by Robin Wright
The document was signed by more than 250 major opposition figures as well as parties both secular and religious, Arab and Kurdish. It was also the first time the opposition inside and outside the country came together in a national accord.
Kilo personally traveled to Morocco and Europe to meet exiled Muslim Brotherhood leaders and convince the Islamists to join their secular counterparts.
Riad Seif, the former parliamentarian, was the first name on the list. He had signed it while still in prison. The regime, Seif had told me, later tried to force him to withdraw his signature.
“They were crazy that I signed it,” Seif had said. “They asked my son and my daughter to convince me to take my name off it. The chief of the prison came and talked to me many times. I told him the last time, ‘You can hang me, but I won’t make this announcement.’”
When I talked to Kilo, he was working with other dissidents on the next steps. The fathers of the Damascus Declaration were trying to establish a permanent leadership, with a general secretary, a media office, and an outreach program for the public. The goal was a national conference to bring all sides together to make decisions.
I told Kilo that the odds of success seemed pretty remote. The government had publicly ignored the Declaration. The Damascus Spring had been squelched after less than one year. And Kilo had admitted that he was increasingly being summoned for questioning by Syrian intelligence.
“The Damascus Declaration represents the coming together of ninety-five percent of the opposition—the democratic opposition, the Islamist opposition, and the Kurdish opposition,” Kilo replied.
“The opposition is now strong enough to emerge as a new pole on the political spectrum. It is strong enough to develop a program of democratic change,” he said. “For the first time since 1963, when the Baathists took over, it is strong enough to try to assemble its own system and leaders.”
“Yes, the spring is over,” he added. “But each step builds on the last one.”
It is likely to be a long march, however.
Three weeks after I left, on May 14, Kilo was summoned by Syrian intelligence. He had just helped craft yet another defiant pronouncement. This one called on Syria to normalize diplomatic relations with Lebanon, define their borders, and open an embassy—a step that would have recognized the separation of the two countries, formally ended any Syrian claims to its little neighbor, and cost Damascus its one trump card in negotiating for the return of its own Golan Heights from Israel. The petition, signed by 500 prominent Syrians and Lebanese, was quickly dubbed the Damascus-Beirut Declaration.
This time, Kilo did not return home.
Three days later, he was charged with “weakening national sentiment” and “spreading false or exaggerated news that can affect the standing of the state.” The crimes carried the potential for a sentence of decades, even life, in prison.
Kilo’s arrest marked the beginning of the biggest crackdown since Bashar al Assad assumed power. The opposition was maturing, but Assad was proving to be little different from his father.
The neo-Marxists have taken a circuitous route to their current democratic agenda. They have assumed a leadership role largely by default; Syria has few Western-style liberals, while the Muslim activists are either in exile or underground. Most of the neo-Marxists have mellowed with time, their thinking shaped by the Soviet Union’s collapse, Lebanon’s sectarian civil war on one border, Iraq’s bloody chaos on another, and the general triumph of Islamic movements in elections regionwide. Most now want to avoid both radical ideas and sudden upheavals.
Yassin Haj Saleh and his wife Samira al Khalil are both neo-Marxist democrats. To see them, I drove to one of the new Damascus suburbs, which are mostly blocks of sterile apartment buildings on the barren hills surrounding the capital. Their small apartment is on the sixth floor and, like many buildings in Syria, theirs did not have an elevator. The walls on the walk up were splattered with cement drippings, and on a windy day the stairwell was a cold wind tunnel.
Saleh and Khalil, who were both born in 1961, are former jailbirds. Both were arrested because they were members of one of Syria’s Communist Parties, although not the same one. (They did not meet until after they were released.) Saleh belonged to Turk’s party; his wife was a member of the communist Labor Party. All communist parties were outlawed, even though Syria’s Baath Party is socialist.
Saleh is a tall, handsome man with prematurely silver hair and the easy demeanor and attire of an academic. Khalil was wearing jeans and a denim jacket, and she wore her brown hair in a flip with big, curled bangs. Her pale lipstick was outlined by a darker lip pencil.
Saleh was a nineteen-year-old medical student at the University of Aleppo, in Syria’s second largest city, when he was arrested in 1980. He was held for the next sixteen years. He told me the now familiar tale of detainee torture during interrogations—the floggings with electric cable that crush muscle and break bones, the infamous “wheel” that detainees are chained to for hours, and another wooden device to which the hands and legs are tied so tightly that it leaves hands paralyzed for months.
Saleh had no inkling of his fate until well into the eleventh year, when he was finally charged. The first count was opposition to the Baath Party goals of “unity, socialism, and progress”; the second was belonging to a group whose aim was to overthrow the regime. He was tried along with 600 others at the Supreme State Security Court—without lawyers, witnesses, or evidence. He was sentenced to nine years for the first offense and fifteen years for the second, both at hard labor, to serve concurrently.
At the end of fifteen years, Saleh was asked to cooperate with the regime, effectively to become an informant. “I said to them, ‘It’s not enough to jail me for fifteen years? It’s now my right to be released,’” he recalled.
So Saleh was held for another year—“and fourteen days,” he noted. “They don’t even respect their own laws or their own courts.” He was transferred to Syria’s most notorious prison, in Tadmur, also known as Palmyra, which means “city of palms.” It is an oasis in the eastern desert with Roman ruins dating back to the second century. It was once a caravan stop between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. It is a city far from the fertile strip between the coastal mountains and the desert where most Syrians live.
“The extra year was the harshest and most atrocious,” Saleh told me.
“Tadmur is a place that literally eats men. It was worse than the ‘house of the dead’ described by Dostoyevsky. Fear is a way of life in Tadmur, where every day primitive and vengeful torture is carried out at the hands of heartless people,” he added. “I was always hungry and always afraid.” When he was released in 1996, he weighed 104 pounds.
His wife, Khalil, spent four years in jail. She and her sister were arrested for membership in the communist Labor Party. A bakery worker at the time, she was never charged, never tried, and never told how long she would be held.
“We just wait,” she said. Khalil was freed in 1991 when Hafez al Assad pardoned female prisoners.
After his release, Saleh returned to medical school, since employment is difficult for former political prisoners. He graduated in 2000 but never practiced. He instead became one of Syria’s most outspoken critics. The state-controlled press will not publish Saleh in Syria, so he writes opinion pieces in papers ranging from Lebanon’s An Nahar to The New York Times to air his view on changes needed in Damascus. He now lives, somewhat precariously, as a freelance intellectual.
Saleh chuckled when I asked him why the Marxists of the twentieth century have evolved into the most outspoken Middle East democrats in the twenty-first century.
It was, he replied, largely a reaction. “We originally became Marxists because the first generation of liberals failed to solve the national problems that faced our countries after independence,” he said.
“The majority of Syrians and Egyptians and Iraqis were poor farmers. In fact, they were more than poor, they were nearly slaves. But the old li
berals of the Arab world, the people who led the struggle for independence against colonial rule, generally came from a class of urban notables—people who were rich and had big landholdings. They were not interested in agricultural reform.”
“They collapsed completely in Syria in the 1960s. That’s why the Baathists had an easy victory over them,” he added.
The Baathists, led by Syria’s Alawite minority, identified with the farmers. Hafez al Assad was of peasant stock from the northern mountains. He was born in a two-room house without electricity, the ninth of eleven children. As a child, he worked and played in the fields, and rode a donkey or walked for transport.13 The majority of Alawites were poor, rural, and less educated.
Through the Baath Party, the Alawites got their revenge against Sunni Muslims and Christians who lived in the cities and owned much of the land. The Baathists squeezed out the traditional power brokers—and had their dominance entrenched in law. Article Fifty-three of Syria’s constitution stipulates that at least one half of the members of the People’s Assembly must be workers and peasants.
“So, since we don’t have a liberal heritage in this region, rehabilitating liberalism and democracy will come mainly from people who were Marxists, people who are more aware of political modernism,” Saleh said. “Many of us read about the French, British, Italian, and German experiences. We are historians and thinkers and economists.
“After the Cold War, many became liberals. Some are liberals today in the same way they were Marxists before,” he added, a smile breaking across his face. “They would never have criticized the Soviet Union before. Now, they would never criticize the United States—or at least what it stands for.”
Neither Saleh nor his wife is active in their respective Communist parties. And both now oppose radical political upheaval. “As we have seen in Iraq, ‘regime change’ is easy, but ensuring stability afterwards is very difficult,” Saleh wrote for The New York Times in an article entitled “Don’t Rush the Revolution.”
Despite the authoritarian nature of the Syrian leadership, gradual change is preferable to abrupt change. A slower pace would not only provide a better chance at avoiding bloodshed, but would give a larger number of Syrians a chance to gain some experience in public affairs, as many have started doing recently by more openly criticizing the regime.
True democracy requires a maturation process with respect to participation.14
Despite the evolution in his thinking, Saleh still gets summoned occasionally by the Mukhabarat for lengthy questioning. Given the challenges of dissent, I asked Saleh if pressing for change in Syria was worth the costs.
“I think it is,” he said. “We haven’t been able to defeat the regime, but we have participated in saving the dignity of our people. This is the moral capital we need—that some of our people are saying no to dictatorship, no to tyranny.
“It is humiliating when you have such a regime,” he added, “and no one says how bad it is.”
The ultimate redline for politics in Damascus is religion. It is another of Syria’s ironies.
On Easter weekend, I visited the Umayyad Mosque. It is one of the most magnificent settings in the Middle East. Built in the eighth century, it was named after the first dynasty to lead the new Islamic world, which ruled from Spain to India for almost a century. More than 10,000 stonemasons and artisans labored on the mosque for more than a decade. It is the first monumental work of architecture in the Islamic world. In 2001, Pope John Paul II chose it for the first visit by a pope to a mosque since Islam was founded. Like everyone else, he removed his shoes when he entered.15
The grandeur of the mosque’s vast courtyard always reminds me of the great piazzas of Venice and Rome. It bustles: Children slide on stocking feet across the smooth white stone floor. Small groups of women sit and talk. Men stroll. Pigeons peck and flock. The courtyard is surrounded on three sides by an arched arcade; the fourth side is a facade of golden mosaics that leads to a huge prayer hall.
Three of the most influential characters in Middle East history are buried here. The sarcophagus of Saladin, the Sunni leader who died in Damascus in 1193 after forcing European Crusaders out of Jerusalem, is in a tranquil little garden. In a small room off the courtyard is a shrine with the head of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed. His battle against the Omayyad dynasty in 680 A.D. symbolized the greatest schism within Islam, dividing Sunni and Shiite. I got caught up in a crush of Shiite pilgrims from Iran trying to touch the shrine. Several chador-clad women brought their children’s clothes to rub against its silver grill.
In the heart of the long prayer hall, the head of John the Baptist is reputedly buried in a domed sanctuary with unusual green glass windows. Muslims revere John as the prophet Yahya; he is mentioned four times in the Koran. Because of the story of his birth to a barren mother and aged father, devout Muslim women sometimes pray in front of his shrine if they are having trouble getting pregnant. On the day I visited, several Muslim women mingled with Christian tourists in front of the tomb.
Politically, Syria is arguably the Arab world’s most secular country, particularly after the fall of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq. Both Syria and Iraq were ruled by the socialist Baath Party, albeit by branches with rival interpretations. Yet underneath, Syria remains a conservative religious society.
“Spiritual wealth is ingrained in the Syrian character,” Mohammed Habash told me when I stopped in to see him at the Islamic Studies Center. Habash, a diminutive but ebullient man, is both a Muslim sheikh and an independent member of parliament. He also hosts popular television shows on religion.
“We believe this land is a cradle of religions,” he explained. “More than one half of the people in the world belong to a religion that has ties to Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Moses, Jesus, John the Baptist, or the prophet Mohammed and his companions—people who came from Syria or came through Syria. That is why this country is known as Cham Sharif, or Noble Land.”
Article Thirty-five of Syria’s 1973 constitution stipulates that “freedom of faith is guaranteed. The state respects all religions.” It also promises “freedom to hold any religious rites, provided they do not disturb the public order.” Both provisions are selectively observed.
The Old City in Damascus still has a vibrant Christian quarter. During my visit, candy shops were selling big chocolate Easter eggs, while my hotel displayed baskets of pastel-dyed eggs and stuffed Easter bunnies. Because the Orthodox Easter is celebrated later than the Catholic Easter, Syria had two three-day national holidays on sequential weekends to observe both. Christmas is a national holiday too. Syria is still home to almost two million Christians, roughly ten percent of the population. The cofounder of the Baath Party, Michel Aflaq, was a Christian.
Freedom does not extend to Jews, however. For millennia, Damascus’s labyrinthine Old City had a Jewish quarter. But almost all of the 30,000 Jews fled during periodic waves of persecution following Syria’s independence in 1946, Israel’s creation in 1948, and the 1956 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars. Synagogues were attacked or burned down. Jewish businesses were ransacked. And special identity cards were issued with the word “Jew” in red stamped across them. The last large group of Jews left when Syria lifted the ban on travel during peace talks with Israel in the early 1990s.
Damascus instead became the refuge for Mohammed Oudeh, better known as Abu Daoud, the aging and unrepentant mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of eleven Israeli athletes.16
But no domestic issue rattles the regime more than what Muslims are doing—or thinking—given recent history and current public opinion.
“If you ask me about sentiment on the street, I can tell you that more than ninety percent of Syrians believe in God,” Habash told me.
“But if you ask me about the role of religion in political life, I can tell you that at least fifty percent of Syrians believe religion must play a role in our political life. That’s almost ten million people.”
As in Egypt, the most consist
ent challenge has come from the Muslim Brotherhood. Unlike Egypt, however, it was not always outlawed. Egypt’s Ikhwan was founded by a disillusioned schoolteacher challenging the elite—and pitted Sunni against Sunni. Syria’s movement was founded by Islamic scholars with ties to the powerful Sunni notables and landowners of Aleppo and Hama—and the clash eventually pitted Sunni against Alawite.17
The Syrian wing was founded in 1945, a year before independence from France. In the 1950s, it was initially part of the legal opposition. In the 1961 parliamentary elections, it won ten seats. It was outlawed after the 1963 coup that brought the Baath Party to power.18
Tensions played out most traumatically in the charming old city of Hama. Syria’s fourth largest city was famed for its quaint labyrinthine streets and the creaking waterwheels along the meandering Orontes River. Its roots date back to the Neolithic Age, several millennia before Christ. But after the 1970 coup that brought Hafez al Assad to power, Hama also epitomized the far end of Syria’s political spectrum:
Hama was a stronghold for the Muslim Brotherhood as well as cells of militant guerrilla groups, like the Fighting Vanguard and Mohammed’s Brigades. The government in Damascus was staunchly secular and socialist.
Hama was traditional; many women wore head scarves; many men, loose tunics. Damascus was a Westernized metropolis of suits and ties.
Hama was dominated by Sunni Muslims, who account for seventy-five percent of Syria’s eighteen million people. The Assad regime was dominated by minority Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam with secretive beliefs that account for eleven percent of the population.
The only common denominator was that both sides were willing to use brutal violence to achieve their goals. The result was a mini-civil war.