support for militant groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas — whose exiled leaders live in Damascus — as well their influence in Lebanon.

And guess who’s waxing apoplectic about this? Yes, that would be Dana Perino, the fill-in for Tony Snow as White House spokesperson. Karam’s piece notes that Perino said,

    “We ask that people not go on these trips… We discourage it. Full stop.” [Plus, it] “sends the wrong message to have high-level U.S. officials going there (to Syria) to have photo opportunities that Assad then exploits.”

Oops! Then I guess having the Bush administration’s very own Assistant Secretary of State for Refugee Affairs Ellen Sauerbrey go to Syria last month was all a terrible mistake then?
Even Israel’s Acting President, Dalia Itzik, was much more moderate than Perino. She told Pelosi yesterday that,

    “Your expected visit to Damascus has naturally touched off a political debate in your country, and of course, here… I believe in your worthy intentions. Perhaps a step, seen as unpopular at this stage … will clarify to the Syrian people and leadership they must abandon the axis of evil (and) stop supporting terrorism and giving shelter to (terrorist) headquarters.”

But the main thing Washington needs to talk to Syria about right now is Iraq. And this strand of the American-Syrian diplomatic dance is quite complex, and in some ways very counter-intuitive. Did you think that it was the Syrians and their Iranian allies who want US troops out of Iraq and the stubborn old Bush administration that wants them to stay?
To a great degree you’d be wrong, on both counts. Here in London a couple of weeks ago my friend the veteran strategic analyst Hussein Agha told me (and on reflection, I quite agree) that, for now, all of Iraq’s neighbors prefer that US troops stay tied down inside Iraq, rather than withdraw. The gist of what Agha said was that for some of those neighboring countries– and this definitely includes both Syria along with Iran– the status quo lessens the likelihood of US attacks against them. Meanwhile for others of the neighbors (and yes, that includes Syria, once again) it represents a situation strongly preferable to the regional turmoil they fear might follow US withdrawal…
As for the Bush administration– well yes, at the ideological/political level of Bush and his resident “brain”, Dick Cheney, it is quite possible that some of them still believe all that stuff about “staying the course”, the value of the “surge”, etc. But Matthew Dowd, who was a key Bush political advisor during the 2004 election campaign is only one of the former Bush supporters who has now been “mugged by reality”, and has come out as openly critical of the way the Prez has been waging this war… Aas for the serving military, it has been clear for some time that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace has been prepared to quietly push back against the Bushites’ rampant bellophilia… And former commander of the US Army War College Maj.-Gen. (Retd.) Robert H. Scales recently wrote openly in the Washington Times that,

    the current political catfight over withdrawal dates is made moot by the above facts. We’re running out of soldiers faster than we’re running out of warfighting missions. The troops will be coming home soon. There simply are too few to sustain the surge for very much longer…

Since Scales is also a former advisor to Rumsfeld when Rummy was at the Petnagon, I guess that makes him a clear defector from the Bush project in Iraq, too.
Here’s the bottom line though: It is now not only (or perhaps, even, not mainly) the Dems, in Washington, who now want to find the speediest and safest possible exit for the US troops from Iraq. It is also the uniformed military– and also, quite likely, the very low-key Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who seems to see his role overwhlemingly as acting as the “anti-Rumsfeld” in the Penatgon.
But the Syrians, Iranians, and all the rest of Iraq’s neighbors are meanwhile (quietly) quite keen to see the US troops remain in Iraq. I have a little direct evidence of that, myself. When I defied the President’;s injunctions and went to Damascus at the end of February, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Mouallem was adamant during the interview I conducted with him that the US should effect a complete withdrawal of all its forces from Iraq– but when I pressed him to specify the time-period over which he thought this withdrawal should occur, he notably declined my invitation to do that.
So the diplomacy of this US withdrawal from Iraq look set to be very interesting indeed…

West’s relations with Syria starting to thaw

US Assistant Secretary of State for Migration Affairs Ellen Sauerbrey was in Damascus yesterday, discussing the situation of the million-plus Iraqi citizens who have found a temporary refuge there.
The Kuwaiti news agency reported that State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said that,

    Sauerbrey called on Syria to work with the Iraqi government and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) “to provide protection and assistance for refugees from Iraq that are in Syria.”

This hortatory tone sounds particularly inappropriate, given that Syria’s 20 million people and their government have given, on balance, a remarkably warm welcome to the displaced Iraqis who have fled there, while the USA, a very rich country with 15 times Syria’s population has admitted something like 450 Iraqi refugees over the whole of the past four years.
Also, it was the US invasion and occupation of Iraq that sparked the strife that has sent so many millions of Iraqis fleeing. And the US, as occupying power there, still bears the responsibility under international law to assure the protection of the safety of all Iraqis… which they have notably failed to do.
Sauerbrey’s visit is the highest profile visit by any Bush administration official to Syria since the US “recalled” its ambassador from Damascus in the aftermath of the killing of former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri in Beirut in February 2005. There ensued two years of a strong attempt by the Bushites to encircle and isolate the Syrian regime, an attempt that was punctuated by periodic calls from powerful neocons for outright “regime change” in Damascus …
Now, finally, the admninistration has concluded that it needs to start engaging with Damascus, at least to some extent. (On Saturday, Syrian, Iranian, and US representatives all took part in the 12-party regional stabilization meeting held in Baghdad.)
When I interviewed Syrian FM Walid Mouallem in Damascus on February 28, he was modestly optimistic about the prospects of a thaw in US-Syrian relations. (See also the latter two portins of this interview, here and here.)
For his part, Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Shara has seemed a little more cautious than Mouallem. He told reporters in Cairo that

    “This is just a start. And we cannot predict how this start would end but we hope the end and the coming steps will be positive and constructive…
    “Warming relations need deep talks and a long time for mutual doubts to be removed. That is why we should not pin huge importance on what happened in Baghdad, but we must not ignore it either because it has brought the dialogue back.”

In another sign of the slow thaw in Syria’s relations with the west, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, is expected in Damascus any moment now.
Meanwhile, Josh Landis is carrying on his blog the full text of an article that the Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha, recently penned.
Moustapha gives quite a lot of details about various overtures the Syrian government made to Washington, offering to provide security coordination regarding Iraq, but says at least two of these offers– made in March and September 2004– were brusquely rebuffed by the Bushites.
He concludes:

    Syria firmly believes that the only way to achieve progress in Iraq is through the political engagement of all parties, without exception or exclusion. This includes all Iraqi factions, regional neighbors of Iraq, and international players with interest in stabilizing the situation in Iraq. A strategy of consensus and dialogue is the only way forward. Syria can play a constructive role if such a path is adopted.

Let’s hope everyone else can also start to play a constructive role?

Human rights, democracy, the US, and Syria

I spent a few days in Damascus at the end of February, and was able to get a ground-reality view of the effects of the Bush administration’s (former) campaign for the forced ‘democratization’ of Middle Eastern societies on the work of Syrian citizens with long experience struggling for human rights and democracy in their country.
Bottom line: “Very bad indeed.”
That was the verdict rendered on the Bushites’ ‘democratization’ campaign by Danial Saoud, the President of the venerable Committee for the Defence of Human Rights and Democratic Freedoms in Syria (CDF).
Saoud was himself a political prisoner from 1987 through 1999, and has been President of the CDF since August 2006. He was adamant that what Syria’s rights activists need most of all right now is a resolution of their country’s state of war with Israel.
Speaking of Condoleezza Rice he said,

    Her pressure on the regime had a very bad effect for us. Now, for 18-24 months the Americans and Europeans have put a lot of pressure on the regime– but the regime then just pushes harder on us.

Mazen Darwish, who is Saoud’s colleague in the CDF’s three-person Presidential Council, told me,

    Before the US invasion of Iraq, people here in Syria liked us, the human rights activists, and we had significant popular sympathy. But since what happened in Iraq, people here say ‘Look at the results of that!’

Saoud stressed that for Syrians, the question of Israel’s continued occupation of Syria’s Golan region itself constitutes a significant denial of the rights of all the Syrian citizens affected– both those who remain in Golan, living under Israeli military occupation rule there, and those who had fled when Israel occupied Golan in 1967 and have had to live displaced from their homes and farms for the 40 years since then. “Golan is Syrian land, and we have all the rights to get it back,” he said.
In addition, he and the other rights activists I talked with pointed to the fact that the continuing state of war between Syria and Israel has allowed the Syrian regime to keep in place the State of Emergency that was first imposed in the country in 1963. “All these regimes in this area say they are postponing the issue of democracy until after they have solved the issues of Golan and Palestine,” he said.

    So let’s get them solved! Everything should start from this. The people in both Syria and Israel need peace. We need to build a culture of peace in the whole area.
    … The CDF is working hard to build this culture.

Both men pointed out the numerous contradictions and ambiguities in the policy the US has pursued regarding democratization in Syria. Darwish noted that, “When the US had a good relationship with Syria, in 1991, Danial was in prison– and the US didn’t say anything about that.” These two men, and other rights activists I talked with also noted that more recently, even during the Bushites’ big push for ‘democratization’ in Syria in 2004-2005, the Bushites were still happy to benefit from Syria’s torture chambers by sending some suspected Al-Qaeda people there to be tortured. (Canadian-Syrian dual citizen Maher Arar was only the most famous of these victims. In September 2005, Amnesty International published this additional list.)
Over the past year, two processes have been underway in Syria that seem to confirm these activists’ argument that US pressure on the Damascus regime has been detrimental to their cause. Firstly, the rapid deterioration in the US’s power in the region has considerably diminished Washington’s ability to pressure the Syria regime on any issues, and Damascus has become notably stronger and self-confident than it was a year ago. For some evidence of this, see my latest interview with Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, serialized here, here, and here.
Secondly, over the same period, the situation of human rights activists within the country seems to have improved some.
Saoud told me that the number of (secular) political prisoners in the country is now less than 20. Indeed, the day we talked, about 16 Kurdish and student activists who had been held for less than a month had just been released. He said “No-one knows how many Islamist activists are in detention… We don’t hear about them until they come to court.” He said, “They don’t torture people like Anwar al-Bunni or Michel Kilo, or the others who were detained last year for having signed the Beirut-Damascus Declaration.” He indicated, however, that it was very likely that many of the Islamist detainees had been tortured. (Human Rights Watch’s recently released report for 2006 states that in Syria, “Thousands of political prisoners, many of them members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and the Communist Party, remain in detention.)
… Meanwhile, the main factor dominating political developments in Syria as in the rest of the Middle East, is the continued and extremely painful collapse of conditions inside Iraq. Syrians have watched that collapse in horror. Their country has received and given a temporary refuge to more than a million Iraqis (a considerable burden on their nation, equivalent to the US taking in some 17 million refugees within just a couple of years.) And since Iraq’s collapse has occurred under a Washington-advertised rubric of “democratization”, the whole tragedy in Iraq has tended to give the concept a very bad name, and has caused Arabs and Muslims throughout the Middle East to value political stability much, much more than hitherto.
Under those circumstances, it is very moving to still hear people living in Arab countries talking about the need for democracy. But when they do so, they are very eager to distance themselves from the coerciveness inherent in Washington’s recent ‘democratization’ project. And they all– regime supporters and oppositionists, alike–stress the need for moves toward democratization to grow out the local people’s needs and priorities, rather than the geostrategies pursued by distant Washington.

Mouallem interview, part 3 (final)

This
is the third installment of my write-up of the interview I conducted
with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Mouallem in Damascus on February
28.  The first two installments appeared in these two earlier JWN
posts: 1, and 2.  ~HC.

So, I had been asking Mr. Mouallem about the fate of the many settlers
whom Israel has implanted into the occupied Palestinian and Syrian
territories since 1967, and he had been saying, “To make peace you need
a political decision.  The issue is not one of settlers, but their
presence there is used as an excuse
for the lack of political will in Israel”…

I asked again about the question of the settlers, and whether the
presence, now, of nearly 500,000 of them inside the occupied West Bank
(including East Jerusalem) might not make the political question, for
any Israeli government, of effecting a total withdrawal from that
occupied area much more difficult to resolve?

He replied,

You talk about the 500,000 settlers–
but what about the four million Palestinian refugees?  How can the
international community be happy with that dispersal of the
Palestinians from their homes but say it cannot easily think about
relocating 500,000 settlers?  The existence of the settlements
there doesn’t in any way affect the requirements of international law.

Regarding the negotiations over Golan, the issue of the Israeli
settlements there was raised during our negotiations with Israel.  The Israeli
negotiators agreed to remove all those settlers and asked for
compensation for the costs of pulling them out and relocating them.

Whom did they ask this of? I asked.

He replied, “Those who were watching the negotiation”– a clear
reference to the Americans, who were the sole outside
mediators/facilitators of all the bilateral peace negotiations that
Israel held, in parallel, with the Syrians, Palestinians, and
Jordanians in the 1990s.

“If the Israelis had asked us,” Mouallem
added, “we would have countered that request with our own request for
compensation for all the many monetary losses our people suffered as a
result of the occupation of our land.”

However, he noted that that principle of compensation from an outside
party for the costs of relocating Israeli settlers from occupied
territories– a principle that has earlier been applied with respect
both to the settlers Israel withdrew from Sinai in 1982, or from Gaza
in late 2005– could also be applied to settlers being relocated out of
the West Bank in the context of a final Palestinian-Israeli peace.

If a comprehensive peace process is resumed within the coming period, I
asked, did he expect that the Syrians would be able to coordinate more
effectively with the Palestinian negotiators than they had in the
1990s, when Yasser Arafat presided over all aspects of the
Palestinians’ dipliomacy?

Mouallem replied, “I can’t tell, because the Syrian issue is much
easier to resolve than the Palestinian issue.  Between 1991 and
2000 we built the structure of the peace agreement on our trac, and we
achieved about 85 percent of the final agreement.”

What about the recent press reports that, between 2004 and summer
2006, a Syrian-American business executive called Ibrahim Soleiman had
conducted some “track two” diplomacy with a group of well-connected
Israeli private citizens, and had passed a number of significant
messages between the governmental authorities in Israel and Syria in an
attempt to exoplore the possibility of a resumption of the negotiations?

“It was a personal issue,” he told me.  “Ibrahim Soleiman is an
individual who is keen to see peace between Syria and Israel.  But
I have no knowledge of any contacts between him and the Syrian
government.”

Did he have any fears that, if there is a comprehensive
Arab-Israeli peace negotiation, this might make problemns between his
government and Iran?

He replied,

No.  We negotiated
with Israel from 1991 through 2000, and we continued to have good
relations with Iran throughout those years.  Of course, it’s
possible the Iranians were convinced that the Israelis would never
complete the negotiation– that Prime Minister Shamir had been serious
when he later revealed that his intention, when he participated in the
Madrid conference, was simply to tie the Arab side
up in negotiations for a further ten years without arriving at any
final settlement.


I asked how he saw the position of the present Olmert government in
Israel.  He had said earlier he saw it as “weak”– so what did
that portend for the chance of successful negotiations?

I prefer not to look at
individuals but at the movements of public opinion.  The Israelis
lack any leadership that is dedicated to creating a peace culture
inside their society and to preparing public opinion for the era of
peace.  Now, instead, we see a leadership that plants fear in public opinion, and
prepares the public there for another military confrontation.


But had the Syrian leadership, for its part, done much to create a
culture of peace, I asked?

He said,

During the peace
negotiations, and especially during the summit between President Hafez
al-Asad and President Bill Clinton in Geneva in 1994, President Asad
said clearly that ‘Peace is our strategic option’, and spoke about ‘the
peace of the brave.’  Until now, President Bashar al-Asad
considers this to be a fact.


Addressing another aspect of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, I asked how he
saw the more activist role the Saudi monarchy recently started playing
regarding several aspects of regional diplomacy including the negotiation of the Mecca
Agreement concluded in mid-February between Fateh and Hamas.  I
asked whether he considered the Saudis had gone significantly further
in this diplomacy than Washington might have been happy with.

He said merely,

We are happy to see the
Saudis having a dialogue with the representatives of [Lebanese]
Hizbullah, and hosting Hamas and Fateh in Mecca.  We’re happy to
see His Majesty the King supporting the Mecca Agreement, which we are
happy with.  We’re happy, too, to see them hosting an Arab summit
in Riyadh in the near future.  This is the role we should see
Saudi Arabia play, in contributing to increase the stability in the
region.

We’re also happy to see them undertaking a dialogue with Iran.


At the beginning of our meeting– before he told me “So now, you can
ask me anything you like!”– Mouallem had made a quick introductory
statement summing up how he saw his country’s present position. 
“We have passed the period of imposed isolation,” he said, with evident
relief.  “Why it was imposed on us, I still don’t know.”

He continued,

The problem we face is that
the Israelis always try to resolve issues by force, and this has led to
the absence of peace for many decades.  We see that the US policy
has also, similarly, involved a reliance on force– in Iraq, in
Afghanistan, and in this current mobilization against Iran.

We believe that without a political regime in the region [by which I
understood him to mean a coordinated political-diplomatic approach to problem
solving], you can’t resolve issues or find stability.  This has
been demonstrated clearly– in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and
Palestine.  You even need a political regime in the ‘War on
Terror’.

Without a political dialogue with the relevant parties in this region,
the Middle East won’t ever see stability.

Is the current instability seving America’s interrests or the region’s
interests?  It is surely not.

They tried to tell us about some projects they had, like the Greater
Middle East, or the ‘New’ Middle East, or the alliance among ‘moderate’
countries in the Middle East.  But what is their definition of
‘moderate’?  Is it a country that supports an ignorant American
policy on regional issues?

You find many questions along these lines being asked in the streets in
the whole of this region.  Why has the American reputation reached
such an unprecedentedly low level in so many countries in and beyond
the Middle East?

No-one in the administration has yet answered this.


Toward the end of the interview, I returned to the question of the
United States’ current position in the Middle East, including the
status of the campaign it pursued in 2004 and 2005 for democratization
throughout the region; and I asked how he saw Washington’s position now.

He replied,

Nobody in this part of the
world is against democracy.  But still, the people of the region
have our own priorities– and the first priority for us is to
liberate the Golan Heights and end the Arab-Israeli conflict. 
Because this on its own would have profound political, economic, and
social consequences on Syrian life.

We want to see the Middle East stable and secure.  We want to see
Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine all stand up!  This, for any Syrian,
is a priority.  And this will lead to other priorities, like
democratization.

I asked his reaction to reports I had heard that some
officials in the Bush administration, including Deputy National
Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, had indicated that they gave such a
high priority to democratization and regime change in Syria that they
had argued that the present, Baath Party-dominated government in Syria should not be “rewarded”
by being engaged in a peace process that would almost certainly lead to
the return of Golan to Syrian control. 

He said,

If Mr. Abrams said so, this
means that in his lifetime he hates to see peace.

When Israel conquered the Golan, did it do so on behalf of peace and
democratization– or on behalf of conquering and expansion?

You should ask Mr. Abrams if what’s happening in Iraq is
democratization.  The average number of people killed every day in
Iraq is 60 to 70 people.  So many Iraqis are now obliged to choose
between being killed and leaving their country.  And this is
democratization?

People like Mr. Abrams damaged the cause of democratization more than
any others.  Because democracy is an important way to govern a
country– but only if you respect each country’s priorities and needs.


We finished the meeting with some small talk. He and
his key media advisor Bushra Kanafani talked a little about the
dangers they faced during the trip the two of them– and one other
Foreign Ministry official, Ahmed Arnous– had made to Baghdad last
November.

Throughout our whole meeting, Mouallem projected a clear sense of
relief that, in his view, the president whom he serves and the
government of which he is a part had successfully survived a period of
some danger and political uncertainty, and was now prepared to be
somewhat gracious and understanding in the way it deals with the United
States and other western and pro-western powers in the period ahead.

I gathered this same impression of a government and regime that feels a
new (if still not yet complete) sense of self-confidence from
all the other contacts I had during my three-day visit to
Damascus.  Those included contacts with a number of members of the
country’s liberal political opposition.  Indeed, I was struck by
how similar some of the key the arguments– and even the language– I
heard from them was to that I heard from Mouallem.  But I shall
write more about that, later.