BEIRUT — The president of Syria ordered his government Tuesday to establish formal diplomatic relations with Lebanon, a move that could pave the way for normalizing decades of tangled ties between the two countries.
President Bashar Assad issued a decree to establish Syria's first diplomatic mission in Lebanon, a small mountainous country carved out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire and long dominated by its larger neighbor.
Assad has promised before to open an embassy but rarely followed through with anything formal. Establishing a Syrian mission in Beirut would mark a turning point if it leads to more transparency in the long-troubled relations between the two countries, analysts said.
"This draws a historical line," said Sami Moubayed, a journalist and political analyst based in Damascus, the Syrian capital.
The decree included no timetable. But a Syrian diplomatic source told The Times that the foreign ministers of the two countries were scheduled to meet this week in Damascus to work out a mechanism for establishing embassies in each other's capital by year's end. The source spoke on condition of anonymity.
Many Lebanese doubt Syria's motives. Those within the pro-U.S. March 14 coalition consider suspect any move by Syria, which has strong ties to the Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah.
Leaders of the March 14 camp welcomed the decision but said important issues remained unresolved, including the fate of Lebanese believed to have been jailed in Syria.
Damascus has for months promised Western leaders it would open the embassy, a move aimed at breaking Syria's international isolation. But a diplomatic mission alone won't fix all the problems between the two countries, said Oussama Safa, director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, a Beirut think tank.
"It remains to be seen whether this entails real change in Syrian attitudes and not just window dressing," he said. "Establishing an embassy is good. But who will the ambassador be?"
Like a dysfunctional couple unable to break free of each other, Syria and Lebanon have long had a complicated relationship. Some people on both sides of the border have never recognized the partitioning of the region once called Greater Syria into two nations.
Syria, with five times the population and 18 times the land area of its small neighbor, for decades has secretly and overtly exercised its political and economic levers of power over Lebanon. But only once, from 1958 to '61, when Syria and Egypt were unified as the United Arab Republic, did Damascus have anything like an ambassador to Beirut -- and he was an Egyptian.
