In The Days

• Source: AFP
• News Date: 11/28/07

ANNAPOLIS, Maryland, (AFP) — A vocal critic of the United States, Syria had been hesitant about attending the US-sponsored conference on the Middle East amid heightened tensions with archfoe Israel.

“The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.”
—Isaiah 17:1

But Syria came out of the international meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, Tuesday backing the revival of peace negotiations with Israel that stalled in 2000.
Just two months ago, Israel had launched an air strike on a Syrian military target.
“The participation of Syria at this meeting represents an extra step by it to contribute to reaching a just and global peace in our troubled region,” Fayssal Mekdad, Syria’s deputy foreign minister, said in a text released by his embassy.
“Despite all the difficulties and differing opinions on this conference in Annapolis, Syria hopes that our meeting today will constitute a point of departure for a peace process … on all the negotiating issues launched at the Madrid conference,” he said.
The Madrid meeting in 1991 launched negotiations on three aspects of Middle East discord: Israel’s conflicts with the Palestinians, Lebanon and its northern neighbor Syria.
The source of the dispute is the territory of the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in the 1967 war.
Mekdad, a former ambassador to the United Nations, noted that his country had negotiated with five successive Israeli governments until talks were suspended seven years ago.
The diplomat reiterated Syria’s support for Saudi Arabia’s peace initiative, endorsed in March by the Arab League, which offers formal Arab diplomatic ties with Israel in return for an Israeli pullout from all land occupied in the 1967 war.
“The Arab peace initiative, which represented a crucial turning point in the search for peace, must be taken in its entirety and must not be treated selectively,” he said.
“We are sincere in our search for a just and global peace. We have the political will to do it,” Mekdad said.
The Syrian diplomat’s remarks were welcomed by German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
“The conference showed that it was a good idea not to close all doors to Damascus,” Steinmeier told reporters. “Syria’s participation is an important first step.”
Syria had waited until two days before the conference to announce its participation, after the United States agreed that the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981, be on the agenda.
Syria’s call for dialogue with Israel came after an Israeli air raid in September hit a military target that, according to media reports, may have been a site storing nuclear material from North Korea.
The tension was palpable Tuesday in the eastern US town of Annapolis when Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni turned toward Mekdad to convey Israel’s hope that the two neighbours can find peace, according to an Israeli official.
“Tzipi looked him in the eye, and he didn’t turn his look away. That is already something,” the official, a senior member of the Israeli delegation who requested anonymity, told AFP.
Russia has proposed to host in early 2008 a meeting on the Israeli-Syrian peace process, according to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.
But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not mention the Moscow meeting during a final declaration on the Annapolis conference.