In the Lion's Den

by Andrew Tabler

  Excited by the prospect of going to China with President Assad, and after drinking half a dozen glasses of red wine, I felt optimistic for the first time in months. I chatted with businessmen about US sanctions; I expressed my beliefs that they wouldn’t have any effect on the country and that Washington would be better off engaging Syria rather than confronting it.

  That night the wine caught up with me, with a sharp pain in my stomach that jolted me out of bed. All the anxieties of my existence in Syria filled my head. Why was the first lady inviting me to China via Rola? Didn’t I just diplomatically get Rola in trouble? Why, despite calling the first lady’s attention to the irregularities at her NGO, had I still received no contact from her? Last but not least, I worried that I might now be too sick to take such a long flight.

  The next thing I knew, I awoke and found myself lying on my back in the hallway leading to my bedroom. The pain in my stomach was gone, and I felt totally at peace with myself. The next morning, when I told Rola what had happened, she took me aside and said, almost in a motherly tone, “This is normal. It’s just the stress of being around the Syrian regime. You’ll be fine.”

  One week later I was in Beijing, the first non-Arab foreign correspondent and American to ever travel with a Syrian president on a state visit. Bashar had yet to outline a reform vision for Syria, so a visit to China indicated that the young president would adopt the “China model”—that is, no political reform with comprehensive economic reform. From my hotel room in the Chinese capital, I saw hundreds of construction cranes dotting the city’s skyline. Outside, orderly street markets teemed with shoppers sifting through everything from lingerie to MP3 players. As I waded through the market with the members of the Syrian press corps, we all talked about how Syrians and Chinese shared a love for trade. We speculated that Syria could be like this someday soon. All that was needed was some reform.

  The following morning, we were herded onto a small bus that would take us to the day’s first photo opportunity, the first couple’s visit to a section of the Great Wall of China located about an hour outside Beijing. The bus had difficulty keeping up with the fleet of black Audis that made up the official motorcade as the gradient increased the closer we got to the wall. When we finally arrived and saw the president and first lady standing alone atop the ramparts, we hurried out of the bus and up the wall’s stairs; standing at the top of the steps and looking down on us were Bashar, Asma, and foreign minister Farouk al-Shara.

  As we snapped photos of the lanky six-foot-four Syrian president, it was easy to understand why so many Syrians liked him. His father, Hafez, seldom ventured out in public, preferring to speak through the state-owned newspapers from the confines of the presidential palace overlooking Damascus. Direct contact with a Syrian president was therefore something new, though Syrians’ reactions to Bashar’s new open ways were clumsy. When Bashar began making state visits in 2001, for example, members of the Syrian press corps didn’t know how to react. Because the country had been isolated for so long, they weren’t exposed to international norms regarding the handling of VIPs. This led to embarrassing moments. During the photo shoot of Bashar’s first state visit to Spain in 2003, members of the Syrian press corps repeatedly shouted out to the Syrian president and King Juan Carlos for personal photos with both leaders—something the king of Spain reportedly found amusing. The palace’s press handlers warned us on the bus not to ask for any photos with the president—or to speak to him directly at all.

  As the snapping of cameras died down and the photographers got their fill of images, we just stood there, blankly staring at Bashar and his wife, not daring to speak. Reading the situation, he said with a big smile, “Before anyone asks for a photo, let’s take one together and get it out of the way.” The Syrian journalists laughed with relief and excitedly huddled around the president and first lady. The journalists’ faces were filled with glee—in a dictatorship like Syria, a photo with the president wasn’t for your scrapbook but for your office wall. Its message was elegantly blunt: “I’m connected—think twice about messing with me.”

  It wasn’t until the bus ride back to Beijing, however, that I realized the degree to which Syria’s isolation during Hafez al-Assad’s rule made Syrians so suspicious of the outside world. I had not yet had a chance to talk with most of the Syrian journalists, so they didn’t know that I spoke any Arabic. I could hear a number of journalists sitting behind me in the bus talking about me. One in easy earshot said that I was “an American spy” and that the “first lady shouldn’t trust me.” One of them—a Syrian who worked with a wire service—struck up a conversation with me in which he said that he felt all foreign correspondents were spies. As I looked out of the window at the haze hanging above Beijing’s burgeoning skyline, I wondered if Joe Battat had to put up with such talk before China’s economic engine took off.

  The first lady didn’t speak to either me or Rola on the entire trip. During a visit to a women’s center in Beijing, Rola sat on Asma’s right-hand side. When the first lady didn’t even look Rola’s way, I knew she was out of business as Asma’s handler. It was an inauspicious end to a job that Rola never had on paper. I, however, realized that if I was on the trip, I was somehow “OK” with the first lady.

  Two days later, the palace’s press liaison announced that the president and the first lady would be returning to Syria early and forgoing a scheduled trip to Shanghai. No reason was given. Standing out on the tarmac at Beijing’s international airport in front of Assad’s Syrian Air 747, members of the press gossiped about the reasons for the early departure. For days, the first lady had been limping badly during official functions. The press handlers told us that Asma had fallen while working out during her first day in Beijing. Most chalked up the early departure to her injury. Lebanese journalists on the delegation, who were being fed news from Beirut, said that Israel’s trade minister was also scheduled to visit Shanghai at the same time. Hundreds of Chinese companies were lining up to meet the Israeli minister, which apparently angered the Syrian president.

  There were plenty of signs that the Chinese were not taking the Syrians very seriously. For example, only a handful of Chinese companies attended a meeting in Beijing with the Syrian businessmen who were accompanying Bashar. One Syrian businessman told me that the Chinese were not very interested in trade with Syria because its traders had a very bad reputation: many didn’t pay their debts, and most bought only irregular goods (seconds) and reconditioned Chinese products.

  When I got back to Damascus, the city was abuzz with talk of why Assad had returned early from Beijing. One rumor speculated that there had been a foiled coup attempt. Another, backed up by other rumors in the United States and elsewhere in the region, said that American aircraft based out of Iraq had been violating Syrian airspace in hot pursuit of Baathists and “foreign fighters”—radical Muslims seeking to wage jihad in Iraq against US forces.

  Getting confirmation of either report was impossible. However, when the Ministry of Information suddenly organized a supervised trip to take me and a group of journalists to the Syrian-Iraqi border town of Abu Kamal, the government seemed to be trying to undermine US arguments that foreign fighters were flowing across the frontier. At Abu Kamal, workers with heavy machinery were digging a three-foot-wide ditch along the Syrian-Iraqi frontier and piling the dirt in a four-foot-high mound beside it. Border guards dressed in Syrian uniforms, with red and white Bedouin headdresses and skin as rough as leather, followed us everywhere we went. They told us that the berm was designed to flip over fast-moving smugglers’ vehicles moving across the border. Standing beside the ditch and berm, it was apparent that a couple of men with shovels could fill in the ditch and breech the wall in thirty minutes or less—it was hardly an effective barrier to those wishing to wage jihad against US forces.

  American forces had closed the Abu Kamal border crossing in the days leading up to our arrival. As our bus pulled up to the gate, the driver weaved the bus between 1970s- and 1980s-er
a GMC vans with raised rear axles, which made them look like hot rods or cars that clowns might jump out of at the circus. One of the Syrian journalists on the bus told us that the vans were used for smuggling fuel from Iraq. Each was equipped with heavy-duty truck suspensions designed to carry much weightier loads. When the vans’ extra fuel tanks were full, the rear end lowered, making it look like a van you might see driving around a normal US suburb.

  At the guard station adjacent to the gate, Syrian soldiers in drab olive uniforms hid behind cement barriers, seemingly afraid of gunfire from the American side. As we approached the gate and camera operators from Syrian TV began filming, a patrol of US soldiers ran up a watchtower. Two peered through binoculars at us, while another seemed to be speaking incessantly into a radio. Syrian soldiers behind us warned us to take cover, saying, “Sometimes they shoot.”

  Inside the border post, the commander told us that American forces were shooting indiscriminately across the border, seemingly at anything that moved. A few days before, he told us, a young boy was shot and killed while playing on the rooftop of his house. In the commander’s office, he pointed to a bullet hole in the window behind his desk. “This happened just yesterday. It nearly hit my head.”

  PART II

  4

  PRESSURE YIELDS RESULTS

  The explosion was fifty miles away in Beirut, but the political earthquake it caused could be felt at my desk in Damascus. Television news broadcasts of smoke billowing from a massive blackened crater in the Beirut neighborhood of Ain el-Mreisseh shook me. I had slept that night at my apartment in Beirut, where I spent most weekends. On my way out of town, I asked my driver to stop off at HSBC in Ain el-Mreisseh to use the ATM. Now onscreen I saw that the bank’s glass facade was shattered, and rescue workers were pulling bodies out of the rubble nearby. An hour later, the bad news was official: Rafik Hariri and six others had been killed in the blast. I suddenly remembered my dream of being bombed outside Hariri’s mansion. I returned to Beirut immediately.

  A few days after civil defense forces put out the blaze and recovered all the remains, the “battle of the protests,” which would eventually lead to Syria’s decision to withdraw from Lebanon, began in earnest. At the first rally on February 18, 2005, several hundred thousand demonstrators poured into Ain el-Mreisseh to survey the damage for themselves. The demonstrators were organized according to sects, with Druze carrying Druze militia flags and Christians carrying Christian banners. But they all had one message: Syria, get out of Lebanon.

  For the next ten days, the pro-Syrian Lebanese prime minister, Omar Karami, resisted widespread calls to resign. So the anti-Syrian opposition called for another rally for February 28, parliament’s first day back into session following the assassination. Since the Interior Ministry had refused to give permission for the rally, the Lebanese Army cordoned off Beirut’s central Martyrs’ Square, which had been destroyed during the civil war and was now just covered in gravel. The Lebanese, never a people to take authority too seriously, circled around the long lines of soldiers, searching for ways to sneak through alleyways leading into the square. For my part, I scaled the wall at the back of the French coffee house, called Paul, that was adjacent to Martyrs’ Square. So did several of the notoriously beautiful Lebanese women, who did their best to overcome the same obstacle in stiletto heels and skin-tight clothes. The American media described the protests as the “Cedar Revolution,” in reference to Lebanon’s famous cedar trees, an imprint of which is in the middle of the Lebanese flag. My friends in Damascus sent me text messages saying that it looked more like the “Gucci Revolution” on TV.

  The opposition was organized. The party banners of February 18 had been replaced with Lebanese flags and red banners that read independence ‘05. To energize the crowd, the Hariri-owned TV channel Al-Mustaqbal (Future) and the Maronite-Christian Lebanese Broadcasting Company (LBC) focused their TV cameras on well-lit, concentrated patches of protestors waving anywhere from two to four Lebanese flags apiece. To a casual viewer wondering whether to defy the government’s ban on the protest, it seemed clear that the protests were on and worth attending. People just kept coming.

  At the beginning of the parliamentary session discussing the murders, Future and LBC television coverage featured split screens, the right-hand side showing the parliament session and the left showing the gathering protestors. Future set up two large-screen TVs adjacent to the protestors’ main podium, which allowed the crowd to react to the heated parliamentary debate.

  As deputies took their seats in parliament, even more Lebanese poured into the square. Expecting a long, drawn-out fight, dedicated members of the opposition were pitched in makeshift tents in the town center around the Martyrs’ Statue, the recently restored symbol of Lebanon’s struggle for independence from France. “We will wait here as long as Syria remains on Lebanese soil,” one die-hard protestor screamed. “We are willing to lose our jobs and our lives for this cause.”

  After intense parliamentary debate, a beleaguered Omar Karami stood and said, “Out of concern that the government does not become an obstacle to the good of the country, I announce the resignation of the government I had the honor to lead.”1 The crowd roared. Chants of “Syria, get out!” and “Freedom, sovereignty, and independence!” rang throughout the crowd.

  After the initial shock wore off, pro-Syrian parties struck back. On March 8, the anniversary of the Baathist revolution in Syria, Hezbollah launched a massive counterdemonstration in nearby Riad al-Solh Square to avoid confrontation with the anti-Syrian protestors camped out in Martyrs’ Square. Since the estimated headcount surpassed that of the opposition protests of late February, Omar Karami accepted the invitation of the pro-Syrian president, Émile Lahoud, to form a “rescue government” to unite the country.

  In response, the anti-Syrian opposition staged a rally on March 14, 2005, the one-month anniversary of Hariri’s death. Standing on the bridge atop Martyrs’ Square, I and a group of journalists watched as busloads of people from all over Lebanon descended on the Lebanese capital. An estimated one million protestors filled the square—the biggest single protest I had ever witnessed in more than a decade of journalism in the Middle East. A week later, Karami resigned. On April 3, President Assad announced that Syria would withdraw its forces from Lebanon.

  The day finally came. On April 27, at a surreal military ceremony at the Riyaq air base in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Syrian and Lebanese military top brass and political leaders read out speeches praising Syria’s role in stabilizing Lebanon. The chief of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, Rustom Ghazaleh, sat pale faced in the grandstand. Under a clear blue sky, squads of Lebanese and Syrian soldiers, dressed in green and red berets, respectively, were assembled in formation in front of French-colonial-era buildings and monuments dedicated to those fallen in the Levant campaigns of World War II. After every major stanza of a speech praising Syria, the Syria soldiers blurted out “Bi ruh, bi dem, nafdika ya Bashar” (In spirit, in blood, we will sacrifice ourselves for you, oh Bashar). The Lebanese formations would likewise respond with Lebanese slogans after positive declarations about Lebanon. After they had finished, both formations marched out together. The Syrian troops then piled onto army transports that whisked them back to the motherland. A lone Syrian solider that the caravan had left behind leapt onto the last truck as it snaked its way across the border. Lebanon’s twenty-nine-year “Pax Syriana” was over.

  The day following Hariri’s murder, the United States withdrew its ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobey. While Hariri’s murder was shocking, removing Scobey wasn’t surprising, given the quiet tensions in the Levant between the United States and Syria the previous autumn. While Syria and the United States were at odds over Iraq and the Palestinians, they also had divergent views over what should happen when President Lahoud’s term was due to expire in September 2004. The United States wanted Lahoud, who was considered Syria’s man in Lebanon, replaced. Lahoud had spent the better part of the last two year
s blocking Hariri’s initiatives in the cabinet.

  During my last meeting with Hariri in July 2003, he had candidly told me over a cup of tea at Lebanon’s Grand Serail that Lahoud’s people were sabotaging the government’s plans to rebuild the country. “We don’t understand where the resistance is coming from,” he lamented. “We have toned down our disagreements with him lately at the request of the powers that be. But it’s getting worse.” “Powers that be” was code for Syria.2

  After months of watching and waiting, Assad finally played his hand. In late August 2004, Assad used his influence in the Lebanese parliament to extend Lahoud’s term an additional three years—half a standard presidential term. In parliament, Hariri, with an empty expression on his face and his arm in a sling, passed the extension through parliament. That evening, pro-Lahoud Lebanese set fireworks off over the port of Beirut.

  In response, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1559 on September 2, 2004. The resolution demanded “all foreign forces” withdraw from Lebanon as well as the “disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias.”3 In the months leading up to 1559’s passage, Hariri liaised with the French president, Jacques Chirac, to draft a UN resolution against an extension of Lahoud’s term. Hariri was willing to cut deals on Syria’s presence in Lebanon, but Lahoud’s extension was a red line. For the United States to support the resolution, it wanted language that called on Hezbollah and Palestinian militias in Lebanon to be disarmed.4 A month following 1559’;s passage, a car bomb severely wounded Marwan Hamadeh, an economy and trade minister in Hariri’s last government. Hamadeh had been an outspoken critic of Syria’s presence in Lebanon.

  In the days following Hariri’s killing, Washington reiterated its demands that Syria withdraw its troops from Lebanon. In a press release on February 15, 2005, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice condemned Hariri’s murder as an act of terrorism, citing that “all those responsible for this terrible crime must be brought to justice immediately.”5 On February 17, shortly before he was scheduled to meet with European leaders, Bush announced in a press conference that Washington’s withdrawal of its ambassador to Syria “indicates that the relationship is not moving forward, that Syria is out of step with the progress being made in the Middle East … and this is a country that isn’t moving with the democratic movement.” Concerning Syria’s involvement in the murder, Bush said, “I can’t tell you that because the investigation is ongoing, so I’m going to withhold judgment until we find out what the facts are…. We support an international investigation.”6 However, later that same day, in testimony before the US Senate, Rice said that Syria should be held indirectly responsible for Hariri’s murder, “given their continued interference in Lebanese affairs.” In response, one senator urged Rice to tighten sanctions on Syria so as to “not let them off the hook.”7