Word: habib
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...time since the shooting. He spent a half hour with Iosif Mendelevich, a Soviet dissident who just finished serving eleven years in a jail in his homeland, and Avital Shcharansky, whose husband Anatoli remains imprisoned in the Soviet Union. At week's end he conferred with Philip C. Habib, his special envoy to the Middle East, who has been working for the past month to defuse the Israeli-Syrian crisis. Habib, at Reagan's request, will return to the Middle East this week to continue his shuttle diplomacy (see WORLD...
...Habib takes time out, Syria and Israel remain poised to fight...
...week's end Habib arrived back in Beirut to the scream and thud of some of the heaviest shelling and artillery fire since the civil war. He needed no further reminder of the urgency of attaining a broader U.S. goal: to work out a settlement among the warring factions in Lebanon so that crises would not keep on exploding like a series of land mines. To that end, Habib has also been seeking ways to strengthen Lebanon's army, to get the Syrians to take more responsibility for disruptive left-wing activities in and around Beirut...
Increasingly it appeared that the key to a solution of the present threat might lie with Saudi Arabia, where Habib had spent two days in talks with Crown Prince Fahd and other Saudi officials. The Saudis deeply fear that if a Syrian-Israeli confrontation were to take place, the Soviets would strengthen their influence in the region. Damascus and Moscow signed a 20-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation last October. In the Saudi view, a military conflict might also foster radical politics in the area, posing yet another threat to stability and conservative Arab regimes...
...addition to the Saudi aid to Syria, the essential elements of the deal Habib was trying to shape consisted of two basic parts. First, Lebanese army units would occupy Zahle and the strategic Sannin Ridge, several miles northwest of the city, so bitterly fought over by the Syrians and the Christian Phalangists. Initially, the Lebanese units would be under Syrian control, but in time command could shift to officers sympathetic to the Christians. Second, the Syrians would quietly remove their SA-6 missiles from Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, possibly after a formal request from the Lebanese government. Israel...