BEIRUT: Amid outcry from French officials over their visit to meet Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus one day earlier, four French lawmakers met with a Hezbollah official in Beirut Wednesday, the party announced.
The unofficial trip to Damascus, which was feted by the Syrian media, sparked an angry response from the French government, which cut diplomatic ties with Syria in 2012.
“[They] have taken it upon themselves to meet with a dictator who is the cause of one of the worst civil wars of recent years,” said President Francois Hollande during a visit to the Philippines.
Led by Gerard Bapt of the ruling French Socialist Party, the cross-party delegation met Wednesday with Hezbollah’s International Relations Officer Ammar Musawi.
Bapt faces possible ejection from the Socialist Party, its chairman announced Thursday.
According to a statement released by Hezbollah’s media office, Musawi highlighted in the meeting that the world’s priority should be combating terrorism and fighting extremist groups.
He said international efforts should also be focused on “stopping all forms of help and support that the [fundamentalist groups] receive from some regional powers,” noting that the jihadi threat has reached “everyone.”
Musawi also pointed to the “ongoing cooperation between Israel and the terrorist groups, especially in the Syrian Golan area.”
He said this cooperation revealed the Israeli plan to segregate the region’s states and its societies.
The French lawmakers’ visit to Assad was not approved by the French parliament and contradicted official state policies, French officials had announced.
A member of the delegation, lawmaker Jacques Myard, from the opposition UMP party, said the visit did not at all mean embracing Assad, but said, “we don’t believe we can fight the Islamic State [ISIS] without Syria.”
Socialist Party Chairman Jean-Christophe Cambadelis condemned the MPs’ visit and described Assad as a “butcher.”
“I have written to Gerard Bapt, I will summon him and take sanctions,” he told RTL radio, noting that it would be up to the party’s disciplinary committee to determine whether that would involve a possible ejection from the party.
Speaking later during an official trip to the Philippines, Hollande said he supported sanctions against all four members of the delegation.
Three of the parliamentarians in the delegation met Assad for talks Wednesday, however Bapt told several media outlets that he did not personally take part in that meeting.
While Britain, France and the United States remain opposed to contacts with Assad, the Syrian government has called for international cooperation to fight Islamist militancy.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, the conflict in Syria, which started as a pro-democracy uprising seeking Assad’s ousting in March 2011 and morphed into a full-blown war, has left more than 200,000 people dead.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls, meanwhile, told TV station BFMTV that, “for parliamentarians to go without warning to meet a butcher ... I think it was a moral failing.”
Myard slammed France’s “policy of blindness” towards Syria.
“If Bashar falls, there will be chaos in the region,” he told BFMTV.
His comments reflect rising sentiment within Western countries that their governments should re-engage with Assad’s regime to try and resolve the four-year bloody conflict and rein in the radical ISIS group, which controls swathes of Syria.
Wednesday, the former head of France’s domestic intelligence service, Bernard Squarcini said in a television interview that authorities would have to re-launch dialogue with Damascus.
“We cannot work on Daesh and against Daesh without going through Syria,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
But the French government remains firm in its political and military support for the moderate Syrian opposition, and wants to try and resolve the crisis through negotiations between members of the opposition and the Syrian regime – but without Assad.
“The idea that we could find peace in Syria by trusting Bashar Assad and by thinking that he is the future of his country is an idea that I believe is wrong,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Sunday.
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