'What can a Syrian embassy in Lebanon change?'

Analysts say Damascus sees Sleiman's deals as easy way to return to international fold
By Michael Bluhm
Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: President Michel Sleiman brought back landmark agreements on Thursday from his two-day visit to Syria, but his venture did little to ease the fundamental friction between the two states and served primarily as another stepping stone on Syria's path back to regional and international significance after three years of isolation, a number of analysts told The Daily Star on Thursday.he deals signed on Thursday between Sleiman and Syrian President Bashar Assad - to establish formal ties between the two nations, delineate part of their common border and look into the issue of Lebanese detainees in Syrian prisons - ensure Sleiman's trip a place in history books and represent an answer to Lebanese demands for Syrian recognition of Lebanese sovereignty, said Timur Goksel, former senior adviser to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon who now teaches international relations at the American University of Beirut.

"It cannot be only a show from now on," he said. Sleiman "does bring with him some commitments that we had not heard until now about diplomatic relations, border demarcations and all that. There is something to talk about."

Sleiman's sojourn provided the image of Syrian and Lebanese presidents meeting on relatively equal terms, at the very least a healthy sign in the two countries' fraught relationship, Goksel added. "From that point of view, it has accomplished something," he said. "These two countries can't have a divorce from each other."

But while the prospect of a Syrian embassy in Beirut is important, the step does not address the issues that have fed most of the tension between the two countries, said Retired General Elias Hanna, who teaches political science at Notre Dame University.

"It is historic in the point the perspective of having embassies - it is like the final say that Lebanon is sovereign, independent, not a part of Syria, and so on," he said. "Maybe in this perspective it is historic, but the visit itself it is not historic. It is not like the meeting of [former Lebanese President] Fouad Shehab and [former Egyptian President] Gamal Abdel-Nasser on the Lebanese-Syrian border in 1958."

"It is not the historic visit they are trying to depict," he added "It is the normal thing to have this kind of relationship.

"What can an embassy in Lebanon change? Does an embassy [and] diplomatic relationship enhance or endanger Syrian-Lebanese relations? For the Syrians, what is there to lose?"

Lebanon's March 14 camp, which holds a slim majority in Parliament, came to power in May 2005 with the agenda of forcing Syria out of Lebanon after the February 2005 massive car bombing that killed five-time former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 22 others. Many in the March 14 coalition have blamed Syria for the killing - a charge Damascus categorically denies - and they say Assad and his regime view Lebanon as part of a Greater Syria and will do anything, including decades of politically motivated violence, to gain and keep control here.

Given that dynamic, this week's state visit failed to cure the major ills plaguing bilateral relations, said Ahmad Moussalli, who teaches political science and Islamic studies at The American University of Beirut.

"The main problems are still there," Moussalli said. "I don't think there will be any policy changes in terms in Lebanon."

"The exchange of embassies will lead nowhere," he said, adding that an actual diplomatic mission would not open anytime soon, would likely be a tiny enterprise and would provoke fears that it was merely a "spy den."

Moussalli said he was skeptical that the measures approved on Thursday - in particular the drawing the border and investigating the fates of detainees - would come to fruition in the short term.

"All these things are not going to be steps now," he said, adding that demarcating the border without the dispute area of the Shebaa Farms represented "a half-measure."

Even the unquestionable value of delineating some of the border loses some luster when one considers the complexity of the task - members of the same clans live on either side of the theoretical border, a line for which highly contentious versions exist in the archives of the British Foreign Office and the French Foreign Ministry, Goksel said.

"It is a complicated affair," he said. "There are very old maps ... They are mostly historical documents that could be traced all the way to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1920" which divvied up much of the Levant among the great powers victorious in WWI. "It is not going to be easy."

Concerning the detainees, Syria would have to demonstrate its seriousness in pursuing the matter if it assents to the inclusion on the follow-up committee of family members of those missing - and then the questions arises on how long before Syria releases anyone from detention, Hanna said.

In inking Thursday's commitments, the Syrians are less motivated by a desire to foster fraternal relations with Lebanon than by their narrow interests in consolidating the gains in the regional and international arenas since the May 21 Doha agreement ended internal strife in Lebanon, Hanna added.

Assad parlayed his blessing for the Doha deal into an invitation from French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Paris and the promise of warmer relations with the West, which had largely shunned Damascus since Hariri's killing. In this dynamic, hosting the Lebanese president symbolized more the meeting of another condition for embrace by the West than the acceptance of Lebanon as an equal partner, Hanna said.

Syria reaps benefits by making promises on diplomatic ties and by holding back other issues - such as the Shebaa Farms and Syrian support for Hizbullah - for future negotiations, Hanna said.

"It is like a win-win situation for the Syrians," he said. "What Syria is giving Lebanon is to enhance its situation, and what Syria is not giving Lebanon is also to enhance Syria's situation, but in a different context. For instance, Shebaa - it is still within the regional game. It can still be used in the negotiations with Israel."

"When Syria says not to delimit Shebaa Farms, you have to say goodbye to the UN initiative," which had pushed for the drawing of the area's borders as a precursor to determining ownership and negotiating the withdrawal of Israeli troops, Hanna added.

Syria's emergence and resurgence, while Lebanon on Thursday mourned the deaths of at least 14 people in a bombing one day earlier, framed the Sleiman-Assad summit as a portrait of the two categories of nations in the contemporary Middle East: stable, authoritarian regimes such as the Syria of the Assads, and failing states exploited as theaters for others' disputes, such as Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, Hanna added.

The Syrians "are playing their cards very well," Hanna added. "The Americans are paralyzed, Israel is paralyzed - no more pressure on the Syrians, neither Arab nor American - and now they are fulfilling their promises to Sarkozy."

Sarkozy's predecessor Jacques Chirac had, along with US President George W. Bush, led the push to isolate Syria. With Chirac out of office and Bush a deeply unpopular lame duck, momentum for now appears to have swung in the direction of Syria and its allies in resisting the US and Israeli agenda in the region, Moussalli said.

"Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas ... and the Russians are on the winning side," he said.