Ill omens in Assad-Arafat split

Press, 6 July 1983, Page 12

Ill omens in Assad-Arafat split

Syria stood to profit from Yasser Arafat’s prestige for a while. DAVID HIRST reports from Beirut for the “Guardian” on the struggle developing between Mr Arafat and President Assad.

When, four weeks ago. I asked Yasser Arafat why he was spending so much time in the Bekaa Valley if the problem he faced there was as trifling as he made out, he fended off the question with a conspiratorial joke. He leaned over and whispered: “Well, at least the Bekaa is better than Syria, isn’t it? Off the record of course.”

It is off the record no longer. Unless Mr Arafat himself has broken one of his golden rules — never to vilify beyond endurance those with whom tie will be eventually reconciled — he believes that his breach with President Arrad is irreparable. For, expelled from Syria, he could hardly have made a more damning judgment of the Arab leader with whom, till very recently, he was standing “in one trench” against the common, Israeli enemy. He warned the world against “a

new massacre comparable to Sabra and Shatila, which the Syrian army is preparing against the Pakestinian people in the Bekaa Valley and Tripoli.” This would “complete what had been accomplished (by the Israelis) last year.” It is so easy to see why, to many Palestinians, no Arab regime has done more damage to their cause than the one which cast itself as their principal supporter. In “Black September” 1970 before he had secured undivided, presidential control of the Ba’atthist regime, President Assad tipped the scales in favour of King Hussein by refusing air cover for the armoured forces which his rival, Salah Jadid, had sent into Jordan to aid the embattled guerrillas.

In 1978, switching sides in the Lebanese civil war, he turned on his former Palestinian allies driving them out of their mountain strongholds and wresting much of Fatah land from their exclusive control.

It has always been President Assad’s ambition to capture the P.L.O.’s will. What he would do with it, once captured, is less clear. He would not necessarily impose on the Palestinians his own ostensibly militant policies, for those are patently tactical. The likelihood is that, having secured the P.L.O. as a trump card in his diplomatic hand, he would, play it for whatever purpose he saw fit — inciting the Palestinians against any American-inspired Middle East settlement of which he disapproved, sacrificing them for any of which he approved. Thus’, when President Assad went to war against the Palestinians in 1976, he enjoyed the tacit

approval of the United States which, rightly, saw this as part of his campaign to insert himself, from a position of strength, into its peace seeking diplomacy. At his summit meeting with President Carter in Geneva the following year, President Assad achieved the apogee of his international prestige.

It is clear that President Assad is now, once again, securing for himself a central place in Middle Eastern affairs which, if their designs for Lebanon and the region as a whole are to get anywhere, the Americans will have to acknowledge.

Paradoxically, President Assad is seeking to impress the Americans through military and diplomatic muscle which the Soviet Union has supplied. That is not new. In 1976 the Russians disapproved of President Assad’s assault on the P.L.O. Today, there are signs that they see the renewed onslaught as an unfortunate repeat performance.

Hitherto, it would have been going too far to say that President Assad sought to bring Mr Arafat down, however vicious and public a turn the usually surreptitious feud between them' seemed to be taking.

It made more sense to preserve him, ostensibly his own master, but in reality an extension of the Syrian will. In this way, President Assad would profit from Mr Arafat’s international prestige and the support of the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people.

Is Mr Arafat’s head now to be the price of President Assad’s selfaggrandisement? The balance of power between the two leaders has shifted dramatical!*’ in President Assad’s favour since Mr Arafat lost his last territorial base with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, since the collapse of his “Jor-

danian option” and, most damaging of all. the rebellion in his own ranks.

In defiance perhaps of the inevitable, Mr Arafat persisted in his efforts to preserve his independence of the Syrians and. in a pathetic attempt to build himself a new territorial base. He trifled with Tripoli as a headquarters that would reconcile relative immunity to Syrian pressures with a vital proximity to the main body of his fighting forces whose mood since the evacuation from Beirut, he appears so disastrously to have misread.

That merely exasperated President Assad who, diverting troops from the confrontation with Israel, helped the Fatah rebels to inflict humiliating reverses on the Arafat loyalists. Whatever President Assad’s original intention, the feud has acquired a momentum which will be hard to check. So the immediate question is how far and how fast President Assad will push his overwhelming military superiority on the ground. Whatever he does will have to be done behind the facade of the Fatah rebels who, in Syrian eyes, have acquired the mantle of Palestinian legitimacy. That raises another question. How far would the rebels go down such a self-serving Syrian course? “Abu Musa hates the Syrians as much as Arafat” said one of his confidantes. And if he is the authentic Palestinian “struggler” which he claims to be, there must come a point where he realises that, in lending Syria his cover, he risks destroying everything — the sanctity of “armed struggle” and “total liberation" — for which he reckons to stand.

If this really is the final round in the struggle between Mr Arafat and his principal Arab backer,

President Assad should certainly win it. if his strength is measured in divisions alone. But there are moral, political and psychological imponderables which, if he chose. Mr Arafat could exploit to the full. If he were to return to Tripoli — braving Israeli gunboats were he to sneak in by sea — and rally the now despondent loyalists for a last stand, who knows what impact this might have on a Syrian army which, time and again, has been called upon to perform unsavoury tasks far removed from the "battle of destiny" which never seems to materialise? Or on a Syrian society which, cowed though it has been by last year's brutal suppression of the Moslem Brother uprising, could quickly be roused against rulers so widely despised and disliked. The dilemma for Mr Arafat is that the opportunities open to him — such as direct terrorist action against the regime or collaboration with the Moslem Brothers and the violent Syrian underground — might do no more than provoke the very massacre of which he has warned.