The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, dismissed as irrelevant Tony Blair´s planned Middle East peace conference yesterday less than 24 hours after Downing Street announced it.

He predicted that the conference, to be held in Britain next month, will fail because it does not address the prime cause of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Instead, he said it concentrates on the Israeli-US attempt to undermine the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

"The result will be more turbulence and disruption in the Middle East," he said. "People are trying to deal with the symptoms rather than the causes. This is what I call the style of the ostrich that sticks its head in the sand."

The conference will deal exclusively with reform of the Palestinian economy and political structures. Israel will not be attending.

Mr Assad, who saw the Queen at Buckingham Palace yesterday, the first Syrian leader to do so, reiterated his defence of Palestinian suicide bombers. He said that "suicide" and "bombers" should be separated. Europeans did not condemn suicides as such, he said: it was the bombs they objected to.

"The Israelis have actual bombs which they put on planes and missiles and drop them on Palestinians. The Palestinians do not have F-16s or rockets, so they have to go by themselves and kill Israelis," Mr Assad said. "If you want to condemn the bomb, you have condemn both sides."

Mr Assad´s dismissal of the conference came the day after he and Mr Blair held a joint press conference at Downing Street in which they downplayed their differences over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraqi crisis.

Mr Arafat has agreed to send senior Palestinian representatives to the British conference but there is suspicion among some Palestinians about its purpose.

The Israeli government too expressed disquiet about the conference being held in the run-up to the Israeli election at the end of next month.

An Israeli government official questioned the value of a conference to which Israel had not been or taken into consideration, or which could have been postponed until after the Israeli election.

"It could have been done with more thought," the official said.

Mr Assad, speaking at a sem inar at London´s Royal Institute of International Affairs, said that the issue of Middle East peace and Palestinian reform were unrelated. Syria would support reform to end corruption but the west´s idea of Palestinian reform has nothing to do with this.

The west´s idea of reform, he said, was whether or not Mr Arafat had a mandate. Mr Assad said that whenever he spoke to European officials and asked for an alternative to Mr Arafat, they had no answers.

A Foreign Office source defended the conference yesterday: "I would point out that Arafat welcomed it. It is not entirely true to say that reform is an Israeli-US agenda. Palestinians have been pursuing it for some time. It is a chance for Palestinians to brief us rather than us setting the agenda." (Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002 12/18/02)