Syria’s Reported Crackdown on Militants Seen as Warning to Foes of Peace Talks

DAMASCUS, Syria —  At a time when Israel is furious at Syria for failing to restrain Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon, to the point of jeopardizing fragile peace negotiations, there are indications that Syrian President Hafez Assad has been cracking down on Islamic militants in his own country.

Assad’s security forces early last month rounded up hard-line opponents to a proposed peace treaty between Syria and Israel, according to diplomatic sources and other observers here.

The crackdown, which the sources said coincided with a round of talks between Syrian and Israeli negotiating teams in Shepherdstown, W. Va., seemed aimed at sending a message to Assad’s opponents at home that Syria is serious in its pursuit of a peace agreement with the Jewish state.

“There are reports that there has been a clampdown on [hard-line] forces not only in Syria but in [northern] Lebanon,” said Murhaf Jouejati, a U.S.-based analyst of Syrian affairs. “If that is true, I think it is a sure signal to Israel that Syria can seriously handle these questions, if Israel were to do its share.”

Israel’s share--in the eyes of the Arabs--would be to leave the Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria in 1967, and southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces have been present since 1978.

The talks between Syria and Israel have been stalled since mid-January because Assad’s government is seeking a statement that the Israelis are willing to pull back to the line that existed between the two countries on the eve of the 1967 Middle East War.

A Jan. 31 attack by Hezbollah guerrillas against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon worsened the atmosphere for talks. The assault left three Israeli soldiers dead, one day after a bomb blast killed the No. 2 commander of the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army.

After the attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told Syria that talks cannot resume unless Hezbollah is curbed.

The arrests of those in Syria opposed to the peace process did not include members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which Syrians--like many Arabs--tend to view as a legitimate resistance force fighting an illegal occupation.

The renewed violence in southern Lebanon has killed seven Israeli soldiers in the last 18 days.

Iran is the main foreign sponsor of Hezbollah, and Syria is not believed to have operational control over the guerrillas. But most analysts agree that Hezbollah could not operate long in Lebanon, which is largely controlled by Syria, without knowledge and complicity of Assad’s government.

Hezbollah also has served Syria’s interests in the sense that its increasingly successful war of attrition has helped persuade the Israelis to enter talks with Assad.

Instead of Hezbollah, Assad’s crackdown has focused on Sunni Muslim militants and hard-line leftist factions who accuse his government of betrayal for even talking to Israel. Analysts here in the capital say the arrests demonstrate that the Assad regime, despite all its vaunted dictatorial powers, must still contend with domestic political opposition.

Police actions are rarely announced in Syria. Instead, information tends to seep out through unofficial channels.

The recent arrests were first revealed last month by two London-based pan-Arab newspapers, Al Hayat and Al Quds al Arabi. Mohammed Khair Wadi, the editor of Tishrin, one of Syria’s most important state-owned newspapers, later said he could confirm that arrests had taken place but did not know the number of people involved. The crackdown also appeared to be common knowledge in the diplomatic community and among Syrian journalists.

Syria’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood movement said hundreds of people had been rounded up. In a statement it sent in mid-January to Al Quds al Arabi, the movement warned that the arrests could be harmful to “national reconciliation, which Syria badly needs,” and demanded a “halt to all kinds of attacks on public liberties.”

The Muslim Brotherhood was violently suppressed by the Syrian army in the city of Hama in 1982. The group’s leaders were arrested, though some recently were given amnesty. Nevertheless, it has continued to exist as an underground and exile organization critical of the ruling Baath Party.

In its statement, the group condemned the peace talks as a surrender to Israel and its ally, the United States. And it accused Assad of making “capitulationist plans.”

The report in Al Hayat said one of the main targets of the campaign was a little-known opposition group, the Islamic Liberation Party. The newspaper quoted a party spokesman as saying 60 activists were blindfolded and taken from Hama to Damascus, while others were arrested in Aleppo and Homs.

According to Al Hayat, the crackdown in Syria was matched by action in northern Lebanon, where arrests of Islamic militants sparked armed clashes between the guerrillas and Lebanese security forces early last month. During the first three days of January, at least 11 Lebanese soldiers and about the same number of Islamists reportedly were killed.

The arrests are another strand of evidence that the aging and perhaps ill Assad is facing a delicate balancing act these days. He is trying to keep up some pressure on Israel to negotiate but not so much pressure as to derail the talks. At the same time, he is working to keep domestic opponents in line.

Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of the Damascus-based Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, confirmed in an interview here that some Palestinian groups in Syria were given direct orders by a senior government official last July to curtail violent actions against Israel because the regime wanted peace talks to succeed.

In October, Assad’s forces fought with loyalists of his estranged younger brother, Rifaat, near the city of Latakia.

The clash for the moment appears to have eliminated serious opposition from Rifaat Assad’s branch of the family to plans for installing Hafez Assad’s son Bashar as the president’s successor, according to one diplomat.