Word: damascus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While Egypt's President Anwar Sadat broke his homeward journey in Morocco to see one of his closest Arab allies, King Hassan II, and Jimmy Carter conferred with Sudanese President Gaafar Mohamed Nimeiri, four hard-line Arab states and an assortment of Palestinian liberation groups assembled in Damascus for the third so-called Steadfast Summit. The theme: Fight Sadat?and topple him if possible...
Even so, the effort served to prolong the already drawn-out and heated Damascus meeting. Finally, late in the week, Syrian President Hafez Assad asked Vance to delay his scheduled arrival in Syria by 24 hours, until after the hardline Arabs had gone home...
Vance also is scheduled to meet with three other Arab leaders--King Khaled and Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia on Thursday and Friday in Riyadh, and President Hafez Assad of Syria in Damascus on Saturday...
Assad is no democrat. The opposition is subjected to wiretapping, and enemies of the regime are not only imprisoned or exiled but sometimes publicly hung in Damascus' main square after summary trials. Assad keeps the security forces firmly under his control (all of the senior officers must be Alawi). Inside Damascus, a special 9,000-man infantry division, commanded by Assad's brother Rifaat, protects the President and his regime. There are stories of Rifaat's ruthless excesses: people losing a choice villa or apartment because he wanted it for a friend, or brutal beatings of someone who is less...
...been broken, and today the U.S., Europe and Japan do more business in Syria than does Moscow. Assad is also trying to broaden his country's foreign political alignments. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem, which Assad warned would be a fateful mistake, is still viewed in Damascus as an "outrageous disloyalty by a selfish man." Nonetheless, Assad privately tried to modulate the anti-Egyptian anger of such radical Arab states as Libya and Iraq...