by Robin Wright
“I was like the guy with the rock—the Sisyphus myth, isn’t it?” Turk says. In the Greek myth, Sisyphus’s punishment was to be blinded and to have to repeatedly roll a giant boulder up a mountain to the peak, only to have it perpetually roll back down to the bottom. The tale was grist for Albert Camus’ 1942 essay exploring the absurdities and follies of life.
Turk was released in 1998. But in the 2001 documentary, Turk tells the filmmaker that he still feels stuck in a prison. “Prison represents oppression, and oppression is still practiced in my country. Destroying that prison is a major goal on which the country’s liberty depends. Prison is also made to scare people. People do whatever they can to avoid it. They shut themselves up.”
With uncharacteristic restraint, Turk also said nothing publicly for three years after his release. Then President Assad succumbed to longstanding heart disease in 2000 after ruling for thirty years. In less than an hour, Syria’s parliament amended the constitution to bring down the minimum age for the presidency from forty to thirty-four, so Assad’s second son, Bashar, could take over.
When the documentary was shot in 2001, Turk tells Atassi that he is growing restless. “Rebellion is still the same,” he says, “as if it were marked in me.”
In August 2001, as the filmmaker was editing his documentary, Turk reappeared in public. Political activity is restricted under Syria’s open-ended state of emergency, which was first imposed in 1963 when the Baath Party came to power. So Turk gave his first speech at a private home. Nevertheless, hundreds were willing to take the risk, including arbitrary imprisonment, to hear him.
In his talk, Turk dared to say publicly that the Syrian regime “relied on terror” to stay in power. He condemned the new form of “hereditary” rule passed from one Assad to another as “illegitimate.” He called on the regime to move “from despotism to democracy.” And he appealed to all opposition groups to reconcile their differences and unite in a common front. Ten days later, he made the same statements on al Jazeera, which beamed his remarks across the Arab world.3
On August 31, Turk suffered an embolism that partially paralyzed his arm. The next day, he set off to get medical help. Then he disappeared.
A week later, the state-controlled media ran a brief government statement:
Turk and other malevolent people have recently spared no efforts in their campaign to slander and vilify all those who oppose their opinions by leveling false charges against them, in an exposed attempt to extinguish the flame of modernization and development in all spheres.
In view of Turk’s persistence in his tendentious onslaught against the state, in an attempt to block the march of freedom and democracy, he was arrested and referred to justice.
For the first time, Turk actually had a trial. In June 2002, he was sentenced to three years for “attempting to change the constitution by illegal means.”
Turk was back in prison.
Change in the Middle East requires confronting some of the most obstinate ideologies that still exist in the twenty-first century.
The morning after I saw the film, I drove from Beirut to Damascus. The trip winds from the sunny Mediterranean coast up into the cloud-shrouded Lebanon Mountain range, then down into the verdant plains of the Bekaa Valley to the border. Damascus is just twenty minutes beyond the frontier. The lonely stretch of road between the two border posts is broken up, incongruously, by a big pink-and-orange sign beckoning travelers to stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts.
The distance is the shortest between any two capitals in the region. For decades after their independence in the 1940s, Lebanese and Syrians said they were one people split up into two nations. But by 2006, the two cities were in worlds apart. Beirut is raucously open. Damascus is rigidly repressed.
Damascus is the world’s oldest capital. Among Arab countries, it is the city richest with history, the closest rival to Jerusalem. The main street of sprawling Souq Hamidiyeh, a bazaar filled with the smell of pungent spices, artisan stalls, and craft-your-own-perfume shops, dates back to Roman times. The old walled city is still bisected by the biblical “Street Called Straight,” which, in fact, is not straight at all. Saul of Tarsus was converted on the road to Damascus, took the name Paul, founded the first organized church at Antioch in ancient Syria, and spent the rest of his life proselytizing the new Christianity. After Islam’s birth in the Arabian desert, Damascus was the first foreign conquest by the Prophet Mohammed’s troops; it became the capital of the first Islamic dynasty. The armies of King David, Alexander the Great, the European Crusaders, Tamerlane, and the Ottoman Turks are among the many others that have either tried or succeeded at taking this strategic city and adding to its layers of history.
In Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain observed, “No recorded event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in existence to receive news of it. Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus…. She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.”
Syria still has illusions of greatness. It wants all roads in the region—to the Arabs’ final peace with Israel, Iraq’s stability, Lebanon’s future, regional security, Arab political unity, even the war on terrorism—to lead through Damascus. The problem of self-importance is pervasive in a region that gave birth to so many great civilizations. Based on bygone eras, the big countries—particularly Egypt, Iraq, and Syria—made lofty assumptions about their capabilities when they gained independence. But the pretensions affect Damascus the most because it has become so passé.
Damascus in the twenty-first century is stuck in time. Since a modern state was carved out of the old Ottoman Empire in a deal between France and Britain that chopped up the Middle East into its current borders, modern Syria has never quite figured out how to effectively rule itself.
The Levantine country, about the size of North Dakota with a mix of mountain and bleak desert terrain, was so coup-prone between independence in 1946 and the Assad coup in 1970 that Damascus went through twenty governments and eleven presidents. In the decade from 1946 to 1956, disparate governments drafted four distinct constitutions.
Between 1958 and 1961, Syria merged with Egypt in a short-lived experiment as the United Arab Republic. Damascus did not like being the junior partner. It seceded, and then flirted with Iraq for a few months in 1963 about a possible merger. That was the year the Baath Party first took over in both countries, just a month apart.
Baath means “resurrection” or “renaissance.” Its essence was captured in “On the Way of Resurrection,” the five-volume work by party cofounder Michel Aflaq. Baathism blended socialism and intense nationalism with a determination to achieve broader Arab unity—and Arab power. The message initially had wide appeal, sprouting branches in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and Yemen. Its Syrian founders, educated in Europe, wanted to craft a progressive and secular party, somewhat in the spirit of modernizer Kemal Ataturk in neighboring Turkey, except with an Arab bent. The Baathist constitution, passed in 1973, blended French, Turkish, and Islamic laws.
Hafez al Assad initially made a difference. He built highways and hospitals to give old Syria a new infrastructure. He improved access to education, focused on the plight of peasants, and used new oil money from Gulf countries to industrialize and subsidize basic commodities. The ambitious Euphrates Dam project was launched to bring electricity, irrigation, and development to the countryside. A building boom made Damascus an increasingly modern capital; its population quadrupled during the first two decades of Assad’s rule.4
But Baathism fell short—chronically short.
Most of Assad’s grand projects were haphazardly planned or poorly executed. The dam was a technical calamity. Modernization was exploited by corrupt middlemen, who gained far more than the people it was to help. Industrialization was not industrious enough to spur enduring economic growth. Syria had more schools, but education remained abysmal; books, reading, and the quest for knowledge did not become part of
popular culture, as they were in Cairo and Baghdad. Society’s growth was stunted; development stalled. Drought, the bills of war with Israel, and fluctuating oil prices did not help.
When I first went to Damascus in 1981, I was struck by the Mediterranean flavor of a developing city that was the western flank of the Orient. But by 2006, Damascus seemed drably outdated and in need of a coat of paint, exhaust emission standards, road crews, and an extreme makeover. It reminded me of a mix of three cities: Dirty Cairo, but without Egypt’s charm and intellectual fervor; the planned capital of Brasilia, a city stamped of a now-dated era; and any medium-size East European capital after the Soviets got their hands on it.
Syria’s ambitious goals in the region faced a similar fate.
Assad means “lion,” and the Syrian leader always considered himself to be the conscience of the Arab world—the Lion of Damascus, as he was known. He wanted a deal with Israel that would ensure a long-term balance of power in the Middle East; he wanted no part of compromises that would give Israel an edge over the Arabs. Assad viewed Egypt’s peace treaty as a selfish sellout, and he did not trust the Palestinians or Jordan to do more than look out for their own immediate interests.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called Assad the shrewdest Arab leader. But the taciturn Syrian president was also usually the most frustrating, arrogant, and querulous. He lectured Kissinger and anyone else who came through his palace for hours before hearing them out. I was on trips with other secretaries of state who were kept waiting for hours just to see Assad at his safe presidential retreat in the mountains overlooking Damascus.
In 1981, I also covered an Arab League summit in Fez, Morocco, when Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Fahd was to debut his plan for a comprehensive peace with Israel to all twenty-two Arab leaders. The day before, Assad and Fahd had talked by telephone and Assad promised he would be there. Months of planning and lobbying had gone into the Fahd Plan. I was at the airport when a planeload of Syrian bodyguards and staff arrived. But Assad’s plane never showed up. The summit eventually collapsed. Everyone went home.
The underhanded theatrics were so Assad. He was not one to defer to another’s initiative. He did eventually attend a reassembled summit the next year, but only after hefty checkbook diplomacy by the Saudis and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon forced Arab unity.
In the region, as at home, Syria’s gains were often temporary and costly: Assad wrested a political principle—the still-elusive premise of land for peace—out of a huge military loss in the 1973 offensive against Israel. During Syria’s military domination of Lebanon, Assad lost much of his prized air force, the channel of his own rise to power, when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. As the Arab world tired of the conflict and saw diminishing returns from war, Assad stuck it out, even squeezing little Lebanon to back out of its 1983 peace treaty with Israel.
The ends justified any means, no matter how bloody.
He both supported terrorists and resorted to terror himself. In a bizarre 1986 scheme, Syrian air force and intelligence officers, the Syrian airline, and the Syrian Embassy in London were all implicated during the trial of a Jordanian who had his unwitting and pregnant girlfriend tote a bomb aboard an El Al plane bound from Britain to Israel.
Assad offered refuge to hard-line groups that rejected peace. He provided virtual carte blanche to Iran when it deployed Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, via Syria, and he cosponsored the creation of Hezbollah. He honored the deal made with Kissinger to maintain peace along his own border with Israel—but then, over the next quarter century, manipulated surrogates in Lebanon to harass Israel on Syria’s behalf.
After the Soviet demise, Assad lost his backers, arms, and subsidies from Moscow. He was pressured into a new peace effort in the mid-1990s. In the end, however, he held out for all of the Golan Heights without meaningful security guarantees for Israel—and died having achieved nothing. Syria was more isolated, even in the Arab world, than when he took office.
Assad was just as uncompromising in keeping his hold on power at home. He built a cult around his presidency. Syria was Assad. Children wore semimilitary uniforms to school and were indoctrinated in the Baath Pioneers, similar to the youth groups in the Soviet Union and North Korea. His picture was everywhere—schoolrooms, billboards, shop walls, hotels, business offices, mosques and churches, hospitals, train stations, even in a giant stencil covering several floors of high-rise apartments en route into Damascus.
“I grew up thinking he was a god,” said a young woman who had been a Pioneer and interpreted for me during a trip in 2006. “Really!”
No one was immune from suspicion or retribution if they dared to differ with Assad. Baath Party founder Aflaq fled the country; he ended up in Baghdad and never was able to go back to Damascus before his death in 1989. Assad even purged his own younger brother Rifaat, who was Assad’s right hand in his rise to power, the commander of an elite military unit, and one of his three vice presidents. Rifaat was flown to Moscow and then to exile in Europe.
The primacy of survival and a legacy of tyranny were Assad’s bequests to his son. Syria’s political course will be determined by what Bashar al Assad does with them.
When I arrived in Damascus from Beirut, one of my early stops was to see Riad Seif, a two-term member of Syria’s parliament. Seif spent most of his life as a prominent businessman, and he still dresses the part—tailored dark suit, crisp white shirt, navy tie with thin red stripes. Born in 1946, Seif has a thick frosting of white hair with traces of the original black underneath; his eyebrows are still black. He has a mole under his right eye.
For years, Seif had the lucrative Adidas franchise in Damascus; an Adidas logo was still showing on the sliding glass window of his apartment. His large living room is set up with couches against all four walls, like a diwaniyeh, or typical receiving room for Middle East politicos. He pulled a big, cushioned chair close to me as he has limited hearing; then he went to get a hearing aid, but the battery was dead.
Seif is a genial but nervous man. “I am walking in a minefield,” he explained, lighting the first of a steady stream of long, thin, brown cigarettes.
“I have been forbidden to talk to the media. Last month, I promised not to give any interviews for two months—and I’m supposed to keep this promise for another four weeks. So I have to be very, very careful.”
Seif first ran for parliament in 1994, as an independent, after being egged on by friends. He ended up receiving the largest number of votes of any independent candidate in Damascus. He easily won reelection in 1998.
Seif was very much a product of the Syrian system, however. He would not have been allowed to run unless the Baath Party and the government were willing to tolerate him. Assad’s control was total. Seif was considered a safe candidate—and a safe politician once elected. Syria’s parliament is also almost toothless. It has no power to draft laws; it can only criticize or modify drafts put forward by the president.
Yet Seif crossed a threshold after the abrupt death of Hafez al Assad in June 2000, the first change in leadership in thirty years. Two weeks later, Seif assembled leading intellectuals and independent voices to discuss a longstanding taboo—how to open up Syria’s oppressive political system. Once again, the issue of how Syrians ruled themselves was on the table. But this time, it centered on peaceful and public debate. No one was plotting a coup.
The beginning of transitions is often spurred by unplanned moments or events. This was the first one. It spurred talkers to become doers. And even people who had cooperated with the regime began to consider alternatives. The meetings continued week after week, on Wednesday evenings, in Seif’s living room. They debated human rights, pluralism, press and academic freedoms, and how to build a civil society. Seif’s group eventually dubbed itself the Forum for National Dialogue. It was the first of ten new political salons, or forums, launched in Damascus after Assad’s death. The debate became contagious. Salons soon followed in Aleppo, Homs, and other major cities.5
Together, they marked the onset of what became known as the Damascus Spring.
“It was like drinking nice water, pure water,” Seif told me. “Hundreds used to come into this room to discuss ideas and exchange opinions. It was all new for us and really very interesting.
“The Baath Party sent some professors from the university to discuss with us,” Seif added. “Some people didn’t want them, but I said we had to have them. This was for all Syrians. We gave them double time, just so the government knew we were trying to be fair.”
All the new forums wanted change, but they were also willing to work within the system to get it.
The elevation of young Bashar al Assad had initially spurred a sense of movement. An ophthalmologist trained in London, he had been his father’s second choice. His flamboyant older brother Basil, the designated heir, died in a 1994 car crash. His father, the Arab world’s toughest leader, was reportedly bereft. For years, black-bordered pictures of Basil, often in his trademark aviator sunglasses, hung next to pictures of Hafez al Assad all over Syria. Although faded, a few were still visible a dozen years later.
A gangling man with a small head and long neck, middle son Bashar was reportedly a reluctant replacement when he was summoned back from London. His brother had been groomed through the military. Charismatic and well-connected, Basil had been deep into his father’s Syria-centric agenda. Bashar, by contrast, had been a painfully shy child. As an adult, he trained in the sciences, lived in the West, and was into technology. His wife, whom he met in London and married after taking office, had lived in Manhattan, worked as a JPMorgan banker, and been accepted at Harvard Business School. His credentials created a different aura around the second Assad president.