Syria, Russia restore pre-Soviet era ties

1/26/2005 1:00:00 PM GMT

Both Russia and Syria have pledged to restore Soviet-era ties between the countries as well as strike an accord on Damascus' debts to Moscow and future military cooperation.

The agreement on military cooperation between the countries comes despite Israel's apparent success in delaying the sale of Russian weapons to Damascus.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad signed the declaration with his Russian counterpart while on a state visit to Moscow.

In the statement, both Moscow and Damascus agreed to "pursue traditional cooperation in the military-technical sphere in keeping with their mutual interests and international obligations," the ITAR-TASS news agency reported.

Earlier Bashar had stated that Syria had the right to acquire weapons to protect itself against Israeli air attack.

"These are defensive weapons, air defence, to prevent aircraft from entering our airspace," Assad said, when asked to comment on the reported contract for portable Igla anti-aircraft missiles over which both Israel and the U.S. had strongly protested against.

"If Israel is against us acquiring them, it's as if it was saying 'We want to attack Syria but we don't want them to protect themselves...That's not logical," he said while speaking to students at the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations (MGIMO).

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to revive lapsed ties between Moscow and Damascus, a former Soviet client state which traditionally was a major purchaser of Russian weapons.

"Syria is a country with which the Soviet Union and today's Russia have always had particularly warm relations," Putin told Assad. The Russian president regretted that there had been "a long pause" since the last visit of a Syrian leader to Moscow but expressed the hope that they could revive "a tradition of friendship and cooperation that is decades-old."

Another agreement reached by the two leaders during the visit was the writing off of more than 70 percent of the $13 billion of Syria's debts mainly incurred from arms purchases during the Soviet era.

The Syrian leader visit to Moscow had been overshadowed by furious Israeli protests over the reported contracts for Russian missiles which Tel Aviv believes would erode the Jewish state's military edge over its arch-foe Damascus.

Assad's visit to Russia, the first by a Syrian head of state since 1999, is seen as an opportunity to improve relations between the two countries after years of decline since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Assad didn't hide his hopes that Russia would become a counterweight to the Americans in the Middle East.

"Russia has an enormous role, and has a lot of respect from Third World countries ... which really hope that Russia will try to revive the positions it used to hold," he told the audience at the MGIMO, adding that U.S. foreign policy regarding its Iraq policy was "disastrous."

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