After years of heightened tension, Syrian-French relations seem to have entered a new phase. on Wednesday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy began an official two-day visit to Damascus, an unthinkable development just a year ago. In Syria, the visit was celebrated as a failure of the long-standing policy of isolating the regime of President Bashar Al Assad.
That policy began at the end of 2004, when the US President George W. Bush and former French president Jacques Chirac formed a common front to punish Syria for its "unacceptable" regional behaviour in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine.
On September 2, 2004, Paris and Washington jointly sponsored UN Security Council's Resolution 1559, which called for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and the disarmament of all militias - meaning mainly Hezbollah.
Under tremendous pressure, Syria was forced to withdraw from Lebanon in April 2005. Bush and Chirac decided to tighten the noose henceforth, hoping for regime collapse in Damascus. Four years on, this policy seems to have crumbled and Syrian-French relations appear to have retained their traditional cordiality.
For most of the 1990s and up until the US invasion of Iraq, Syrian-French relations were at their best. On the personal level, Chirac was the only Western head of state to attend the funeral of the late Syrian president Hafeez Al Assad in 2000. He pledged to provide all sort of support to help the new Syrian leader - Bashar - to proceed with his reform project.
Politically, Syria and France were in agreement on almost every single issue in the Middle East. In 2002, Syria joined forces with France, Russia, Germany and China in the UN Security Council to prevent the US and Britain from passing a resolution to legalise the use of force against Iraq. A year later, however, this whole picture was turned upside down. Syrian-French relations started to deteriorate quickly. Friendship turned into enmity and sorrow replaced trust.
Tension
The shift started in November 2003, when Chirac sent his political adviser, Maurice Gourdeau-Montagne, to Damascus to meet Bashar. At the time tension between Washington and Paris could not be cut with a knife, thanks to Chirac's strong opposition to the Iraq war.
Montagne told the Syrian president that the Iraq war has changed the political map of the Middle East and that Syria may subsequently need to reconsider its anti-war policy. Having realised that what has been done in Iraq could not be undone, the French wanted to mend relations with the US. Montagne told his Syrian hosts that that was also the position of Germany and Russia. Syria disagreed.
In June 2004, Chirac took advantage of his meeting with Bush in Paris to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings, to persuade him to move beyond Iraq and towards agreement over Syria and Lebanon.
Chirac, through his close ties to former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, was the one who initially brought the US into Lebanon. Until Hariri's assassination on February 14, 2005, the Bush administration had no independent Lebanon policy.
In August 2004, Montagne paid a secret visit to Washington to follow up on the Normandy talks between Chirac and Bush. He and Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser to Bush, agreed to turn a new page in their relations and to co-ordinate their policies in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon.
France believed that its interests in the Middle East are no longer served by supporting the status quo in Syria. For France, the death of Yasser Arafat and the collapse of Saddam Hussain's regime marked the end of an era - Pan-Arabism. Chirac decided, hence, to embrace a different policy line in the Middle East, one that takes into account the occupation of Iraq, the end of the intifada, the collapse of the Arab state system, and the slow reform process in Syria.
France pursued with vigour the policy of isolating Syria until Sarkozy came to power last year. His visit to Damascus was a formal declaration that the Chirac attitude towards Syria was impractical and his judgment was overtly mistaken. He hence decided to change course, extend his hand to Damascus, and re-establish France's traditional influence in the Levant.
Dr Marwan Kabalan is a lecturer in media and international relations, Faculty of Political Science and Media, Damascus University, Syria.
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