Word: assad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
AMMAN: Nothing like a funeral to prompt some healing of family feuds. Syria's President Hafez Assad's surprise arrival at Monday's burial of King Hussein may signal a renewed willingness to pursue regional peace efforts, which broke down following the slaying of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. "Assad knew that people would be reading the signals at Hussein's funeral," says TIME Middle East correspondent Scott MacLeod. "Showing up at an event attended by Israeli leaders and President Clinton suggests he wants to get back into some sort of peace process...
...looms. As the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin has shown, personalities count in making peace. Today, many Middle East leaders are old or ailing. Arafat, 69, reportedly has Parkinson's disease; Jordan's King Hussein is ill with cancer; Saudi Arabia's King Fahd is enfeebled; and Syria's Hafez Assad, 68, has heart trouble. Princes are set to take over Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but Syria and the Palestinians have no successors. Whoever they are, the concern is that the next generation may not be nimble or strong enough to keep the peace...
BAGHDAD: After William Cohen's Gulf tour played to indifferent audiences, Saddam is putting his own band of envoys on the road. His deputy prime minister is in Morocco, his justice minister has reached Yemen, and his foreign minister is hitting Syria -- where President Assad is urging against any U.S. use of force. Not that he's likely to give Saddam rave reviews, either -- Assad is a longtime foe of Iraq...
...Mandela's time in office has been spent in the acquisition of new friends of the Qaddafi-esque ilk. Perhaps even more disquieting than the largely symbolic fraternity between Qaddafi and Mandela, were last year's allegations that Mandela intended to sell chemical weapons to Syrian dictator Hafiz al-Assad. This episode was followed by a state visit by Vice President Al Gore Jr. '69 to South Africa during which Gore is reported not to have even broached the subject of the arms deal in his conversations with the South African president...
...fact that the ANC resorted to terrorism against South African civilians in the latter years of the struggle to end Apartheid undoubtedly caused the group to simplisticly infer connections with the causes of Arafat, Qaddafi and more recently, Assad. The ANC's associations with the pariahs of the world delegitimized an otherwise legitimate cause and only made it more difficult for the ANC's non-Marxist, non-terrorist sympathizers to support them. Pretoria's continued pursuit of these relationships in the face of Western objections raises important foreign policy considerations for Washington...