Word: assad
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Syrian President Hafez Assad ordinarily is no one's idea of a cooperative statesman, not with his record as a bloodily repressive dictator. But Assad is shrewd enough to sense which way the winds of world power are blowing. So last week he accepted the American formula for a Middle East peace conference. That, in effect, made him the first Arab leader since Egypt's Anwar Sadat to agree to public, direct peace talks with Israel: that is what the conference is supposed to lead to, after a brief ceremonial opening...
None of which necessarily means that a conference will meet anytime soon. At least one of Assad's motives was to put the onus of blocking peace squarely upon Israel, should Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's government balk at accepting the same terms. Shamir is alert to that danger, but he is far from avid for a peace conference...
...Even so, Assad's move underlines the extent to which once unfriendly countries are concluding that it is prudent to please the U.S., the world's sole remaining superpower. The Syrian President had long been a client of the Soviet Union and a leader of the rejectionist Arab states that opposed any dealing with Israel. But, American analysts believe, at the end of the gulf war Assad realized he had reached a turning point: he could become the unrivaled leader of Arab radicals -- or he could bid for status among the moderates. Assad decided, as one American diplomat puts...
...letter to George Bush last week, Assad accepted two U.S. ideas: that the United Nations send only an observer to the peace conference (Syria had originally wanted the U.N. to play a major role) and that, after the conference had broken up into bilateral talks between Israel and individual Arab states, it reconvene only if the participants agree. Israel in effect could veto resumption of the full conference...
Life in exile isn't so bad -- just ask Rifaat Assad, the fiftysomething brother of Syrian strongman Hafez Assad. Rifaat once ran a 20,000-man militia at home but was kicked out of the country in 1983 when Hafez Assad began to worry about his sibling's lust for power. Since then Rifaat has lived the lush life of a global businessman, managing millions of dollars' worth of investments in Europe and the Middle East. He visits the properties with an entourage of 20 that includes his two wives and several shapely female "secretaries," all traveling aboard two customized...