SYRIA:Syrians welcome France's role in the Middle East, but there are contradictions in the countries' relations, writes Lara Marlowein Damascus
WADDAH ABD-RABBO, the editor-in-chief of the Syrian newspaper Al-Watan, had no doubt about the significance of French president Nicolas Sarkozy's two-day visit. "It means unconditional recognition of the policies and role of Syria, and the return of France to the region and international politics," he said.
Sarkozy is the first Western leader to visit Damascus since the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri three and a half years ago. Syrians relish their rehabilitation.
"Sarkozy's visit is good for us!" said a medical lab technician with whom I shared a taxi.
"I think we'll have peace with Israel," he predicted. "But people have to get used to the idea first."
Yesterday's summit established a new "quartet" of would-be Middle East peacemakers: Sarkozy, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Sheikh Hamad al-Thani of Qatar and Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Everyone seems to have forgotten the earlier "quartet" that was supposed to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Divided between Hamas and Fatah, at the mercy of Israel's domestic political crisis, the Palestinians are losers in these new stirrings of a Middle East peace process.
Sarkozy's initiative comes with few strings attached for Damascus. The French president defined his human rights policy in a recent speech to French ambassadors: "We must broach difficult subjects, but in a way that leads to tangible, positive results and not to sterile confrontation."
In Syria, this has led France to subcontract human rights to Sheikh Hamad. "It's easier to make a gesture among Arab brothers than when a crusader comes to preach at you a thousand years later," says an adviser to Sarkozy.
"Two [of hundreds of Syrian political prisoners] have been freed, and we hope more will come later."
Since he resumed contacts with Assad in late May, Sarkozy says the Syrian leader has kept his commitments. If the Franco-Syrian dialogue stops yielding results, he warned, he will break it off.
"We like France. We like Iran. We like Hizbullah," a Syrian woman reporter told me as we waited for Sarkozy at Assad's palace. Her colleagues crowded round us, nodding in agreement.
They know Sarkozy loves Israel, hates Hizbullah. "He says Hizbullah are terrorists; we say they're the Resistance," one said. "It's not a problem."
But can Franco-Syrian relations accommodate such blatant contradictions, all the way to a peace agreement between Syria and Israel? The fifth round of indirect, Turkish-sponsored Syrian-Israeli negotiations was due to begin in Istanbul on September 7th. But the Israeli negotiator, Yoram Turbowicz, resigned, and it's not clear whether they can re-start before Israel chooses a successor to prime minister Ehud Olmert.
"At the last round, the Syrians gave their version of the border on Lake Tiberias," said a high-ranking French official. "They were waiting for the Israeli response, and they're disappointed."
Israel wants a return to the 1923 border, which did not give Syria a shoreline. Syria demands an accord be based around access to the lake, which it had when the June 1967 war started.
The key question is whether Israel will ever return all of the Golan Heights, which it occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981. Israeli public opinion is strongly against it, and the current turmoil in Israeli politics makes a rapid resolution unlikely.
Sarkozy has jumped into the diplomatic void left by US president George Bush's Middle East failure. By positioning himself now, Sarkozy hopes to reap the benefits later.
But Assad told the impatient French leader he will not start direct negotiations until there's a new US president.
In the meantime, many wonder, in the words of a Lebanese journalist, whether Assad is taking Sarkozy for a ride.
Sarkozy preferred to ignore Assad's trip to Moscow, where he asked for more Russian weapons and approved Russia's intervention in Georgia, comparing it to Syria's defence of her interests in Lebanon.
During Sarkozy's long spell as France's interior minister, his top aide Claude Guéant forged ties with Asef Shawkat, Assad's intelligence chief and brother-in-law. Damascus helped Paris dismantle a network that was sending French Arab fighters to Iraq. For nearly three decades, the Syrian regime used access to Lebanon as a lever in dealings with the West; now it exploits power over the flow of weapons, money and men to Iraq.
Sarkozy has suddenly discovered the charms of neo-Baathist dictatorship. During his visit, he praised Syria's secularism, its fight against fundamentalism and Assad's decision to make French the second language in Syrian schools, on a par with English.
For nearly 30 years, until Hariri's assassination triggered the election of an anti-Syrian majority, Damascus virtually controlled the Lebanese government. In an ironic reversal, Assad asked Sarkozy to use his influence over Fouad Siniora's pro-western government. And Sarkozy, like the Americans in the 1980s, appears to have accepted a degree of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon. "You can't raise the Lebanese problem without talking to Syria," he repeated.
It was music to Assad's ears.