Syria's president blamed for crimes of the past

Faced with the uproar over the state visit to Paris by President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the mayor of the capital, Mr Bertrand Delanoe, listed illustrious past travellers to Syria - Chateaubriand, Gerard de Nerval, Andre Malraux . . .

The mayor had just finished speaking yesterday when two city councillors sitting near the President's young wife, Asmaa, in the front row unfurled a yellow and black banner - the colours of the stars which the Nazis forced European Jews to wear during the second World War. "Assad - anti-semite" said the banner.

As the two men were hustled out by security guards, a third yelled: "Don't forget the blood of our ambassador; don't forget the Drakkar." Louis Delamare, France's ambassador to Lebanon, was assassinated in 1981. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the killing of 58 French soldiers in the Drakkar building in 1983. Bashar al-Assad was 15 and 17 when those events took place.

Paris receives a half dozen state visits each year, and more than 100 official visits. Some of France's guests - the leaders of Russia, China and not a few African dictators - have more blood on their hands than the 35-year-old President of Syria, a mild-mannered opthamologist who succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, one year ago. Indeed, the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, who will visit Paris on July 5th and 6th, will go down in history as the man who sent Phalangist militiamen into the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in 1982, where they slaughtered up to 2,000 Palestinians. Nor have Arabs forgotten that Mr Sharon dynamited the houses of Qibya village - with residents inside them - in 1953.

But Dr Bashar, as he is known to all Syrians, appears doomed to be blamed for the Nazi Holocaust, the sins of his late father and the Lebanese civil war, which ended in 1990. Some 7,000 people - including Catholic and Protestant representatives - joined Jewish and human rights groups in a demonstration against his visit on Monday night, symbolically held at the Place des Martyrs du Vel' d'Hiv, whence tens of thousands of Jews were deported to death camps in 1942.

In an opinion page published by Liberation, the Jewish writer Marek Halter said that Dr Bashar had "contracted the anti-Jewish virus" as a medical student in London and - incredibly - associated him with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and Saudi extremist Osama Bin Laden. Another article, published by Le Monde and signed by 10 Jewish, antiracist, socialist and centre-right leaders, called Dr Bashar "an enemy of France" and held him responsible for the disappearance of 17,000 Lebanese during the civil war as well as the deaths of 75 French soldiers.

Two stupid, reprehensible remarks started this crusade against Dr Bashar. In May, during Pope John Paul II's visit to Damascus, the Syrian President accused Israel, without naming it, of "trying to kill all the principles of the holy religions, in the same way that they had betrayed Jesus and tried to kill the Prophet Muhammed". At an Arab summit in Amman a few weeks earlier, he had said that "the racism of the Israelis has surpassed Nazism".

Dr Bashar's statements were condemned by the French Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the French Foreign Ministry and the US State Department. Which is more than one can say about epithets used by Israeli leaders to describe Arabs. Only last year, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, called the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, a "crocodile". The late Menahem Begin referred to Palestinians as "two-legged beasts". Rabbi Ovadia said they were "serpents", and the former Israeli chief of staff, Gen Rafael Eitan, called them "cockroaches in a glass jar".

President Jacques Chirac and the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, ignored widespread criticism to receive Dr Bashar. Mr Chirac was the only EU head of state to attend Hafez al-Assad's funeral last year, and France wants to play a role in modernising Syria and reviving hope for peace in the Middle East.

But Dr Bashar's first year in power has been disappointing.

The eight-month "Damascus Spring", during which political discussions were allowed in private "fora", came to an abrupt end in February. Syria's new president has freed 600 political prisoners, but 750 more remain.