In the Lion's Den

by Andrew Tabler

  After lying low for a few months as the Hariri investigation blew over and the Assad regime vented its fury over former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam’s dramatic “defection” to the opposition on December 30, the declaration’s leadership began to organize. On January 18, a twenty-member transitional committee was formed, including thirteen domestic and seven exiled opposition groups. On January 29 and 30, Samir Nashar and other members of the transitional committee attended a Syrian opposition conference in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Syrian National Council in the United States and the Syrian Democratic Assembly of Canada. Farid Ghadry, the head of the Bush-administration-supported Reform Party of Syria (RPS), was not invited. Receiving foreign funding emerged as a fault line in the opposition. The day following the conference, the Damascus Declaration issued its first follow-up statement, which rejected foreign pressure on Syria, declared Syria to be part of the Arab nation, and clarified that the declaration’s references to Islam were not limited to Sunni interpretation.

  “More people signed after that,” Abdel-Azim said. “The demands came from declaration signatories. They said to be silent on Iraq and that Palestine was dangerous. We certainly don’t want the Iraqi or even the Lebanese scenarios in Syria. We need democratic change to strengthen nationalist forces to face external pressure.”

  On February 18, the transitional committee began work on the formation of a fifty-member national council, with representatives from all of Syria’s fourteen governorates. Its members were scheduled to be announced on April 6.

  Both the Syrian government and Washington responded to the Damascus Declaration selectively. The regime gave Abdel-Azim considerable leeway in carrying out the accord’s activities, despite the fact that the regime’s nemesis, the Muslim Brotherhood, was one of the declaration’s primary supporters. Drafts of a new parties law that made their way around Damascus indicated that the regime was not making much space for opposition parties. Syrian political commentator Sami Moubayed, who had seen drafts of the law, reported that while the parties law would be issued within the month, it would not accept parties whose “behavior is opposed to the Revolution of March 8 [the day the Baath took power].” Parties that were “chaotic, terrorist, fascist, theocratic, religious, ethnic, sectarian, tribal, etc.” would be denied license—leaving little room for many of Syria’s opposition parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood and the Kurds, to formally join political life. Not surprisingly, foreign funding was strictly forbidden as well.3

  The regime then began going after outspoken declaration members to force the opposition to toe the nationalist line. Riad Seif, who was released from prison on January 18—the very day that the transitional committee on which he now sits was formed—bore the brunt of regime harassment.

  “On February 14 [the first anniversary of Hariri’s assassination], there was a decision to contain all the Syrian opposition,” Seif said. “I am one of the primary names on the Damascus Declaration, so they arrested me again.”

  He was released the next day. On March 12, during a rally supporting Kurdish rights, the same thing happened. “If they arrest and hold me, I will be a hero, and they don’t want that. They cannot get rid of me other ways, because that would be costly. So they try to scare me so that I am unable to think,” said Seif, whose son disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1996. “They warned me not to talk to foreigners or diplomats. They follow me everywhere. They tell my neighbors not to talk to me. I was less isolated in jail.”

  The problem, according to Abdel-Azim, was a stark contradiction between the leadership’s words and the regime’s actions. “In his last two speeches, the president said the national opposition that doesn’t take foreign funding should be respected,” Abdel-Azim said. “But on the street, two days later, they call us traitors and beat us.”

  Washington struggled to find ways to handle the Damascus Declaration as well, especially in light of the rising Syrian nationalist sentiments resulting from the US occupation of Iraq, Washington’s strong alliance with Israel, and the Hariri investigation.

  “I told the Americans that they will get more credibility if they focus on corruption and the regime’s crimes in the 1980s,” Nashar said, following his return from the Washington conference. “On these issues the regime cannot defend itself…. The human rights associations have a lot of files [on corruption and human rights abuses]. If America concentrates on this, Syrians will emerge from fear. Look at what happened in Lebanon. Do you think that a million Lebanese could have protested on March 14, 2005, [demanding Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon] without international cover?”

  Perhaps with Nashar’s nuanced advice in mind, on February 18, the same day that work on the declaration’s national council began, Washington announced that five million dollars from the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) would be earmarked “to accelerate the work of reformers,” including “build[ing] up Syrian civil society and supporting] organizations promoting democratic practices such as the rule of law; government accountability; access to independent sources of information; freedom of association and speech; and free, fair, and competitive elections.”

  A week later, the Damascus Declaration’s leadership predictably, but kindly, turned Washington down. “The Damascus Declaration refuses foreign funding, including the $5 million from the US State Department for the Syrian opposition,” read the group’s statement a week later. In a follow-up report by Reuters, Abdel-Azim said that while “support by international powers for democratic change in Syria is welcome,” financing was out of the question. “It means subordination to the funding country,” Abdel-Azim said. “Our project is [for] nationalist, independent democratic change in Syria, not through occupation or economic pressure, as we see the United States doing.”

  Making things more complicated, former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Bayanouni announced in Brussels on March 17 the formation of a National Salvation Front, a group of seventeen exiled opposition parties that called for “democracy” to replace the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Another opposition meeting, sponsored by the Aspen Institute (officially dubbed a “small and informal meeting with oppositionists from Syria” on the sidelines of a conference called Civil Society and Democracy in the Greater Middle East), was held in Doha, Qatar, on March 22. A few days later, as Khaddam reportedly met with the virulently anti-Assad Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt, Bayanouni announced that his organization had in fact had contact with Khaddam since 2003—some two years before the former vice president left office.

  “The Damascus Declaration has no value without the Muslim Brotherhood. I am a liberal, and I am responsible for my words,” said Nashar, who was arrested and then released three weeks after my interview. “I saw them in Washington. They have a democratic awareness—perhaps more than the Syrian intelligentsia.” While Abdel-Azim said that the new front had “nothing to do with the Damascus Declaration,” Riad al-Turk, a member of the Syrian Democratic People’s Party, one of the five parties included in Abdel-Azim’s National Democratic Rally, blamed him for dividing the opposition.

  “The formation of the [National Salvation] Front is because of the backwardness, slowness, and hesitation of the Damascus Declaration’s leadership,” Turk said in an interview with the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat on March 20. “The basic conflict is now between external opposition representing America and the domestic opposition representing the regime. The hope is that there is a liberation front that will support a general political line calling for democratic change and preserving national independence while not falling into a severe crisis like in Iraq.”

  To try and understand where the Damascus Declaration was heading, I visited the home of Michel Kilo for a long interview.4 Greeting me at the door in a brown corduroy suit and slippers, he escorted me into his office: a small desk in the corner of a guest bedroom. Despite the ongoing crackdown on dissidents, Kilo seemed eager to talk.

  “The Syrian oppo
sition didn’t leave the country—especially true democrats,” Kilo said. “In the past we had only one block: the regime. Now we have two blocks: the regime and its parties, and the opposition and its parties.”

  When I asked Kilo why he was picking a time when the regime was under pressure to launch the declaration, his answers were surprisingly nationalistic.

  “We are not calling for changing the regime or a revolution—we are calling on reform,” Kilo said. “It’s not right to ask for foreign assistance. We are not part of the American pressures. We are not toys in the West’s hands. We will make a democratic state in this country no matter the cost.”

  I then asked Kilo if the regime had asked the opposition what they would like to see in a political parties law.

  “For five and a half years, Abdel Halim Khaddam said that the parties law was coming after one month. Nothing happened,” Kilo said. “There is a draft law. It forbids ethnic and religious parties and all parties have to recognize Article 8 of the constitution and commit to the goals of the Baathist March 8 revolution. This is not a political parties law—it’s a law to prevent political parties.”

  As much as Kilo was critical of the Assad regime, he was equally critical of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Kilo insisted that the opposition could not work according to “an American understanding” but “our own understanding” and that Washington’s intentions were to “Americanize the region,” not democratize it. “We want to discuss Arab unity and that we will not accept doing nothing about the Palestinians.”

  When I asked him if he would have thought differently had the US occupation of Iraq not broken out into sectarian warfare, Kilo nearly leapt out of his seat. “Of course! There is no democracy without a state.”

  Last but not least, Kilo rejected accepting any money from the Bush administration for Damascus Declaration members. “No one will enter the Damascus Declaration if they take money from the US administration.” As Kilo shook my hand cordially in farewell, I wondered what his next move might be.

  On May 12, Kilo helped engineer the Beirut-Damascus/Damascus-Beirut Declaration, another manifesto urging Syria and Lebanon to establish full diplomatic relations between the two countries and demarcate the long ill-defined Syrian-Lebanese frontier. Two days later, Syrian security forces arrested Kilo at his home.5 The Security Council reiterated these demands on May 17 in Resolution 1680, which called on Damascus to demarcate the Syrian-Lebanese frontier—a key element in ending the dispute between Syria, Lebanon, and Israel over the territorial status of the Shebaa Farms—on which Hezbollah legitimizes the retention of its weapons. Anwar al-Bunni, an opposition figure working with Kilo and head of a closed EU-supported civil-society center, was arrested the same day. The next day, Washington issued Executive Order 13399, freezing assets of “anyone involved in the Hariri murder” and subsequent bombings in Lebanon.

  6

  NO VOICE LOUDER THAN THE CRY OF BATTLE

  A little after 8 am on July 12, 2006, Hezbollah fighters fired katusha rockets from Lebanon into Israel. Simultaneously, a squad of Hezbollah fighters crossed the “blue line” from Lebanon to Israel to attack two Israeli Humvees patrolling the frontier near the town of Zar’it. Three Israelis soldiers were killed, and two were wounded and were taken by Hezbollah back over the frontier into Lebanon. Following a failed rescue attempt, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert declared the soldiers’ capture an “act of war” and ordered the Israeli air force to begin striking targets throughout Lebanon. The war between Israel and Hezbollah that analysts had been predicting for half a decade had finally broken out.

  People across the Syrian capital crowded around television sets and tuned in their radios to get the latest news. After three days of bombing, Al Jazeera television reported that Israel had bombed a Syrian military installation near the Lebanese-Syrian frontier. In Damascus, people openly speculated whether Syria’s old enemy, Israel, was approaching the gates.

  “Did you see the report?” Leila asked me as soon as I answered her call on my mobile. I could sense from the tone of her voice that she was panicking. “Do you think they will hit us as well?” she asked.

  I didn’t know what to say. Syrians and Lebanese are socially and economically joined at the hip, but following the forced withdrawal of the Syrian Army from Lebanon in April 2005, formal political relations were more distinct than at any time in the last thirty years. When it came to a Hezbollah attack on Israel, however, it all came down to what Israel considered to be the “return address.” Given Hezbollah’s strong support from both Damascus and Tehran, it was anyone’s guess who Israel would hold responsible—and when.

  It wasn’t clear that Assad knew the answer either. Syria’s state-dominated media reported the Israeli attacks without official comment for the first two days, instead using statements by Russian president Vladimir Putin and random Italian communist party officials condemning the violence. On July 15, Syrian information minister Mohsen Bilal responded to the border strike with a warning: “Any Israeli aggression against Syria will be met with a firm and direct response whose timing and methods are unlimited.” Iran quickly backed Syria up, warning Israel of “unimaginable losses” if it struck Syria. Tehran added that it was only offering “spiritual and humanitarian” support to Hezbollah. The Iranian regime denied, like Syria, that Tehran supplied Hezbollah with weapons.

  President Bush thought otherwise. On July 17, as Putin openly teased Bush about Washington’s “democracy agenda” at that week’s G8 Summit in Moscow, a microphone that was inadvertently left on recorded a muffled and candid conversation between Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair that would shed light on Washington’s idea of how to end the crisis. “What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit,” Bush blurted out to Blair over the lunch table.1 The question was how.

  As journalists in the West transcribed the candid Bush-Blair lunch exchange, the US embassy in Damascus held a leaving party for deputy chief of mission Stephen Seche, the de facto ambassador to Syria after Margaret Scobey was withdrawn following Hariri’s murder. When I arrived at the US ambassador’s residence—the recent remodeling of which was a bit ironic, given the historically low relations between Damascus and Washington—Seche greeted me at the garden’s entrance along with Bill Roebuck, the embassy’s political officer. After about five minutes of discussion, arms folded, looking down at the ground, I said how, despite their hard-line rhetoric, I thought that I heard some conciliatory gestures in Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s TV address as well as in Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s hard-line speech from earlier in the day. Perhaps the situation would calm down soon, I added.

  “Are you kidding?” one of the diplomats said. “We wrote that hard-line speech!” And with that, he turned away to greet the garden’s next visitor. Seche’s message toed the diplomatic line on US support for Israel—but there was something about the way he spoke that told me that something big was up and that he wasn’t totally happy about it.

  That “something” turned out to be the proxy war in Lebanon between Israel and its regional nemesis, the nuclear-hungry Islamic Republic of Iran. From the first days of the 2006 Lebanon War, stories reported how Israeli generals had, before the war, briefed US officials about a military response to an expected Hezbollah attempt to capture an Israeli soldier. These expectations were based on the fact that Hezbollah had attempted to capture two Israeli soldiers the previous January. Hamas, the Islamic resistance organization with a parliamentary majority in the Palestinian Authority, did successfully capture Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June, leading to an Israeli military rescue attempt.

  So when Hezbollah used a tunnel under the “blue line”—the ceasefire line of 1949 that demarcates the southern border of Lebanon—to kill four Israeli soldiers and abduct two others on July 12, it was no surprise that Israel struck back with a massive military response.

  What was unexpected, however, was Hezbollah’s ability to fight bac
k. A week after the beginning of the bombardment, which included strikes on civilian targets that Israel claimed Hezbollah was using as “human shields,” diplomats attending the garden party were expressing surprise that Hezbollah continued to fire hundreds of rockets into northern Israel every day. Syrians seemed surprised as well, but pleasantly so. Day by day, more Hezbollah flags appeared across the Syrian capital, and young people lined up at shops to buy yellow Nasrallah T-shirts. Homemade decals showing busts of Assad, Nasrallah, and Ahmadinejad arranged together suddenly appeared on professionally printed posters in shop windows.

  Over the next few days, the Syrian media’s pro-Hezbollah propaganda campaign made it hard to determine the depth of popular support for “the resistance.” State-owned Syrian television’s morning and evening news programs—the only two that most Syrians now watch (besides soap operas) in an era of pan-Arab TV satellite stations—led in with video footage of women and children being pulled from the rubble in Lebanon. Marching music played in the background, complete with war drums. The ruckus suddenly stopped, only to be followed by an audio recording of US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s statement of July 21 that the war in Lebanon was part of the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” The linkage between Washington’s democracy agenda, Israel, and death and destruction was clear. Rice’s dictum was repeated every day on Syrian television for weeks, and many Syrians parroted it back to me with the addendum, “a new Sykes-Picot”—referring to the secret 1916 agreement between Britain and France that led to the division of the Ottoman empire into the Arab states we know today.

  In many ways, history seemed to be repeating itself in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria in the summer of 2006. The late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was famous internationally for turning his country’s military defeat into a “diplomatic victory” over Israel, Britain, and France in the 1956 Suez Crisis and defiantly shifting Egypt into the Soviet camp during the Cold War. However, in the Arab world, Nasser is better known for his subsequent embrace of authoritarian socialism and its export during the pan-Arab revolution across the region. The domestic political reforms Nasser and his “free officers” promised when they seized power in 1952 were postponed until Arab “dignity” was restored by Israel’s defeat. The policy, which dramatically ended when Israel routed the Arabs in the Six-Day War of June 1967, was encapsulated in the slogan “No voice louder than the cry of battle.”