Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stole the show on Sunday at a Mediterranean summit in Paris and served notice that Damascus was central to solving problems in the Middle East.
Once banished for his “destabilizing” role in the Middle East, Assad, in a series of meetings over the weekend, resumed diplomatic ties with Lebanon and held indirect talks through Turkey with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
In his big return to the international stage, he helped ensure that French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Union for the Mediterranean summit was not undermined, as many had feared, by feuding among the Middle East neighbors.
Assad also placed himself firmly at the center of future peace moves.
“Syria is an integral part of the solution to Middle East issues,” he said on French TV Sunday. “Any country that wants to resolve the Middle East’s problems must hold talks with Syria.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, remains to be convinced.
“We want to see actions now because enough words have been exchanged,” she told reporters after her talks with the Syrian leader.
Yet after a starring role on Saturday, when he was Sarkozy’s honored guest at the Elysee Palace, Assad had followed up on Sunday with a series of bilateral meetings.
Then, smiling under the dome of Paris’s Grand Palais, the summit venue, he helped launch the Union for the Mediterranean with more than 40 other heads of state and government.
At his Paris hotel, Assad met UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and, for the second time in less than 24 hours, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman.
But his biggest coup was agreeing to establish diplomatic relations with Lebanon, with Damascus and Beirut opening embassies in their respective countries for the first time since independence.
Washington and several European capitals also welcomed the move.
“It’s very positive, it’s a step that is going to help stabilize the situation, not only in Lebanon but throughout the region,” said EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana’s spokeswoman Cristina Gallach.
An EU official suggested that the move could lead to the long-awaited signing later this year of an “association agreement” with the bloc, which was frozen after the killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005.
Syria, the former power broker in Lebanon, withdrew its troops in the aftermath of Hariri’s assassination, for which it was widely blamed. Damascus denies involvement.
Washington continues to blacklist Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism, but France has moved to bring Assad out of the diplomatic cold, renewing ties broken off after the murder of Hariri, a personal friend of Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac.
Assad also took the opportunity offered by the summit, and the presence of Erdogan, to hold indirect talks with Olmert, a small step forward, but the highest level contact between the two sides for eight years.
Olmert spoke with Erdogan, who then met Assad, according to an Israeli diplomatic source.
“We are still in indirect dialogue, but at a high level,” the source said, referring to a process that began in May.
In exchange for peace, Damascus is demanding that Israel return the strategic Golan Heights, which the Jewish state seized in the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed.
At the end of a weekend where he had shone, Assad remained pragmatic about the future.
“From the very start of the peace process, we have been speaking of normal relations” with the Jewish state as part of a peace deal, he told Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera.
“Things could deteriorate, just like they could improve. Relations could be warm, just as they could be cold,” he said. “This is all part of the sovereignty of each state. This is what we call normal relations.”
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