He told Khaddam in a report published by Asharq Al-Awsat: No one dares to address Saddam
Amid progress in secret messages between Presidents Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad in 1996, the Syrian president made the decision to dispatch his deputy, Abdel Halim Khaddam, to Paris. The purpose of this visit was to meet with French President Jacques Chirac and inform him about the decision to reopen the Syrian-Iraqi border, which had remained closed since 1982.
Assad’s objective in coordinating with Chirac was to mitigate the response from the United States regarding efforts to dismantle Saddam’s “isolation” and to strengthen the level of trust with the French president. This came after Assad successfully engaged France in arrangements to oversee the “Nissan Understanding” in southern Lebanon. The agreement was reached in April 1996, following the Israeli “Grapes of Wrath” war initiated by Shimon Peres, who subsequently lost his position as Prime Minister to Benjamin Netanyahu in mid-1996.
According to the minutes of the meeting between Chirac and Khaddam on July 31, 1996, as published by Asharq Al-Awsat in the third installment of the secret messages between Saddam and Assad, Chirac expressed his desire to keep the meeting confidential. He raised a sensitive issue to Assad concerning the presence of the Syrian military in Lebanon and linked it to the possibility of initiating negotiations with the newly appointed Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu. Chirac made a noteworthy proposition: “If the Israeli army withdraws from southern Lebanon, the Lebanese Army should take responsibility for the entire border. France has expressed its readiness to deploy observers, but this would also entail the disarmament of Hezbollah. This naturally holds significance for Syria. Syria, as expected, cannot agree to this without receiving something in return. The question is: What would be the compensation? For instance, the withdrawal from the Golan Heights and securing its military presence in Lebanon for a certain period after the operation.”
During the meeting, Chirac remarked, “The problem is that it is difficult to influence Abu Uday (Saddam) because people are reluctant to engage in direct conversations with him. This explains why we are communicating with Tariq Aziz. There is an agreement, and suddenly something changes because Saddam behaves unpredictably, and no one dares to directly engage with him.”