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Boycott lifted, France hosts Syrian leader

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is coming in from the cold with a red-carpet reception in Paris yesterday that could lead to new openings across the Middle East.

Assad, still shunned by the US as a backer of terrorists and a close ally of Iran, had been boycotted in France and cold-shouldered by the EU since the 2005 assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, in a bombing that was widely blamed on Syria.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, is meeting Assad at the Elysee Palace before tomorrow’s founding summit of the Mediterranean Union, a new grouping linking the EU with 13 countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Israel. The Syrian leader will stay on for tomorrow’s Bastille Day celebrations — and will face exiles protesting about human rights abuses and lack of freedoms.

Sarkozy’s shift on Syria reflects the constructive role Assad is deemed to have played in reaching May’s Doha agreement ending the impasse in Lebanon between his ally Hezbollah and the Western-backed Beirut government, as well as the re-launch of peace talks with Israel.

Israel had hoped for a symbolic handshake between Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert and Assad. That would be sensational but seems unlikely. Still, it will be a first to have these long-standing enemies at the same table, though seated well apart.

Syria and Israel negotiated for several years in the 1990s but failed to reached agreement over the Golan Heights, occupied since the 1967 war. New talks, mediated by Turkey, began after Israel bombed what the US has said was a nuclear reactor built by North Korea in Syria. Israel hopes to weaken Syria’s strategic alliance with Iran and its support for Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas.

Assad has insisted he will not abandon these relationships. Assad’s rehabilitation in France raises questions about the UN tribunal set up to investigate the Hariri killing. The UN says it is “irreversible” but the Lebanese suspect justice could be sacrificed at the altar of realpolitik.

Commentators argue that Assad has done well considering he has given so little away.

“Syria is about to regain its good name without having to ditch Iran or water down its policies,” said Salama Salama, a columnist with Egypt’s al-Ahram.

Sarkozy’s invitation to Assad was controversial in France, where former president Jacques Chirac was affronted by the killing of Hariri, a close friend. Sarkozy justified it by the “much more constructive role” Syria is now playing in Lebanon. Assad also sent a deputy foreign minister to last November’s Annapolis peace talks in the US.

But the US remains suspicious, citing Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the movement of fighters from Syria into Iraq. The US has banned the export of some goods and frozen Syrian assets, only this week targeting officials engaged in “public corruption.”

Damascus may find rapprochement with Europe takes time. But there is no mistaking its sense of triumph so far.
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