Last update - 00:00 03/05/2007
Rice meets Syrian FM in first high-level U.S.-Syria talks in two years
By Haaretz Service and News Agencies
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a much anticipated first high-level meeting in years between the United States and Syria was "professional and businesslike" and focused on how to improve security in Iraq.
Rice met with her Syrian counterpart Walid Moallem for a half hour and on the sidelines of a two-day conference about Iraq's future in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. She said she took the opportunity to air U.S. concerns about Syria's notoriously porous border with Iraq.
"The Syrians clearly say that stability in Iraq is in their interest, but actions will speak louder than words and we will have to see how this develops," she told reporters afterward.
The United States has accused Syria of allowing foreign fighters to enter Iraq through the long border and is pushing for an international tribunal to try suspects in the killing of Hariri. A United Nations probe has implicated Lebanese and Syrian security officials in the killing but Damascus denies all the charges.
"I didn't lecture him and he didn't lecture me," said Rice. I would say it was professional. It was businesslike."
"We don't want to have a difficult relationship with Syria, but there needs to be some basis for a better relationship - concrete steps that show on the Iraq issue that there will actually be action," she said.
The top U.S. diplomat said she was not seeking a similar meeting with Iran's foreign minister.
Following the meeting, Moallem said told reporters the talks were "frank and constructive. We discussed the situation in Iraq and how to achieve stability."
A U.S. official had said that a meeting between Rice and Moallem would deal mainly with security on the Iraqi-Syrian border, not with Lebanon or attempts to prosecute those who killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005.
The meeting marks an abrupt change in the policy of U.S. President George W. Bush, who stopped contacts with Syria on the grounds that Damascus had not complied with U.S. demands.
The U.S. military, however, said Thursday that Syria is doing more to stop the flow of foreign fighters coming across its border into Iraq.
U.S. military spokesman Major-General William Caldwell said insurgents were still crossing the border into Iraq's vast western desert, where Sunni Islamist Al-Qaida in Iraq has influence, but numbers were slowing.
"There has been some movement by the Syrians ... there has been a reduction in the foreign fighter flow making their way into Iraq, as we have observed here over the last month," Caldwell told a news conference.
Caldwell did not give precise details on what Syria was doing to stem the flow.
Rice also exchanged pleasantries over lunch with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, during the Iraq conference in Egypt on Thursday, a U.S. spokesman said.
"They said hello. It was not about substance," said U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit called it an exchange of words. "They are civilized people after all," he told reporters.