French officials believe that Russia’s new leader, Konstantin Chemenko, will exert a restraining influence on Syria and urge President Hafez Assad to avoid any possibility of a confrontation with either Israel or the United States.
Many French officials know Chemenko personally. He last visited France in the spring of 1982 when he met with Premier Pierre Mauroy and also welcomed several French delegations in Moscow.
The French analysts say Chernenko represents, both because of his age and his political past as a protege of the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the most “cautious” fragment of the Soviet leadership.
They say that, at least for the foreseeable immediate future, Chemenko will most probably want to concentrate on internal economic matters and avoid a climate of crisis in international affairs, especially in the Middle East. He is reputed to have very little experience in foreign matters and to have shown practically no personal interest in the Middle East.
Chemenko is known as a conventional Marxist and as such he is expected to show a slight preference for PLO leader Yasir Arafat who is considered in Moscow as “a revolutionary leader.” Arafat is scheduled to attend Yuri Andropov’s funeral tomorrow and PLO sources in Tunis, where Arafat is residing, said he will meet Chemenko at the Kremlin.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
