Mubarak carries six difficult conditions from Turkey to resolve tensions with Syria

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak arrived in Damascus on Tuesday evening from Ankara to share with President Hafez al-Assad the results of his visit to Ankara and his talks with Turkish officials and to convey the Turkish point of view on finding a way out of the current tense situation between them.

Turkey on Tuesday asked President Mubarak, who held talks with Turkish President Suleiman Demirel, to convey a file containing demands that the Turkish government believes Syria should respond to in order to avoid a confrontation between the two sides as a result of the revolutionaries of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK).

Mubarak, carried six Turkish demands to his meeting in Damascus: suspending support for the Kurdish revolutionaries, expelling their leader Abdullah Oclan, closing their camps in Lebanon, halting their movement through the Syrian borders, recognizing the current borders of Turkey and promising to establish good neighborly relations.

The most difficult of the conditions for Syria to meet is the recognition of the current borders of Turkey, because this means that Damascus would give up its claim on Alexandaritta Sanjak, which was ceded to Turkey according to a French-Turkish agreement in 1939.

Additionally, the Turkish precondition to expel Oclan means that Damascus would have to retract its repeated announcements that the Kurdish leader is not in its territories and that Syria does not know where he is.

The spokesman for the Syrian Presidency, Jubran Koreyah, said that Mubarak reviewed the results of his visit to Ankara and his talks with Turkish officials and the Turkish viewpoints to eliminate this dilemma and that President al-Assad shared with Mubarak the Syrian viewpoints.

Mubarak told journalists who accompanied him on his trip between Damascus and Ankara that he told the Turks: "Our region cannot bear or accept a military act or an armed confrontation."

The Egyptian President tried to arrange a meeting between the two countries' foreign ministers to restore confidence between the two sides. Cairo will inform Ankara later about the results of President Mubarak's talks in Damascus.

He asked the Turkish side to examine his proposals to bring together the Turkish and Syrian sides at a negotiating table to discuss the problem of the Kurdistan Workers Party and its violent activities in Turkey.

However, before President Mubarak started his visit to Ankara, Turkish Prime Minister Mesout Yilmaz directed what he called "the last warning" to Syria, calling on it to hand over Oclan. Vacation licenses were canceled for Turkish soldiers along the borders with Syria.