DAMASCUS, 30 December 2004 — Syria’s foreign minister blamed Israel in remarks published yesterday for the deadlock in peace talks between the two archfoes, citing Israel’s rejection of Damascus’ recent overtures. “Despite our repeated calls for the resumption of negotiations, the peace road is deadlocked,” Farouk Shara said in a speech to Syrian political leaders late Monday that was later carried by SANA, Syria’s official news agency. “Israel and no one else is to blame for the deadlock in the peace process.”
Shara said that Israel’s demands for the dismantling of the Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance group and Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon in line with a Sept. 2 UN resolution would be one of the results of peace “rather than a premature condition for it.”
Hezbollah led a guerrilla war against Israel’s 18-year occupation of a border zone in southern Lebanon that ended in 2000.
“At a time when Syria is clinging fast to the requirements of a just peace and does not put forth any conditions to achieve peace, the Israeli side is putting conditions on Syria that have nothing to do with peace,” Shara said.
Shara spoke at the annual meeting of leaders of the National Progressive Front, considered the country’s highest ruling body. The group is headed by Syrian President Bashar Assad and includes the ruling Baath Party and six other political parties.
Shara said Syria still upheld the so-called “Rabin Deposit” or its position to resume peace talks from where they left off in 2000. Bashar made a similar statement earlier this month, but the United Nations Mideast envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, and Egyptian officials have said Bashar is willing to restart talks without any conditions.
The “Rabin Deposit” refers to a promise made by the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to former US President Bill Clinton for full withdrawal from the Golan Heights in any final peace agreement with Syria. Many Israelis contest that promise, which Clinton wrote about in his memoirs.
Syria has repeatedly said in recent weeks that it wishes to resume peace talks with Israel, which collapsed in 2000. But Israel replied that Syria must first clamp down on Damascus-based Palestinian militant groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which have killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings.
When Syrian-Israeli peace talks collapsed in January 2000, Syria wanted assurances that Israel would withdraw from all of the Golan Heights, which it captured in 1967 and later annexed. Israel wanted slight modifications in the pre-1967 border and insisted that issues of security and normalization be spelled out first.
