DIARY CHARLES GLASS
amadan, the Muslim month of fast- ing, and the heat of the Syrian spring arrived together in Damascus. Devout Muslims and those who want merely to show a seasonal devotion to the faith, are not permitted to eat, drink or smoke while the sun beats mercilessly down. The shop- keepers in the souks of the old city seem exhausted by the fatigue of fasting, but they can take some consolation from the smell of spring jasmine in the courtyards of the old Damascene houses. When the sun is down, good Muslims may eat to their hearts' content. It was perhaps fitting that, after a separation of five years, the leaders of the Syrian and Palestinian peoples should have begun their reconciliation on Monday night with a meal to break the tension and to put behind them the deaths of the thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese who were killed in 1983 because of their leaders' mutual antipathy. It was in May 1933 that President Hafez al Assad of Syria expelled the PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat, from Syria, because Arafat had defied Syria by negotiating with King Hussein of Jordan and uttering statements that implied recognition of Israel. Over the succeeding seven months, war was waged across Lebanese territory as Palestinians supported by Syria pushed Palestinians loyal to Arafat north from the Beirut- Damascus highway in the Bekaa valley to Tripoli in north Lebanon. The scene last week of a car bomb from which more than 50 people died. Arafat fled Lebanon by sea in December 1983. He has now returned to Syria and the past is conveniently forgot- ten. Syria is officially treating it all as a minor matter. The state-owned press de- voted more attention to a visit from Soviet cosmonauts.
It is a measure of how expensive life has become here that the staple of political discussion — coffee — is not put on the table the moment one sits down for a chat. 'I'm sorry,' a Palestinian friend apologises, but we have only tea. Coffee is too expensive now.' He followed this shocking revelation with a lengthy analysis of the three and a half hour meeting between Assad and Arafat. 'The process of norma- lisation has begun,' he said, 'and I don't think it can be reversed.' He said he believed Syria was willing to let Arafat come here because it and all other Arab regimes were under pressure to show some support — other than meaningless public statements — to the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza. Syria, he told me after he had himself been briefed by the Palestinians who sat in on the Arafat- Assad conference, wanted also to co- ordinate its policy with the PLO to oppose the Shultz plan. This would seem to me to be a case of finding accomplices to shoot an extremely dead horse. But he thought Syria and the PLO had to propose an alternative to Shultz. They hope to do this at an extraordinary Arab summit confer- ence in Algiers in June. Their alternative: an international conference with a single Arab delegation (to include Syrians, Palestinians, Jordanians and Lebanese), Israel and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. That Israel, which itself rejects even the modest Shultz proposals, would reject this scheme seems fairly obvious.
Gavin Stamp may be interested to read that one of his beloved red telephone boxes has found its way to the Sheraton Hotel in Damascus. It guards the entrance to a basement 'British Pub', where some of the Lebanese politicians come to have a beer when they are in town. They usually stay at the Sheraton, which was home to many of them in late 1982 and 1983 when the Israelis forced them out of Beirut. The Palestinians, who have come here like the Lebanese to seek Syrian support against their enemies, for some reason stay at the Meridien Hotel, which has no telephone kiosk and no pub. The international press corps is divided between the two hotels. Jonathan Randal of the Washington Post is, like me, at the Sheraton, which means we spend far too much time drinking into the wee hours discussing the futility of life and not enough drinking tea with PLO officials who can no longer afford coffee. Tim Llewellyn of the BBC is at the Meridien, but my fear is he will come round and prolong our drinking even more.
Eric Rouleau, then Middle East cor- respondent of Le Monde and later the French Ambassador to Tunisia, wrote in early 1983 that the dispersion of the PLO fighters from Beirut to nine different Arab countries 'meant the PLO in practice had renounced the armed struggle'. Israel had expelled the PLO from what Rouleau called its' "Hanoi". Its sanctuary as well as its operational base'. There are Palesti- nians now in the Meridien Hotel contem- plating a return to Hanoi as a result of Monday's meeting. This will be unwelcome news to most Lebanese Christians and Shi'ite Muslims, some of whom will no doubt be rushing to the Damascus Sher- aton soon to beg Assad not to let the Palestinians back. West Beirut's Sunni Muslims however must be counting the days until their Palestinian co-religionists deliver them from the Shi'ite chaos of the last four years.
0 ur strategic alliance with Syria is crucial,' Yasser Arafat said. 'What would become of us without the sanctuary it provides us on Israel's borders? I say to you without shame: if the Damascus gov- ernment threw me out the door, I would come back through the window; if the windows were locked, I would dig a tunnel to get back into the country.' Arafat made this announcement many deaths and many mutual insults ago, three months before Assad exiled him in 1983. Now, he has dug his tunnel back in. What price is he paying? Syria is asking him to give up his relations with Egypt, a country which is anathema to Damascus not only because it signed a peace treaty with Israel but because it, as the largest Arab country, is one of Syria's two rivals for leadership of the divided Arab world (the other is Iraq). Syria also wants Arafat to re-integrate the pro-Syrian PLO groups into the PLO. Arafat left his lieutenants behind in Damascus on Tues- day to work out compromises with Syria on both requests. In return, what will he get? He can reopen his offices in Damascus, a far closer and better base than Tunis from which to direct the course of the West Bank-Gaza uprising. With free access for his forces from Syria through southern Lebanon; with a radio station from which to broadcast directives and encouragement to Palestinians in the territories; with a headquarters in Damascus relatively im- mune, as those in Tunis have not been, to Israeli bombing and commando attack; with training bases in Syria and Lebanon near the Syrian border; Arafat would be in a strong position to turn the uprising into a revolution. The catalyst that brought about this transformation in the PLO's potential fortunes, a catalyst which may eventually see Arafat's return to a semi-state status in Beirut, was the assassination by Israel of the PLO military leader, Abu Jihad, who was buried in Damascus last week. I wonder whether the commandos who mur- dered him in front of his wife and children were aware of the service they appear to have done their country. In the many-sided chess game of the Middle East, it is often impossible to calculate the consequences of any move. Now I think we would all feel better for a good cup of Turkish coffee.
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