Talks centre on troop pact

Press, 2 March 1984, Page 6

Talks centre on troop pact

NZPA-Reuter Damascus The Syrian President, Mr Hafez Assad, and the Lebanese President, Mr Amin Gemayel, held a first round of talks in Damascus yesterday which, diplomatic sources said, had centred on ways to scrap Beirut’s controversial troop withdrawal pact with Israel. Officials gave no details of the talks but said that the meeting also had been attended by the Syrian Prime Minister, Dr Abdel Rauf Kasm, the Foreign Ministers of both countries and other officials.

The diplomatic sources said that there was speculation that abrogation of the agreement with Israel, signed in May last year, could be announced in Damascus or at resumed national reconciliation talks between Lebanon’s factions in Geneva.

Syria and its Lebanese opposition allies have demanded that the accord be scrapped, saying that it jeopardised Syrian security and infringed Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence, as well as legitimising Israeli gains from its invasion in June, 1982. The Christian Lebanese President is under strong pressure from the country’s Right-wing Christian factions not to scrap the agreement.

Mr Gemayel’s meeting with Mr Assad, after months of negotiations by Saudi mediators shuttling between Beirut and Damascus, marks his first visit to Syria since he took office in September, 1982. The sources described the meeting as the start of a thaw in relations between the two governments, soured by the Israeli inva-

sion and Mr Gemayel’s Erevious dependence on the United States to secure withdrawal of foreign troops from his country. He received a warm welcome from Mr Assad and other Syrian officials when he arrived at Damascus’s old airport in a chartered Swiss plane bearing the red cross.

The sources noted that Syria had not pressed for Mr Gemayel’s resignation, which has been a key demand of opposition leaders such as the Druse chieftan, Walid Jumblatt, and Nabih Berri, head of the Shi’ite Muslim Amal movement.

In West Beirut yesterday a car-bomb killed three people and injured more than 30.

The bomb exploded between two blocks of flats in a wealthy area, a few blocks from one of the main

State television buildings. • The Soviet Union vetoed yesterday a Security Council resolution to send United Nations troops to Beirut to replace the fournation multinational force. The vote on the draft was 13 in favour and two against — the Soviet Union and the Ukraine. There were no abstentions. The negative vote of the Soviet Union, one of the council’s five permanent members, was enough to kill the resolution. The main Soviet objection was that the draft failed to ensure that there would be no more naval shelling or air attacks by the countries of the multinational force. The resolution, repeatedly revised during more than two weeks of backstage negotiations, was sponsored by France. ’