In Mainz, Germany, on February 24, Bush announced that Syria must withdraw its troops and “secret services” from Lebanon so as to allow Lebanon’s upcoming elections to be held freely. “We will see how they respond before there’s any further discussions about going back to the United Nations,” Bush said during a press conference with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who reportedly supported the statement.8
On March 1, in an interview with Time magazine, Assad responded with a vague timetable for a pullback of troops that fell short of a commitment to a full withdrawal. “It should be very soon and maybe in the next few months. Not after that,” Assad said. “The security situation is much better in Lebanon than before. They have an army, they have a state, they have institutions.”9
On March 3, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah visited Damascus and openly called on Syria to withdraw its forces from Lebanon or face Arab isolation. Later that same day, in a press briefing at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Bush turned up the rhetoric against Damascus another notch. “The United States of America strongly supports democracy around the world, including Lebanon,” Bush said. “It’s time for Syria to get out.”10
On March 6, the White House branded Syria’s gradual withdrawal plan “half measures” and “not enough” and demanded that Damascus withdraw its army and intelligence services “completely and immediately,” adding, “the world is watching the situation in Lebanon, particularly Beirut, very closely.”11
Behind the scenes, while the demonstrations in Lebanon pressured Syria to withdraw, the United States worked with the United Kingdom and France at the Security Council to draft a resolution establishing an international investigation into Hariri’s murder. A week after Assad finally agreed on April 3 to withdraw Syrian forces, the council passed Resolution 1595, establishing the United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC).
With Syria out of Lebanon, the Lebanese cabinet scheduled elections over three successive Sundays in late May and early June. The Hariri-family-led anti-Syrian March 14 bloc captured seventy-two seats, breaking the numerical threshold needed to form a government. As Fouad Siniora, Rafik Hariri’s right-hand man in government and former finance minister, struggled to build a coalition, Syria initiated an additional “security procedure” on the Syrian side of the frontier, denying access for cars and trucks departing Lebanon for Syria. Nearly half of all Lebanese commercial trade crossed the Syrian frontier on its way to the richer markets in the Persian Gulf—truckloads of vegetables rotted in the hot summer sun as drivers, stuck with their loads, slept in the shade under the trailers.
While most chalked up the blockade to Syrian spite at having been thrown out of Lebanon, it hurt powerful Syrians, too. Less than a year after President Assad came to power in 2000, his cousin, Rami Makhlouf, had built a massive duty-free store on the Syrian side of the frontier. It sold the cheapest alcohol in the Middle East and housed what was then Syria’s only supermarket, where everything from frozen pizzas to Dunkin’ Donuts goods could be purchased by the boxful. At Syrian customs, officers had turned a blind eye to anything in a Syrian duty-free bag. With the advent of the blockade, however, customs officials now restricted passengers from bringing in anything other than personal effects and luggage.
In Syria, individual reaction to Hariri’s assassination was one of shock and dismay. The country’s Sunni population looked to Hariri as someone of their faith who had brought modernity to the Levant. He not only rebuilt Lebanon, he transformed Beirut—a mere two hours’ drive from Damascus—into one of the Arab world’s best shopping hubs. His secular Sunni example, transmitted through his Future TV channel in Beirut, dovetailed nicely with secular Syrian Sunnis from the countryside like Leila, as well as Damascus’s wealthy businessmen. When asked who they thought did it, most Syrians refused to believe their regime was involved. “It must have been Israel,” Leila said shortly after the murder. “We are pulling out of Lebanon. Why would the regime do this?”
After Hezbollah’s massive March 8 demonstration in Beirut, the Syrian authorities organized a demonstration the following day. Thousands of students and public-sector workers left work early and were gathered along the Mezze autostrade, part of Damascus’s largest modern suburb, for a two-kilometer walk to nearby Malki—the site of President Assad’s personal residence, the US embassy, and the diplomatic headquarters of many other Western countries. The area is named after Colonel Adnan Malki, the deputy chief of staff and Baath Party member who was assassinated in 1955 by a sergeant loyal to the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP)—a fascistlike party advocating the creation of “Greater Syria,” a political and cultural union of what is today Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Cyprus. Following Malki’s murder, SSNP leaders were subsequently either imprisoned or had to flee the country, but the party’s political influence in the state continued.
This was not the first rally that I had ever witnessed in Syria, but it certainly was the largest. As I walked to the rally, I could hear music and drums up to half a kilometer away. Rounding the first corner onto the Mezze autostrade, I immediately ran into a middle-class Syrian family in modern dress with signs reading no usa in English dangling around their necks. As I approached the family, their eyes widened in shock. I stopped two feet in front of them and, with an expressionless face, blurted out, “I’m American. I’m angry!”
The father instantly extended me his hand as his children looked clearly frightened. “We don’t have anything against the American people, only against the government. Please, don’t take it personally!” he said, quite nervously.
I couldn’t hold a straight face for more than a second, and I laughed a little as I shook his hand. “But your sign makes it look like you are against the whole United States. What are you protesting against?”
“Bush meddling in our affairs,” he said. He shook my hand and walked off.
Until that moment, I’d thought the march was to support pro-Syrian Lebanese “loyalists” such as president Émile Lahoud, prime minister Omar Karami, parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri, and, last but not least, Hezbollah. After all, I thought, this was all about Hariri’s assassination, and the Lebanese opposition’s attacks on Syria’s role in Lebanon.
Instead, the March 9 rally was a march against “foreign interference.” As far as the eye could see, protestors marched with signs in English reading NO FOREIGN INTERFERENCE, BOSH [sic]; LEAVE US ALONE; and MR. BUSH, WE DON’T NEED YOUR BLOOD DEMOCRACY. Other Syrian youths carried posters of Bashar al-Assad.
But even to a casual observer, the protests screamed of farce. Most protestors seemed to be just enjoying an afternoon off from work or school. Adding flare to the mob were hundreds of employees of the duty-free company Ramak and the mobile-phone operator Syriatel, both of which are owned by the president’s cousin Rami Makhlouf, all dressed in T-shirts with the companies’ respective logos. TV cameramen standing in the buckets of boom trucks had to focus on small parts of the crowd to make it seem as if the autostrade was filled with people. When I asked one of the protestors carrying a poster denouncing Bush what his sign said, he looked at me blankly and said, “By God, I don’t even know.”
Unexpectedly, there wasn’t a Baathist flag in sight. Those of us covering the rally thought it was in response to the rallies in neighboring Lebanon, where protesters left their party flags at home in favor of national unity under one banner. Even the statue of the Baathist colonel Adnan Malki, which sits near the presidential residence, was without Baathist decoration. Baathist marching songs were completely replaced by the songs of the famous Lebanese singer Fairouz, who often sings of the natural beauty of Lebanon and Syria.
The only Syrian party flags at the rally were those of the SSNP, which featured a black field adorned with a white circle and a red, swastika-like insignia known as “the tempest.” It was not a reference to Nazism, but rather an indication that Syria’s Baathist days were dwindling. Baathism itself is a p
an-Arab doctrine for Arab political unity in the name of confronting the problems facing the Arab world, most notably, the issue of Israel. For some reason, the government decided that the symbols used seemed to be shifting toward something more limited, more area specific. The SSNP also has a vision for political unity but did not have the authoritarian stigma of Baathism. SSNP doctrine is something Syrians and Lebanese both understand, and some of them support it (though maybe not political union, but something that emphasizes the historical, cultural, and linguistic ties that bind Syria and Lebanon together).
As I walked down from Adnan Malki Square toward the office, I ran into Syrian journalists covering the protest. Most told me about rumors that a Baath Party conference would be held in early June. While many remained pessimistic that the conference would produce anything at all, others said President Assad was about to announce a sweeping round of reforms, called the Jasmine Revolution. They said some public relations agencies were already planting the aromatic flower, native to Syria and Lebanon, all over Damascus in anticipation of the event. The movement was to include, among other things, changes in the constitution to allow for multiparty elections (parties not based on ethnicity or religion, however), as well as the expansion of NGOs and similar other associations. From my work with the first lady, I knew that the latter had been under way for some time. The former, however, had not been seriously discussed in Syria in more than forty years.
Back at the Syria Today offices, Leila and I met to decide on how to cover the Lebanon crisis.
“I don’t believe Syria would kill Hariri,” Leila told me. “But it’s going to be the hottest story of the year, and we need to cover it.”
“Yeah, but what do we do if the investigation says Syria did it?” I asked. “Can we cover that?”
“I have no idea,” Leila said.
My ICWA fellowship was starting in earnest, so Leila hired Hugh Macleod, a British journalist working as an editor for the state-owned Syria Times, to edit the magazine. Hugh had just come off a stint at The Independent’s foreign desk, so he knew the issues well and gave us an in-house experienced Western perspective that proved to be vital in giving Syria Today an edge. Hugh believed in pushing the regime’s red lines, and since we had no idea where they now were, we tested them with each edition to see what would happen. As the investigation into Hariri’s murder unfolded, we reported on every development—each month we would print the edition and send it to the Ministry of Information’s censorship office, and each month it just came back approved with no comments.
Waiting for the state to actually set a date for the Baath Party conference, we then ventured into a realm that I would never have thought possible: opposition politics. Syria’s illegal-but-tolerated opposition parties were always hard to take seriously. Not because they hadn’t taken their licks from the state over the years, but rather due to the opposition’s stale political ideologies, chronic divisiveness, and questionable penetration into society. Marxist parties, for example, which threw around terms used only in North Korea these days, were ironically split along sectarian lines. Sectarian parties, especially Kurds, were divided ideologically. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had waged a terrorist war against the state that culminated in the darkest day of Syrian political life—the state’s bombardment of the city of Hama in February 1982—was strictly outlawed, and its leadership was in London. And last but not least, it was hard to point to a single thing that the opposition had done to effectively change political life in Syria for almost four decades.
Nonetheless, in the wake of the Hariri attack, rumors circulated that the opposition was trying to form a central platform for the first time. So we chased down the opposition’s leadership to get their story as part of Syria Today’s coverage of the conference. What we found, in a Syrian context, was amazing and changed my mind about Syria’s domestic opposition.
In the days following Hariri’s murder, two unnamed members of the Committee for the Revival of Civil Society flew to Morocco to meet Muslim Brotherhood chief Ali Sadreddin al-Bayanouni to discuss basic principles on which a united opposition front could be formed. The two returned to Syria with agreement on four broad points: democracy, nonviolence, a unified opposition structure, and a commitment to democratic change. Somewhat surprisingly, the two were empowered to negotiate with Syrian parties on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood to forge an accord. Having direct contact with the Muslim Brotherhood was a risky endeavor for any Syrian, as Law 49 of 1980 made membership in the Muslim Brotherhood punishable by death. The drafting of what would eventually become known as the Damascus Declaration began. Following Assad’s promise that the Baath Party conference “will be a leap for development in this country,” rumors then circulated that members of the Muslim Brotherhood would be allowed to return to Syria without arrest.
The political base of the declaration started to take shape. Civil-society activists met in the offices of Samir Nashar, leader of the nascent Free National Party and a wealthy Aleppo trader, whose discussion forum was shut down in October 2002 in one of the state’s final crackdowns on the Damascus Spring—the period of about two years after Assad’s inaugural speech when Syrians met freely and often to discuss the country’s problems.
“We met on April 4, 2005, and decided it was time to open dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood,” Nashar told me in an interview in March 2006. “We needed to bring the exiled and domestic opposition together.” On April 17, Hassan Abdel-Azim, spokesperson for the opposition’s National Democratic Rally—a grouping of five leftist pan-Arab parties—announced that it was ready to talk with the Muslim Brotherhood as well.
Things soon got complicated, however.
“Some of the opposition was afraid to include the Muslim Brotherhood, because they thought it would cause big problems with the authorities,” Nashar said. “They didn’t know how the regime would react.”
It wasn’t long before they found out. On May 24, eight members of the Atassi discussion forum—the only group that remained open after the Damascus Spring crackdown—were arrested when civil-society activist Ali al-Abdullah read aloud a statement from the Muslim Brotherhood’s Bayanouni. This followed the possibly unrelated disappearance and murder of Kurdish Sheikh Muhammad Mashouk al-Khaznawi, whose tortured body was found on May 11. Nashar claims Khaznawi had an “open dialogue” with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Syrian state denied any culpability in the murder, which has since been attributed to a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist who had earlier branded Khaznawi an apostate. Human rights activists announced on Arab satellite TV that Brotherhood members would be arrested if they returned.
Because of fear of state persecution—or hope that Article 8 of the Syrian constitution, which says that the Baath Party must lead the state and society, would be repealed at the party’s conference the following month and a new “parties law” would be introduced that would allow Syria’s opposition to officially participate in political life—Abdel-Azim decided not to rush things.
“Our idea was to establish a narrow coalition that could be expanded,” Abdel-Azim told me in a March 2006 interview. “We had to talk to a lot of parties. The Muslim Brotherhood was outside Syria as well. So we decided to postpone.”
On visits to Beirut, I was always bombarded with questions on “the situation in Syria.” I used to be able to answer this authoritatively, citing a specific development or law that had been passed and the implications. In the spring of 2005, however, I had to just throw up my hands and say, “I have no idea.”
No one did. The rumor mill in Damascus, always running at full speed, was out of control. Some people talked about tensions between the old guard and the president; others, tensions in the Assad family itself. As a rule, I always discounted such gossip, but one piece of news put me on edge. A friend with strong connections to the security services stopped by for a drink on my terrace. During the conversation, he paused, deep in thought. When I asked him what was wrong, he looked up and said, “You would never believe what h
appened to me this morning. Someone from [unnamed Syrian official’s] people visited me. The reason? To get my comment on a list of major political figures. It started out with the president’s name, and then one word comments or short statements describing their strengths and weaknesses. Next to the president’s name, the descriptions read, ‘weak, inept, unable to lead,’ things like that. Next was the president’s wife Asma, which read ‘arrogant, dreamer, etc.’ It just went on and on. It was like someone was carrying out a human resources evaluation at a company. When I realized someone was doing just that for Syria, and in such detail, I began to shake. I couldn’t believe that anyone in Syria could put such things into print. I was afraid to even touch it.”
Syria had always been an enigma, but hearing this story upset me. The way my friend told the story indicated that it had indeed happened. The fact that some kind of human resources evaluation of Syria’s leadership was going on indicated to me that Syria was ruled by an oligarchy. And the fact that it was coming from this official—who was supposed to be retired and out of power—was even more shocking. Who was included in this oligarchy remained unknown. It is easy to assume important figures such as President Assad or Vice President Khaddam were involved, but this left out powerful relatives, security chiefs, and associates.
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