Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  Seif and others believed they could negotiate with the new leader. “When Bashar inherited the state, he introduced himself as a reformer,” Seif explained. “He promised us a lot.”

  During his 2000 inaugural address to parliament, the new president used words little heard in Syria—democracy, free speech, a free press, and accountability. He talked about the “dire need” for “constructive criticism…from different points of view.”

  To what extent are we democratic? And what are the indications that refer to the existence or nonexistence of democracy? Is it in elections or in the free press or in the free speech or in other freedoms and rights? Democracy is not any of these because all these rights and others are not democracy, rather they are democratic practices and results of these practices which all depend on democratic thinking.

  This thinking is based on the principle of accepting the opinion of the other, and this is certainly a two-way street. It means that what is a right for me is a right for others, but when the road becomes a one-way road it will become selfish. This means that we do not say ‘I have the right to this or that.’ Rather, we should say that others have certain rights, and if others enjoy this particular right I have the same right. This means that democracy is our duty towards others before it becomes a right for us.6

  Assad began his presidency by releasing 600 political prisoners and closing a notorious prison. Big satellite dishes soon proliferated on crowded rooftops. New Internet cafés competed with traditional coffeehouses, particularly for the young. Two mobile telephone networks transformed communications in a country where faxes once had to be registered with the government. A new satirical weekly, The Lamplighter, was the first independent paper in almost forty years to get a license to publish. It dared to poke fun at Syrians and their system.

  From June 2000 into the winter of 2001, Syria was almost vibrant. Intellectuals published increasingly bold demands. The first was the Manifesto of the Ninety-Nine, so called because that many writers, academics, lawyers, doctors, and even a handful of cinematographers were brave enough to sign it. Issued in September 2000, it called on Assad to pardon all political prisoners, end censorship, establish the rule of law, allow the freedom to assemble in new associations, and end the pervasive surveillance.7

  It was soon followed by the Manifesto of the One Thousand, which reflected the burgeoning movement for reform and the growing number of people willing to publicly attach their names to it. The second manifesto demanded even more: an end to emergency law, democratic elections, no privileges for a “ruling front,” judicial independence, and human-and women’s-rights guarantees.8

  By January 2001, Seif was sufficiently emboldened to announce at one of the Wednesday-night forums that he intended to create a new political party to compete with the ruling Baath Party. He wanted to call it the Movement for Social Peace.

  “I was very naïve. I found that people took it very seriously and immediately offered suggestions about how to build it,” he told me, laughing at the memory. “But the government also took it seriously. And it saw a new movement as a big danger.”

  Syria’s Mukhabarat secret police soon showed up. “First, they called. Then they came here,” Seif said. “They asked me to stop.”

  The tone of Syria’s new president also shifted. In one of his first press interviews, Assad warned the reformists against “any action threatening the country’s stability.”

  The Forum for National Dialogue, the embryo for a new party, was shut down in February 2001.

  Seif continued to gnaw away at the system, however. In parliament, he pressed for an official probe into corruption, the other big taboo in Syria.

  Bribes, kickbacks, and rip-offs affect most aspects of Syrian life, often blatantly. One of the first taxis I took in Damascus was ordered to pull over by a cop who appeared out of nowhere on a street corner. The taxi had done nothing wrong, but the driver had no recourse. He could pay off the policeman, face a trumped-up ticket for more, or even be arrested. “It happens every day,” the cabbie shrugged. “Tomorrow the police will be on other corners doing the same thing.”

  The bigger problem is at the top, where corruption impacts Syria’s deeply troubled economy. Most of it is tied to Syria’s political families, prompting comparisons with the mafia—dynasty founder Hafez al Assad as the archetypal Don Corleone and his three sons as the impetuous Santino, hapless Fredo, and wily Michael Corleone.9

  Seif specifically dared to question a monopoly on Syria’s new cellular telephone system by the Makhloufs, the other half of the Assad empire. Hafez al Assad married Anissa Makhlouf. Her family—particularly Bashar al Assad’s cousins—ended up running many of the most lucrative businesses and franchises throughout the country, reportedly including the Dunkin’ Donuts.10

  “As a member of parliament, I was very well-informed about the Makhlouf family deal with the mobile business. It was a big scandal that would cost Syria, an underdeveloped country, millions and millions of dollars,” Seif told me. “I spoke against it loudly in parliament and forced them to investigate it. But when I realized it was only going to be a formality, I made a study and printed three 3,000 copies of it—I did this on my own—and I distributed it all over Syria.

  “The minister of communication warned me that, if I didn’t give up this matter, I was taking a big risk,” he continued, agitated. “And the Makhloufs sent around someone who made very generous offers—a lot of money—to back off. I told them to go away.”

  Seif’s situation came to a head in August 2001.

  As the scrappy politician distributed his booklet on corruption, he also moved to relaunch the Forum for a National Dialogue. Earlier meetings had been informal. Invitations had been by word of mouth. Local intellectuals had begun the evenings with commentaries on some aspect of reform and then opened it up for discussion. The idea was to stay below the radar. The regime had not allowed the forum to register as a nongovernment organization, so the meetings could be considered a violation of emergency law.

  But Seif decided to do it up big. He invited a prominent Syrian exile to fly in from Paris to give a formal lecture. And he printed up invitations.

  “As a member of parliament, I insisted that this was my right,” Seif recalled. “But the Mukhabarat contacted me three days before the event and told me not to hold it. They said it’s not allowed. I told them I was doing it anyway—and they could do what they like.

  “The lecture was held on September 5, 2001. More than 600 people came from all over Syria. They were sitting down the stairway and into the street,” he continued, pointing beyond his living room. “We knew a lot of people would come, so we had loudspeakers for them. We talked from seven P.M. until one in the morning. People were really very energetic and courageous.”

  The next day, Seif was arrested.

  The police came five days after the arrest of Riad Turk, the grandfather of Syria’s opposition. Over the next few weeks—as the world was caught up in the al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—Syria arrested other increasingly vocal politicians, academics, writers, and journalists.

  The Damascus Spring was over.

  Seif was formally charged with defying the state and trying to change the constitution by illegal means.

  “In court, I said, ‘By force? With these muscles?’” Seif told me, laughing. He looks a little like actor Tom Bosley, the portly father from the television series Happy Days.

  Seif was defiant when he faced the judge. There are no jury trials in Syria.

  “I want an explanation as to why I am here. I am a deputy in the Syrian parliament. I performed my duties as a deputy, yet the existing regime in Syria does not accept any opposition or argument other than its own,” he told the judge, in front of a courtroom that included diplomats from the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Belgium, and Holland.

  “I did not violate the constitution. I am here because I demanded a breakup of the political, economic, social, and media mon
opoly in Syria.”11

  The legally elected and most popular independent politician in Syria, a leader of the Damascus Spring, was sentenced to five years in prison.

  Seif was released in January 2006.

  He emerged pledging to move ahead with his new party. To friends, colleagues, and well-wishers again filling his living room, Seif vowed to pick up where he had left off. With an eye on the future, Seif said, his new party sought a membership with a majority among the young.

  “We have arrived at the point where we really have to change,” Seif told them. “There is no way to continue as it is now. We want to build, as soon as possible, democracy in Syria, because that is the only way to save the country and to avoid catastrophe.”12

  But when I met him three months later, Seif told me his ordeal had not yet ended. Four weeks after he went home, the Mukhabarat showed up at his door at two A.M. He did not hear the bell because of his deafness, so the secret police went to the homes of his cousin and then his son.

  “They came back at five A.M. I looked through the door and saw my son surrounded by secret police,” Seif recalled. “As soon as they came in, they put handcuffs on me and a blindfold, then they took me to a Mukhabarat office. They talked to me, then beat me. They wanted me to sign a promise that I would not contact any diplomats or foreigners. If I didn’t sign it, they said I’d be humiliated every day for the rest of my life.

  “The same officers warned my son. They said if he said one word about his father, one member of his family would disappear or be killed,” Seif added. “They said this without shame.

  “Now, I have to report to the police every day from eleven until one,” he continued. “I am followed by an intelligence patrol wherever I go, twenty-four hours, seven days a week. They have warned my family, friends, and associates not to deal with me. They register everyone who comes to my office. People are very afraid to be in touch with me.”

  Seif can not run for parliament again for five years—the time matching his prison sentence. “I have no business,” he added. “The government long ago forced me into bankruptcy. It started when they cut off supplies for my factories.”

  “I am,” he conceded, “a little broken. Not completely,” he added hastily, “but a little.”

  I asked Seif about the future. Words had been pouring out of him all evening, but this time he paused for a moment.

  “Look,” he responded, leaning forward in his big chair. “The regime is very strong. Every farmer depends on the government. Maybe one quarter of all jobs are in the public sector, provided by the government.

  “But the regime has also done many horrible things during its thirty-six years,” he continued. “Corruption is hurting everybody. Unemployment is horrible. No one believes they have the even most basic rights. And then there are hundreds of thousands of Mukhabarat—and they warn everybody, not just me. So a very big majority of Syrians are dreaming of change, but they are also not yet ready to pay the price. They are what we call the silent opposition.

  “Myself and the others, the activists in the opposition, are determined to go on. We’re waiting and watching for opportunities to push,” he said. “They’ve been taking people back to prison again lately, but it’s backfiring. It makes us more committed.

  “We’ve already paid a big price. But we’re willing to pay more. The key for us is that we just have to be steady. We can’t waver.”

  The shifting political winds in the Middle East are upending perceptions about who the allies of democracy are and who are its enemies.

  During the Cold War, the West encouraged the emergence of Islamic movements to foil Communist influence in the Middle East. Islam seemed a natural ally against an atheist ideology.

  But with Islamic parties now rising rapidly, the ultimate irony in the Middle East is that so many of the secular activists putting their necks on the line for democracy are Marxists. Or, as some insist, former Communists who are now just leftists seeking a democracy that gives them political space.

  In fairness, many have evolved, in varying degrees, in both tactics and goals since the Cold War’s end. The neo-Marxists are often taking the biggest risks, organizing the boldest demonstrations, penning the most scathing criticisms, and serving the longest prison stints. They are, in a delicious twist, becoming the best de facto allies of the West on democratic reform.

  Nowhere is that truer than in Syria. Riad al Turk entered politics through Syria’s Communist Party. His position began shifting in the 1970s, forcing a party split. His breakaway faction became critical of the Soviet Union, opposed its invasion of Afghanistan, and put forward a program for multiparty democracy in Syria. In 2005, the party abandoned its Communist moniker; it is now the Syrian Democratic Socialist Party. But Turk remains a Marxist, albeit one willing to share power.

  The neo-Marxist democrats are small in number. For millennia, political life in the Middle East has centered around family, tribe, religion, or neighborhood, with decisions left to a band of elders—not unlike other parts of the world before their own transitions. In Syria, the rise of ideology that crossed those traditional boundaries is a mid-twentieth-century phenomenon. Aflaq’s Baath Party movement, launched in the 1940s, was one of the first, and for more than a decade it was little more than a clique of intellectuals.

  Modern ideology is also a luxury of the literate. And literacy is a phenomenon of the late twentieth century in both Syria and the wider Arab world. Literacy doubled from forty percent in 1970 to almost eighty percent in 2000 in Syria. Education politicizes, intentionally or not. Hafez al Assad’s own experience was proof—and one of the reasons, as Syria opened up schools, that he ensured that teachers and university professors were all certifiable Baathists.

  Since Assad’s death, Syria’s leftists have done the most to define a different future. They have established the parameters and rhythm of action. And, seasoned in Syrian prisons, they have been realistic about the long view.

  Michel Kilo is a neo-Marxist democrat and one of Syria’s leading opposition thinkers. We met late on Easter Sunday, after he returned from Easter dinner. Kilo is Greek Orthodox. Amid the hundreds of books squeezed onto shelves that line his living room and hallways are religious icons, including a picture of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. His wife offered me Easter cookies.

  “I am a democrat, an Arab, and a leftist, in that order,” Kilo said, when I asked him how he identified himself. Kilo is a man of imposing heft and height with Nixonesque jowls, and he speaks with a baritone certainty. “I have always been a Marxist,” he added, “and I will always be a Marxist.”

  During the days of Hafez al Assad, Kilo was imprisoned once and harassed often for his opposition. He was jailed—without charges or a trial—for two-and-one-half years. He was released in 1982. Since then, he told me, he had been summoned frequently by Syrian intelligence for extended questioning, and his telephone and activities were heavily monitored. He and his wife said they could always tell when they were being tailed—by the cigarettes glowing in the dark across the street at night, or when cars with three men are parked nearby during the day.

  I asked Kilo, who was educated in Germany, how he distinguished between Marxism and the socialism of the Baath Party.

  He scowled, his big black eyebrows knitting. “There’s a huge difference! Baathism is Stalinism. Neither includes the idea of the citizen or liberal freedoms. They don’t talk about civil society. There is nothing of the ideas of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. They just have the authority, the state, and the one class,” he said. “Baathism and Stalinism are the opposite of Marxism.”

  After Hafez al Assad’s death in 2000, Kilo became an engine for change in Syria. During the Damascus Spring, he mobilized the opposition behind the Manifesto of the Ninety-Nine; his signature is sixth on the list. In 2001, he was a sponsor of the Manifesto of One Thousand.

  Kilo often negotiated with other dissidents at Café Rawda across from parliament in the modern business district of Damascus. I
t is a bustling, noisy place with a canopied courtyard where men smoke hubble-bubble waterpipes and play backgammon or chess. After the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, Kilo also designed a petition imploring the government to avoid a similar “looming danger.” It warned that “cumulative mistakes” had “exhausted” Syria and exposed the country “like never before.”

  On his own, Kilo also pressed the regime for specific reforms, including distinctly non-Marxist changes in banking and insurance to help jump-start Syria’s troubled economy. “We have banks, but only to put your money into. They’re not modern,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Whenever I think about this government, I think ‘They are stupid.’ Really,” he added, then laughed derisively. “They’re donkeys. When you have clothes that don’t fit anymore, you buy new ones.”

  But Kilo launched his boldest initiative in 2005 when he set out to unify Syria’s often querulous opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood. He proposed a detailed statement of unity on all the major issues facing Syria and a common platform to tackle them. Kilo wrote the first draft.

  The result was the Damascus Declaration.

  Syria, the Declaration warned, was at a crossroads requiring an urgent “rescue mission.” In blunt language, it said, the monopoly on power by an “authoritarian, totalitarian, and cliquish regime” had torn apart the country’s social fabric, put it on the brink of economic collapse, and led to stifling isolation. Syria’s foreign policy was “destructive, adventurous, and short-sighted,” especially in Lebanon.

  That’s imprisonable language in Syria.

  “The present moment calls for a courageous and responsible national stand,” the Declaration added. The proclamation represented a huge leap for Syria’s opposition. The Damascus Spring in 2001 had been about ideas of reform. The Damascus Declaration in 2005 was calling for regime change.

  The five-page document, boldly unveiled at an unauthorized press conference in October 2005, laid out an alternative vision based on reform that would be “peaceful, gradual, founded on accord, and based on dialogue and recognition of the other.” It acknowledged Islam as the “more prominent cultural component,” but it stipulated that no party or trend could claim an exceptional position. The role of national minorities must be guaranteed, along with their cultural and linguistic rights.