I headed from my apartment down Shahbandar Street to an Assad rally in front of the Central Bank on Damascus’s central Sabeh Bahrat (Seven Seas) Square; “Mnhibak” posters were taped to nearly every tree and signpost. Russian-made Syrian military helicopters, with missiles attached and towing streamers reading “Mnhibak,” circled over the square. A hot-air balloon hovered over the square, also carrying a giant “Mnhibak” poster. Everywhere thousands of Syrians with “Mnhibak” T-shirts, baseball caps, and signs filled the streets. Everything was regimented—young boys and men stood in lines facing rows of girls and women.
As I passed by, I could tell from their appearance and dialects that they were from eastern Syria—the part of Syria’s Sunni community that Bashar’s father had co-opted by bringing them to the Syrian capital to work in the regime’s bureaucracy. As I walked along, groups of young Druze from the southern Syrian town of Swaida and Alawites from the Syrian coast clustered around the square’s central fountain. These young Druze and Alawite men carried posters showing photos of President Assad with logos of Syriatel, the cell-phone provider owned by Assad’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf. A few of the women wore Islamic veils, but most were dressed in tight-fitting jeans and paraphernalia, like biker chicks. On a terrace above the columns at the front of the Central Bank stood all the regime’s main players—Bashar, his wife, Assad family members, ministers—who waved to the crowd below. If anyone needed a snapshot of Bashar’s minority-dominated regime and its pecking order, this was it.
Taking out my notebook and speaking in Arabic with a few of the attendees caused scores of people to flock around. One man from Damascus said they supported Bashar because he was “open-minded and just—everything in Syria is good.” A seventy-year-old man from Muhajreen, the neighborhood occupying the slopes of Qassioun Mountain above Assad’s apartment in Abou Roumaneh, said, “Syria was once a place of sand—now it is a castle.” Another man said, “Syria is protected by God!”—the line from Assad’s speech following the first Mehlis report into Hariri’s death, which outlined Bashar’s plan to push back against the United States.
When I asked them about the rampant corruption that everyone seemed to talk about, one man said, “Who did this corruption? It wasn’t Bashar!” Another said, “Bashar is the best leader in the Arab world.” When I asked them how many Syrians supported Bashar, one man shouted, “Ninety-nine percent!” Another blurted out, “We want him to be president forever!” Beside me I could hear someone whispering to a wild-eyed man from the security services, “He’s an American journalist.”
Suddenly Bilal, a good Syrian journalist friend, appeared through the crowd to my left. Bilal was an Alawite from the Syrian coast. He looked annoyed and kind of tired. “I have to get out of this place,” he said. Thinking he meant the rally, I suggested he just go back to the office or his home. “I mean this country!” he said.
I stopped in my tracks and stared at him. I knew Bilal was a critical thinker and the best writer I had ever trained in Syria. However, he was also an Alawite and, like many of his sect, historically pro-Assad. “I just don’t understand why all this is necessary,” he added. I suddenly realized that, for all the economic and social changes that had taken place in Syria—not to mention technological—very little had changed politically from the day that Bashar had taken over.
When the poll took place on May 27, 2007, Assad secured 97.62 percent of the vote, a slight improvement over the 97.24 percent he obtained in 2000. The answer to Bilal’s prescient question was an extra 0.38 percent.17
From Washington, Ammar Abdulhamid—my one-time colleague at MAWRED and director of the Tharwa project—covered the Syrian elections via his website, Syrian Elector. Ammar was a recipient of funds from Washington’s Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), the controversial program established by the Bush administration to spread democracy in Arab countries. While funding well-meaning projects, MEPI was criticized as part and parcel of the Bush administration’s “democracy agenda” in the Middle East. Funding was distributed to US NGOs such as the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), who in turn issued grants to civil-society activists in Syria. The initiative was also harshly criticized for funding the exiled Syrian opposition, though the criticism varied, because many saw the exiled group as deeply divided, ineffective, and lacking the street credibility of the Damascus Declaration and other domestic opposition.18
Syrian Elector covered the election in detail; reports came from all over Syria. The website reported on voting fraud and other kinds of regime manipulation of the ballot. While it was an interesting window for foreigners into the Syrian referendum, it was unclear how many Syrians used the site to track the referendum—a referendum that had very predictable results, as Assad was the only name on the ballot—or whether they learned via the site why their vote mattered. Nonetheless, in a Syrian context, the site was unprecedented.
The other big change that day was Leila’s departure to study in the United States. For over three years, she had struggled to keep the magazine afloat, even going without her salary for well over two years. The Damascene businessman who had invested in the project, Nazeer, thought it would motivate her to work harder—instead it wore her out. With a scholarship to the University of Maryland to study broadcast journalism, Leila saw her chance to escape and took it. While I was happy for her, I suddenly realized that I was on my own in Damascus for the first time. I had never navigated the Syrian regime without her. So I asked a friend and wealthy businessman, Abdul Ghani Attar, to invest in Syria Today and give it the financial and business backing that the magazine would need to survive. Abdul Ghani, son of wealthy businessman Abdul Rahman Attar, agreed to do so, as long as I stayed long enough to make some changes at the magazine and get it on a successful path. While I agreed to his terms, I had no idea how to balance that work with my growing journalistic and analytical work for international publications and think tanks.
To take my mind off the spectacle surrounding Bashar’s reelection, I focused on doing the only thing I knew to help the situation and, in a small way, promote America’s long-term interests—I offered journalism training through Syria Today. While the world focused its attention on the dramatic political changes in Syria and Lebanon following Hariri’s assassination and the 2006 Lebanon War, few noticed the economic changes that Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon caused on the Syrian economy.
During the years of Syrian occupation of Lebanon, Syrian officials used the institutions in Lebanon’s free-market economy—most notably its banks and insurance companies—to finance imported goods into Syria. These imports were mostly smuggled into Syria, which still maintained import restrictions to heavily protect the Syrian economy in line with the country’s socialist goals. Syrian and Lebanese traders paid bribes to the Syrian army and security officers who controlled Lebanon and Lebanese customs, forming large networks of corruption on both sides of the border.
When Syria was forced to withdraw from Lebanon in April 2005, these networks were suddenly broken up, as importing goods through an independent and perceivably hostile Lebanon threatened the black market that underpinned Bashar’s opening to the outside world. By necessity, the regime was forced to liberalize import restrictions and allow private banks in Syria—which had formally opened for the first time in 2004—to expand to finance Syria’s new economy.
This was in line with the recommendations of the five-year plan drawn up by Abdullah Dardari—then minister of planning, now deputy prime minister for economic affairs—the German-drafted blueprint for bringing Syria from a socialist system to a “social market economy” and the same model actually used by Germany. Throughout 2005 and 2006, the regime issued licenses for a handful of private banks and private insurance companies in Syria. These institutions issued letters of credit to fuel a boom in imports through Syria. As more boutiques and shopping centers opened throughout the capital, Syrians enjoyed the fruits of globalization—designer shoes and cl
othes, modern appliances, modern technology—like never before.
Instead of seeing the boom as the product of Syria’s forced withdrawal from Lebanon, most attributed it to Bashar’s vision for a more open Syria—despite the fact that most, if not all, of the state’s five-year plan had yet to be implemented. Washington’s isolation policy, combined with US sanctions, kept the United States from using its influence in this rapidly changing part of Syrian society that was, in many ways, the direct result of Washington’s effort to push Syria out of Lebanon. Instead, Iran took advantage of this power vacuum and announced a slew of investments in Syria to help fuel the boom.
To see Iran spreading its tentacles into Syria and taking advantage of the reform that I had advocated for so many years was like icing on a bitter cake. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, I had written an op-ed for the New York Times advocating the expansion of the Bush administration’s promotion of democracy to include Syrian reform. As it was clear that direct engagement between the two governments was out of the question, my article advocated reaching out to Syria’s private sector through the American embassy in Damascus instead. The article’s bottom line was that supporting Syria’s private sector would help the United States compete with spreading Iranian influence in Syria and ultimately help the country move toward a peace agreement with Israel.19
A few days after the article’s publication, I received a phone call from the US embassy’s public-diplomacy department asking for an appointment. When we eventually met, the embassy official—who knew I had helped carry out journalism training in Syria in the past—encouraged me to carry out journalism training through Syria Today. This seemed like a great idea—not only did I have the chance to engage directly with Syrians and promote American values, but it was a chance to test my theory as well. Could the United States reach out to the Syrian people directly and effectively?
After putting an ad in the daily Arabic papers for the training, we were swamped with applications. I and some of the other Syria Today staff weeded out the applications to a final list of twenty-five interviewees. Following the interviews, we narrowed down the list to five finalists. Leila hired them on a small salary to, in her words, “ensure their loyalty.” We then arranged to have secondary training with existing Syria Today writers as well. I taught the course, along with a few American journalist friends from Beirut, using the basic textbook used at Columbia’s journalism school.
In many ways, teaching Syrians who had never studied writing, or never worked for state-dominated newspapers, was a treat. “Going to the tree”—finding people uncontaminated by these influences—for recruits allowed us to attract a number of Syrians who proved intelligent and well-meaning. It was frustrating as well, though—the Syrian educational system had not taught them the basics of composition, let alone to distinguish between basic concepts. For example, the students did not know the difference between the subject of a story and a theme. The idea that the opening of a story should introduce the reader to the subject was completely foreign to them. This was largely the product of the writing style of Arabic newspapers, which tended to “bury the lead” or soften the point of stories in order not to offend influential people. Many of the students not only didn’t do the homework—a common occurrence in any school—but when they did, they failed to grasp the basic concepts of the assignment. Many used their writing not to construct a rational or compelling argument but simply as an opportunity to vent their spleen against whatever angered them that day.
In the end, two writers joined Syria Today magazine. Eager to get more writers and build on our relative success, I opened another training session. This time, however, Syria Today didn’t have the funds to pay the trainees, which forced me to offer the course for free. Like the previous class, I advertised in the local newspapers, vetted candidates, and selected a dozen new students for a course that met once a week. But with each passing week, more students dropped out of the course. Some had other commitments; others just stopped showing up. A core of six students remained, but they showed up intermittently. Few did their homework, and those that did cobbled it together on the way to class. Each worked two or three jobs to keep up with the rising cost of living in the country. While the same number of students finished the course as the first time, only one continued writing. I realized that reaching out to the Syrian private sector would take considerably more effort than one-off, small-scale projects—it needed institutional support in order to make an impact.
During the two months following Bashar’s “reelection,” Syria experienced a massive heat wave, which transformed the Syrian capital into a polluted oven. During the height of the crisis in Lebanon, Bashar had cut the high tariffs on cars from more than 200 percent to less than 40 percent. Syrians who had been saving for decades to buy a car could finally afford to do so—the results were traffic jams in Syria’s major cities and rapidly declining air quality.
From atop Qassioun Mountain overlooking Damascus, a lead-colored smog cloud hovered over the world’s oldest most continuously inhabited city. To escape the heat and bad air, Syrians purchased air conditioners, which were also suddenly available at affordable prices due to the cuts in import tariffs.
Sitting at my desk, I could hear a deep humming noise outside our office. I assumed the noise was from welders working next door, a building which had been under continuous construction since the day we moved into office in 2005. The humming got louder and began to pulse, which reminded me of the sound you might hear in a sci-fi film like The War of the Worlds when a spacecraft is about to attack.
Suddenly, a trainee in the magazine’s writing program came running into my office. “Evacuate the building!” he screamed.
Running out of the office, the acrid smell of burning plastic filling the air, I immediately saw the problem as I got out of the door: smoke was billowing from the Free Zone’s transformer building, located next door to the Syria Today offices. When the staff reached the other side of the street and joined employees of other local businesses fleeing the chaos, I could see flames and smoke coming from different electricity-transmission boxes along the main thoroughfare. Instead of blowing some fuse or breaker somewhere in the Syrian grid, the meltdown continued, the humming growing louder as sparks flew out of the corrugated metal vents of the transformer building.
Several hundred employees of the various Free Zone businesses just stared in disbelief as the owners of cars near the transformer building frantically tried to move them out of harm’s way. Othaina, braving smoke and mortal danger, ran back into the Syria Today offices, threw the main electricity switch, then ran back out. Thara, our office administrator, wept openly. “It’s just chaos,” she said to me in English, wiping tears away from her cheeks.
About twenty minutes later, someone somewhere turned off that entire sector of the Damascus grid to stop the meltdown, and the humming stopped. An olive-green Land Rover with blackened windows and stencils of Bashar’s silhouette then arrived at the transformer building. The license plates indicated they were from one of the country’s security branches. No one got out of the vehicle, which sat there for two or three minutes, then drove around to the junction boxes that were on fire, and sped down the street and out of the Free Zone.
Syria Today staff, their faces in shock, watched as firemen put out the flames. When it was over, I just told them to go home—we could operate without Internet service, but without power, there was simply nothing to do.
The July meltdown was just the latest sign that Syria’s infrastructure was under considerable stress from increased demand and difficulty in performing maintenance due to US sanctions. In mid-June, ADSL Internet connections all over the city died, paralyzing businesses such as Syria Today, which had benefited from the “new economy” that Bashar’s opening up to the outside world had made possible. In the past, a couple of phone calls and a few thousand pounds to our wasta, or influential friends, in the state-owned telecommunications establishment would have solved the problem. But thi
s time was different: no matter how many times we called, no one was able to fix the problem.
The magazine’s IT manager said that there was nothing she could do, as the problem was happening all over the country. Much slower dial-up connections still worked, however, so we set up an Internetaccess terminal in the newsroom. Productivity ground to a halt, though, and most employees simply stayed home and used their personal dial-up accounts.
Flying on Syrian Arab Airlines, the state-owned national carrier that was later rebranded Syrian Air, had become an increasing problem as well. US sanctions on Syria banned all exports of goods with more than 10-percent American content. A waiver in the sanctions allowed exports of repair parts to Syria via export licenses, applications for which Syrian Air’s suppliers had to file with the US Commerce Department in Washington. During the 1990s, when relations between Washington and Damascus were arguably at their all-time best (as Syria was involved in US-sponsored peace negotiations with Israel), the US government approved most of the export licenses for Syrian Air parts and also allowed the carrier to purchase a few used Airbus aircraft, which, because they had more than 10-percent US content, required an export license as well.
Despite the fact that Washington tightened sanctions in 2004, the waiver for aircraft parts was still in effect. However, as relations worsened, export-license applications were increasingly rejected. The Bush administration had adopted a hard line on the interpretation of the waiver, which allowed exports only for “safety of flight.”
In the Lion's Den Page 20