Syria Denies Secret Israel Talks

DAMASCUS, December 9, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Syria denied Friday, December 9, it was in secret talks on reopening peace negotiations with Israel to avoid UN sanctions over its alleged role in the killing of Lebanon's ex-premier Rafiq Hariri.

"Syria has nothing to hide. She is refusing any kind of secret talks and is always acting in the open," state news agency SANA quoted an official source as saying.

The Guardian reported Thursday that Damascus engaged in clandestine talks on reopening peace negotiations with Tel Aviv in a bid to avoid UN sanctions over Hariri's murder.

The daily said Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have urged Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to re-launch talks with Israel broken off in 2000, during discussions on the sidelines of a summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), wrapped up in Makkah Thursday.

It added that Arab leaders were seeking to revive a 2002 plan by Saudi King Abdullah for a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement.

Arab leaders, at the Beirut summit, unanimously offered Israel normal relations if it withdrew from the territory it occupied in the 1967 war and let the Palestinians set up an independent state with occupied Al-Quds (East Jerusalem) as its capital. Israel rejected the offer.

Deceiving Reports

The Syrian source said reports claiming reopening talks with Israel were aimed at "deceiving public opinion by making it believe that Syria is backing down in the face of the strong pressure it is facing."

The source, however, noted that Syria is "working for a comprehensive peace in the region, a true peace that must start with the end of the occupation in line with the Arab initiative for peace and resolutions of international law," Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Syria has been under mounting international pressures since Hariri's killing on a February 14 bomb blast that also killed 20 others on the Beirut seafront.

An interim report issued in October by UN chief investigator Detlev Mehlis, implicated top Syrian intelligence officials in the killing. Damascus vehemently denies any involvement in the killing.

Mehlis is scheduled to submit his final report to the UN Security Council on December 15.

Syria has recently offered to resume peace talks with Israel "without conditions", but the Israeli government rebuffed the offer as a mere propaganda meant to ease US pressures on Damascus.

Israel occupied the Syrian Golan Heights during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and annexed the area in 1981.

The area is a grassy plateau overlooking north-eastern Israel and south-east Syria and have important water resources - providing Israel with a third of its water needs.

The United States accuses Syria of harboring “terrorists,” developing weapons of mass destruction, and allowing foreign fighters into Iraq through its borders.

Two months later, US President George W. Bush signed into law the Syria Accountability bill which allows economic and diplomatic sanctions on the Arab country.