Word: damascus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...walked into an ornate conference room in Hafez Assad's Damascus palace last week, Madeleine Albright stole a quick glance at the door to a nearby bathroom. The only excitement during her previous meeting with the Syrian President had been getting locked in that bathroom until a security agent pried open the door. She'd avoid the room this time, but Albright expected the same demands from Assad that had so far blocked talks with Israel on returning the Golan Heights to Syria. Twenty minutes into the meeting, however, the Secretary of State and her Middle East aide, Dennis Ross...
...talks with Syria, scheduled to begin in Washington Wednesday, in which the prime minister warned Israel would pay a "heavy territorial price." Following the plateau's capture in 1967, Israeli military doctrine held that it afforded Syrian artillery such a range over Israeli flatlands that handing it back to Damascus was strategic suicide. But warfare has changed considerably since then, and satellite and other electronic surveillance gives Israel a detailed picture of Syrian military movements that renders watchtowers on the Heights dispensable...
...Golan town regained from Israel after Syria's 1973 surprise attack. He will have done it all, after surviving three wars with Israel, a fierce Islamic uprising, a coup attempt by his own brother Rifaat and the demise of Syria's only important ally, the Soviet Union. Comments Damascus law professor Mohammed Aziz Shukri: "This man built his glory not on his military career but by maintaining stability...
...nations. But there's nothing simple about the agreement. Israel insists that any return has to be gradual, a step-by-step process designed to boost each side's confidence. The Syrians claim that Israel, during Rabin's tenure, agreed to hand back the entire Golan Heights. Damascus now demands that negotations begin with that concession in the bag. Barak's government counters that whatever Rabin offered was hypothetical, and the only way to strike a deal is to resume the bargaining. Syria may eventually agree. "Assad has made a strategic decision for peace," says Uri Savir, who headed Israel...
...some in Syria, peace will come none too soon. One day recently, a teacher named Naim Khalil, 38, piled his wife and kids into the car and drove out to a dusty hillside west of Damascus. He looked past some barbed-wire fences and a minefield at some cousins standing on another ridge in the family village of Majdal Shams, under Israeli army control for 32 years. Holding up a battery-powered megaphone, he yelled out greetings and asked for the latest news. "I've been doing this since I was a boy," Khalil explains. "This is how I told...