Word: assads
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cairo -- Syrian President Hafez Assad has been refusing to negotiate the transfer of the Golan Heights from Israel to Syria until the U.N. lifts sanctions against Iraq. Saddam Hussein is Assad's sworn enemy, but Assad feels a growing isolation from his neighbors -- Iran, Turkey and Iraq -- and so is doing Iraq this favor. The Clinton Administration wants a Syrian-Israeli agreement on the Golan by the end of this year, and has initiated secret talks with Iraqi officials at the U.N. aimed at lifting the sanctions...
Damascus -- Syrian President HAFEZ ASSAD is watching events in Moscow closely. According to a Syrian insider, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and would-be President Alexander Rutskoi sent conflicting signals to a Syrian delegation that visited Russia to discuss the Middle East not long before last week's crisis in Moscow. "Rutskoi talked like the old communist leaders," says the insider. "He told the Syrians to 'stand up to imperialist aggression' and promised 'the Russians will back you.' But Yeltsin's people told the Syrians to do what the Americans told them...
Syria, on the other hand, remains rather glum about the P.L.O.-Israeli deal. Although President Hafez Assad gave it distant approval, he is miffed at being made to look as if he is following Arafat in concluding an accord with Israel instead of playing the lead Arab role he prefers. He might also fear that the Israeli-P.L.O. agreement sets an uncomfortable precedent for his own negotiations to get the Golan Heights back from Israel. The Declaration of Principles foresees a gradual, step-by-step Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Assad seeks a total Israeli...
Syria is a harder case. President Hafez Assad is not eager to be seen as following Arafat's lead, and he believes the P.L.O.'s settling for a staged autonomy threatens his own ambition for a one-step return of the Golan Heights to Syrian control. Washington will have to stroke Assad, knowing that Israel needs time to digest the latest events before ceding territory to Syria, no matter the peace that would be its price. In Clinton's favor is the fact that Assad can no longer count on Moscow to support his pan-Arab dream and Syria...
...while academe remained largely silent) for Salman Rushdie against the Iranian mullahs and their fatwa: "Those of us from the Moslem part of this world cannot accept the notion that democratic freedoms should be abrogated to protect Islam." He has inveighed against Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez Assad in Syria. The "traditional discourse" of Arab nationalism, he wrote on the eve of the Gulf War, is "unresponsive, anomalous, even comic." The Arab media are "a disgrace," incapable of dealing with "life in the Arab world today with its terrible inequities, its self-inflicted wounds, its crushing mediocrity in science...