Agence France Presse

DAMASCUS, 11 January 2004 — Syrian President Bashar Assad welcomed the new US ambassador to his country yesterday despite their fraught diplomatic relations as Damascus urged Washington to help revive peace talks with Israel.

Bashar, whose country faces the threat of US sanctions, said last month that he wanted to restart negotiations with Israel that collapsed in acrimony four years ago — an overture so far rejected by the Jewish state.

“Syria wants the United States to work seriously for a resumption of the peace process with Israel at the point where it broke down,” the official Ath-Thawra newspaper said.

Meanwhile, Margaret Scobey, the first US ambassador to serve in Syria for four months, presented her credentials to Bashar, who wished her “success in her mission,” the official SANA news agency reported.

Scobey accompanied visiting US Sen. Bill Nelson to a meeting with Bashar where they discussed ways of rebuilding US-Syrian relations and regional issues including the Middle East peace process, it said.

On the sensitive question of relaunching peace talks with Israel, Bashar said his country “supports the UN Security Council resolutions and the principle of exchanging land for peace,” it said.

But despite some support within his own government, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rebuffed the overture and instead announced plans to increase by half the Jewish population of the Golan Heights, which was seized from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and unilaterally annexed in 1981. “It is a government of war, not a partner for peace,” charged Syrian government newspaper Tishrin.

Previous negotiations between then Israeli Premier Ehud Barak and the late Syrian President Hafez Assad, Bashar’s father, collapsed in acrimony in January 2000 over the fate of the strategic Golan plateau.

“Syria wants the United States to play an honest, neutral, objective and credible role ... and not allow Israel to miss this opportunity, as Sharon tried to do by saying the negotiations must start from scratch,” the paper said.

Under Barak, Israel agreed to withdraw from most of the Golan Heights except for a narrow strip of land, an option Syria rejected. Syria’s appeal was made even though Washington has threatened Damascus with diplomatic and economic sanctions, accusing it of sponsoring terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction.

Damascus has denied the charges, and accuses Washington of double standard and not doing enough to rein in its close ally Israel, widely regarded as the only nuclear power in the Middle East.

Nelson, a member of the Senate’s powerful armed services and foreign relations committees, was to leave Damascus later yesterday to continue a tour of the region and Europe.

In a first official meeting with Scobey last week, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara highlighted the “importance of launching a positive and constructive dialogue between the two countries that would permit a better understanding of each side’s positions and secure their interests”.