Syria bars UN team seeking end to WAsia attacks

UNITED NATIONS, July 19 (Reuters) Syria barred a UN mission to the West Asia unless it excluded one of its members, Norwegian Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN adviser on Syria-Lebanon issues, a UN official said today.

Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary-general, told reporters the mission decided not to go to Damascus because it urgently needed to return to New York to brief the UN Security Council on a flurry of diplomatic initiatives.

''The mission did plan to go to Syria and one of the issues we would have had to grapple with is what to do with Roed-Larsen,'' Malloch Brown said. ''What would have been a tough choice is one we did not have to make.'' Damascus, diplomats said, had barred Roed-Larsen because of his previous reports on Security Council resolutions demanding Syrian forces withdraw from Lebanon and militia disarm. His reports have also cited weapons flowing to Lebanon's Hizbollah militia across the Syrian border.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan sent the team to the West Asia to search for ways to end the Israeli-Lebanese conflict. He will report to the UN Security Council tomorrow.

''Obviously the secretary-general considers it his business to choose who to send on good offices mission,'' Malloch Brown said.

''It is clearly the case that the Syrians didn't want him,'' he said of Roed-Larsen.

But Malloch Brown said that if the UN initiative continues, Annan would want a team to visit Damascus ''and this will be an issue he will have to face down the road.'' Annan, he said, would be reporting on the diplomatic overtures and his demands for a cease-fire at a dinner tomorrow with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and possibly Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief.

The team was led by political adviser Vijay Nambiar of India and included Middle East envoy Alvaro de Soto of Peru as well as Roed-Larsen, a Norwegian diplomat.

Reuters YA GC0033