DUBAI - Veteran Syrian Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam, widely regarded as the architect of his government's Lebanon policy before its troop pullout in April, announced his resignation on Friday.

"I have decided to resign," he told the Dubai-based satellite television Al-Arabiya in an interview from Paris.

Khaddam, 73, said he was "convinced that the process of development and reforms, be they political, economic or administrative, will not succeed" and that he preferred to choose "the motherland" over "the regime".

"I have many things to say, serious things, when the time is right," he said, adding that his relationship with President Bashar al-Assad was "amicable".

The vice president first asked to resign at a congress of Syria's ruling Baath party in June, but there had been no word since on whether Assad had accepted the resignation.

At the time, he criticised Syrian foreign policy leading up to the withdrawal from Lebanon after a 29-year deployment under international pressure over former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri's assassination.

Khaddam, who long served Bashar's father Hafez before his death in 2000, was also close to former interior minister Ghazi Kanaan, for 20 years Syria's intelligence chief in Lebanon, who committed suicide in October.

Lebanese media speculated at the time that Kanaan had been killed because he was about to reveal the authors of Hariri's killing for which a UN probe has implicated Syrian intelligence.

Khaddam now lives in Paris and, like Kanaan, was also close to the pro-Western Hariri, who was killed in a February bomb blast in Beirut.

Kanaan and Khaddam were reportedly stripped of responsibility for the Lebanon file by Assad, in keeping with an agreement with pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud who accused the two men of being in Hariri's pay.

Khaddam was caretaker president following Hafez's death and until the succession of Bashar al-Assad.

Copyright © 1999-2005 Lebanonwire^®.com. All rights reserved.