DAMASCUS: Syria’s leader said that Israel poses the “greatest obstacle” to Mideast peace and warned that a failure of negotiations would open the way for more resistance in occupied lands.
Bashar Assad said in a speech opening the foreign ministers’ meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Damascus yesterday that peace must include regaining Arab territories held by Israel.
Israel and Syria conducted indirect peace negotiations through Turkish mediators last year. But Syria suspended them in December over Israel’s Gaza war.
Bashar said recently he didn’t think Israeli government was a good peace partner since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he would not return the Golan Heights captured from Syria in 1967 — a key Syrian demand.
Netanyahu has said, however, that he was open to restarting peace talks.
Bashar said Syria continues to consider peace as a “strategic goal that must be reached one day,” and he blamed Israel for the lack of progress since the launching of the peace process in 1990.
“The failure of the process so far showed blatantly that Israel is the greatest obstacle facing the hoped for peace,” he said.
Bashar said in March that the earlier indirect talks with Israel failed because the Jewish state would not make a clear commitment to return all of the Golan up to the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Direct talks between Syria and Israel under US auspices failed in 2000 over the same issue of the extent of an Israeli withdrawal.
Bashar warned that the “failure of political efforts to regain legitimate rights will give the resistance the right to carry out its duty in order to regain those rights.”
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in Syria for talks with Bashar on Moscow’s plan for a Middle East conference, a Russian diplomat said. Lavrov and Bashar will meet today.
Russia has been seeking a greater role in Middle East diplomacy, and Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said Moscow was “striving to strengthen and develop political dialogue and mutual cooperation with Syria.”
