Convention In Damascus

A week of frenzied diplomacy

The Syrian capital of Damascus was the convention center of the Arab world last week. On hand were the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, assembled for the first meeting of their National Council in almost two years. Hardly had those meetings opened when reports began to circulate throughout the city that the long feuding governments of Syrian President Hafez Assad and Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan Bakr were about to take a tentative step toward merger. With all that going on, Jordan's King Hussein abruptly decided he had better fly to Damascus too to get in on things. The result was something of a three-ring circus.

The National Council meeting reached agreement on the most important issues on its agenda early on. The relatively moderate Yasser Arafat remains the dominant figure within the P.L.O., although the role of George Habash and his radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine will be somewhat expanded. Delegates took the considerable step of agreeing to adopt a joint political program. They rejected the Camp David plan for creating an autonomous "entity" on the West Bank and Gaza, and they insisted that the P.L.O. and not King Hussein should represent the Palestinians. Hussein accepted both these points, bringing himself into closer alignment with Syria than ever before.

Moderates and militants alike remained committed to the use of terrorism against the Israelis, and in fact a minor wave of violence continued throughout the week. In Jerusalem, for example, a grenade exploded in an open-air market, injuring a score of Israeli shoppers. Citing recent terrorist activity, the Israelis staged two military strikes against Palestinian bases in southern Lebanon.

Galvanized by Sadat's efforts to make peace with Israel, the governments of Syria and Iraq were on the verge of announcing that they were prepared to share one flag, one President, one foreign and defense policy and one ministry of information, all in the interests of Islamic unity against Israel. Declared an exuberant Syrian official: "We are about to change the whole balance of power in the region."

Considering the fact that the rival wings of the Baathist Party that rules both countries have been at loggerheads for years, and that agents of the two governments have lately been unusually busy trying to blow each other up (there have been three assassination attempts against the Syrian Foreign Minister by Iraqis and shootouts in embassies around the world), the giddy rhetoric of unity was greeted with some bemusement by foreign diplomats. Still, the fact that these erstwhile enemies, concerned not only about Camp David but also the instability in Iran, were even talking about merging was genuinely remarkable.

In the meantime, the negotiations between Egypt and Israel remained stalled, although U.S. Envoy Alfred ("Roy") Atherton was back in the Middle East trying to get the talks going again. His mission this time was limited to discussion of two matters of limited importance: whether, under the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, security arrangements should be subject to review after five years, and whether the document should supersede Egypt's other treaty obligations. The crucial issue, the extent to which the treaty should be tied to subsequent negotiations over the West Bank and Gaza, will be taken up again later, perhaps in Washington next month.

The treaty is far from being an accomplished fact, but many U.S. policymakers are trying to look beyond the completion of that treaty to the problems that the Middle East will face in the post-Camp David world. As last week's events in Damascus indicated, that era is likely to be as stormy as the one that preceded it.

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