THE OTHER CONTINENT: ASIA 383got ready to fly back to Moscow, the Chinese were slow about agreeing
a communiqué – indeed, he had reached the next stage of his Asian
tour, Pakistan, before receiving Beijing’s draft: they acted as if they were
the rising masters of the continent.^29 The trip to China had been a
revelation. He had imbibed basic lessons about Chinese grievances, and
on 16 February even asked the Politburo to consider giving up territory
around Khabarovsk in the Soviet Far East.^30
Whereas USSR’s old enemies in Asia continued to query the sin-
cerity of Gorbachëv’s new foreign policy, its Asian client states were
agitated about the implications of his rapprochement with America.
It was one of Shevardnadze’s tasks on his Asian trip to persuade old
friends that Moscow would stick by them. This was probably why he
failed to visit Vietnam, for the Soviet leadership had made a basic
choice in favour of improved ties with the Chinese.
But the Politburo had no wish to lose its collaborators in the
Middle East and, after a brief stopover in Islamabad, Shevardnadze
flew on to Syria for talks with President Hafez al-Assad. Two years
earlier Gorbachëv had assured the Syrian dictator of the USSR’s con-
tinued support for states that stood up to ‘American imperialism’.^31
After a formal exchange of greetings, Assad expressed doubts that the
Soviet leadership was fulfilling its promise. Shevardnadze faced an
uncompromising negotiator. Despite the visible signs of age and a
shrillness of voice, Assad knew how to impose himself on everyone
around him. He established an ascetic atmosphere. There were no por-
traits of him on the walls of his official residence, only a picture of one
of Saladin’s battles against the Crusaders. He kept Circassians as his
bodyguard. (For a man from the multi-ethnic south Caucasus like
Shevardnadze, this was more than a little fascinating.) Assad was blunt
about his concerns. Recalling that he himself had been a student in
the USSR in the 1950s, he remarked that people were claiming that the
Soviet order was on the verge of collapse and could no longer support
friends like Syria. Assad tore into Israel’s attempt to appear as a force
for peace in the Middle East. He decried the recent shift in the Krem-
lin’s policy away from promoting the Arab cause and lamented the
abandonment of allies in Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam
and even Eastern Europe to dire fates. Assad was an angry man; he did
not disguise his feelings about the turn in Soviet foreign policy.^32
Shevardnadze then travelled to Baghdad, where he aimed to alert
Saddam Hussein to the Kremlin’s hope for a rapprochement with
Tehran. Until then, Soviet policy had favoured Iraq over Iran. Now the