Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  An old joke about poorly paid civil servants in Syria is that they go into work in the morning, put their suit jackets on the backs of their chairs, go out for coffee—and return at day’s end to retrieve their jackets.29

  Shaaban was running late, so I waited in a reception room. I was chatting with the young interpreter I used when her mobile telephone rang. I could hear the tone of the male voice on the other end. The caller did not identify himself. He wanted to know who I was seeing, what I had been told, and what I was saying during my visit, the interpreter told me.

  Surely, she replied, he knew everything I was doing.

  He asked if she wanted to come in to talk to him in person.

  “No,” she responded.

  He kept pressing her. She explained that we were sitting in a government ministry. He said he would call back later.

  “And he will,” the interpreter said. “I’m surprised he didn’t call earlier.”

  I had been particularly careful on this trip. I have been going to Syria since 1981; I can usually pick out the Mukhabarat goons in a hotel lobby, restaurant, shop, or office in seconds. I have been to Syria with three American secretaries of state, and it’s always interesting to note the beefed up intelligence presence wherever we are staying. On this trip, I deliberately did not make telephone calls from my hotel room, even to the interpreter. I did not bring a cell phone. I did not plug my laptop computer into the Internet. I selectively checked e-mails at a business center and later changed passwords on the account. The intelligence officer’s call was either clumsy, or they wanted me to know.

  I raised the issue with Shaaban as soon as I was ushered into her office.

  “No, no, this is wrong. This is silly. Really. This should not be happening anymore,” she said. “I will make a telephone call later.”

  I asked Shaaban to call the interpreter in—she had asked that the young woman not join us—and tell her the same thing. She reluctantly did.

  Shaaban is a precise and brusque woman. She was wearing a navy business suit, navy stockings and a string of pearls. She wears her thick brown hair short, combed behind her ears. She has a Crest smile. She is also a devout Baathist.

  Shaaban again became the public face of the regime after the Valentine’s Day assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, after Syria came under political siege from the outside world for what many Lebanese charged was its role in the murder. The United Nations launched an unprecedented investigation into the murder. Even traditional allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia demanded accountability by Damascus. The probe soon implicated top Syrian intelligence and military officials, including Assad’s younger brother Maher and his brother-in-law Asef Shawkat. Shawkat married Assad’s older sister Bushra, reportedly the most politically astute of the Assad children, against her father’s wishes.30 Bashar al Assad later named him head of military intelligence, tightening the family circle around him.

  Shaaban was unleashed to defend the regime. She did slews of television interviews dismissing the international probe. She penned several op-ed pieces in the Arab and Western media pointing in other directions. She took on the kind of role that Tariq Azziz had performed for Saddam Hussein in Iraq as English-speaking front man.

  Shaaban, who did a Fulbright Scholarship at Duke University, insisted that Israel and the United States were responsible for Hariri’s murder. A week after the massive bombing of Hariri’s motorcade, she wrote a rambling opinion piece alluding to former American intelligence operations as a precedent.

  We all know which countries can organize civil disturbance in Iran, Chile, Venezuela, and a long list of other countries where democracy was buried under tyrants appointed just because they were “friends.”

  The parties who benefit most are those very same parties who benefited from the occupation of Palestine and Iraq, destabilizing Lebanon, targeting Syria, and severing the close ties that bind the Syrian and Lebanese people together…. Eliminating him in that criminal manner from the Lebanese equation paves the way for international and regional forces, well known to all in terms of capabilities, expertise, and incentives, to implement the scheme of taking over the Middle East.31

  On the home front, however, Shaaban conceded her government had serious problems. “If the Baath Party wants to survive, it has to reform itself,” she told me.

  “The most important thing is that we are looking at ourselves in the mirror, really bravely, and trying to face whatever problems we have,” she added. “I hope in the next two years, most people would feel changes in the way we are functioning.”

  But Syria’s focus is on institutional efficiency, not individual freedoms, Shaaban made clear. Priority goes to the economy, not democracy.

  Syria’s four-point reform package began with strengthening and streamlining government. “For the first time in government, we meet every other week with the cabinet so we can discuss strategy,” she explained. “Each ministry takes a turn and gives a report. And then we have one year to implement it and come back with the results.”

  Shaaban was a bit rushed because her report was due at a cabinet session the next day, and she was still working on it. The regime had also hired a Malaysian firm to assess each branch of government and propose changes.

  The second goal was to tap into Syria’s rich history and market the country as a tourist destination. “Syria could be a huge attraction,” she said, and tourism could be a vital supplement to revenues centered largely around oil and agriculture. The government was building new hotels and roads to attract more tourists. Bashar al Assad had just attended the opening of the lavish Four Seasons Hotel, one of the few new buildings in Damascus.

  The third priority was her project to get expatriates to invest—and to keep their Syrian citizenship. “Syrians abroad have done extremely well. Our estimates show that there are 50,000 Syrian doctors in the United States and Europe. We also have many Syrian businessmen abroad,” she explained. “We encourage them to take the nationality they want but to keep their Syrian identity. There’s no conflict between being loyal to the country you chose and still being proud of your origins and culture.”

  Finally, the government was trying to modernize its industry, in part for exports. “Most of the time,” she acknowledged, “our trade balance is in the red.”

  When I pressed her on political reforms, Shaaban would not to go into specifics. Ideas floated after Bashar al Assad took office—about a more independent media and a new law on political parties—were no longer floating. Shaaban insisted, however, that new political space was opening because nongovernment groups were “springing up like mushrooms.

  “In fact, we should be more careful,” she told me. “You don’t want to jump from one state to another without organizing how that move should happen. Society must remain stable.”

  Stability has been the political catchword for Syria since independence. Syria has fourteen diverse religious and ethnic identities. Besides Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians, they include a restive and non-Arab Kurdish community that makes up almost ten percent of the population—in a country officially named the Syrian Arab Republic.32 If political parties were allowed to form freely, Syrian analysts warned me, many would be built around a religious or ethnic base.

  Even his toughest critics credited Hafez al Assad with holding the country together—albeit through Soviet-style repression.

  Under his son, stability was central again in the debate over reform. With chaotic Iraq on one frontier and troubled Lebanon on the other, Syrians both in and outside government were nervous about sectarian divisions erupting at home. The influx of more than one-half million Iraqis fleeing across the 450-mile border between 2003 and 2006 had driven home the potential dangers.33

  On the day I strolled through the Old City’s historic souq, one of several huge maroon banners strung across the roof declared in awkward English, WE ARE IN SYRIA THE COUNTRY OF SELF-ESTEEM. WE REFUSE YOUR DEMOCRACY AFTER WHAT WE HAVE SEEN HAPPEN IN IRAQ.
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  A sense of vulnerability over the unknown impact of real reform ran deep. The end of Iraq’s Baath Party produced sectarian strife that killed dozens of Iraqis daily, worsened the economy and unemployment, increased crime, kidnappings, and rape, and brought with it a massive and prolonged foreign military presence. Many Syrians I talked to worried about what the end of their own Baath Party would mean.

  The sense that Syria was fragile was visible in unusual ways.

  The Middle East has its own version of American Idol—called Superstar—which runs on Lebanese television and is open to contestants throughout the Arab world. One of the strongest singers in the 2005 competition was Syria’s Shahed Barmada. Many Syrians thought she did not stand a chance because the show was in Lebanon—in the midst of the crisis over Hariri’s assassination and Syria’s troop withdrawal. A young Syrian told me she and her friends did not bother to telephone in their votes; they had assumed she would lose.

  When Barmada was named runner-up, her father astonished viewers by racing onstage and wrapping her in the Syrian flag. The young singer quickly became the second-most-recognizable face in Syria, after Bashar al Assad. I saw her picture all over Damascus on billboard advertisements for Ford, often decked out in a baseball cap with the blue-and-white Ford logo. She had marketability because she was one of the few symbols of Syrian success.

  Yet patchwork repair is also unlikely to be enough to placate Syrians, perhaps for economic reasons even more than political discontent.

  Syria has been living on borrowed time for quite a while. The Assads, father and son, may have kept the country tranquil, but neither was a good money manager. Syria’s old-fashioned and incompetent socialist economy got a reprieve when oil was discovered in 1984. Exports began in the early 1990s. Reflecting the sorry state of the rest of the economy, Syria’s modest oil production soon accounted for half of government revenues and two thirds of its foreign exchange.34

  In violation of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein, Syria also got a huge boost from smuggling Iraqi oil through Syrian pipelines and land routes for almost a decade. Damascus netted up to one billion dollars a year off illegal oil trading.35 The ouster of its brother Baath Party was costly, literally, to Damascus.

  Syria’s health is now dependent on its own oil. But production peaked in 2000—and the oil has already begun to run out.

  “Between 2008 and 2010, Syria will become a net importer of oil,” former World Bank economist Nabil Sukkar told me. “So our revenues are on the way to a major decline.” The current fields are expected to run out around 2025.

  Sukkar, an older man with a patrician nose and expensive suits, now runs a consulting firm in Damascus. He blamed the regime. “Oil removed the sense of crisis, so it slowed down reform by creating a sense of complacency,” he continued. “We should have been renovating other sectors—agriculture, industry, and tourism as an alternative. But with oil, the attitude became ‘Why bother?’

  “If we had done our homework in the 1990s, we would not be facing this future,” he added. “But there was no clarity of what the economy was going to be. Now, we face a crisis around the corner.”

  Since 2000, Bashar al Assad’s renewed promise of economic liberalization has never been realized. As with political reforms, most ideas get no further than the proposal stage. In 2005, the Baath Party held its first national congress since the younger Assad took office. It declared that Syria was shifting to a “market social economy,” although the government offered few specifics.

  “Of course the government had in mind China, which in 1987 introduced the idea of a market socialist economy,” Sukkar said. “In Syria, the idea is that we are to move to a market economy. But to alleviate the fears of the working class they added the word ‘social’—in order to keep some faith in the old system.

  “But frankly, if you ask what that means, I don’t think anybody knows,” he said. “Nothing has really changed.”

  With revenues already dwindling, Syria’s looming new burdens will be tougher to address. The demographic baby bulge is expected to put growing and unattainable demands on the economy over the next two decades. The regime is already unable to absorb the 300,000 young people looking for jobs every year. During my visit, unemployment hovered uncomfortably at around twelve percent officially, but more like twenty-five percent in reality.

  One of the toughest steps for the Syrian regime may be cutting back on public subsidies, from basic foodstuffs to petroleum products, which are pivotal to both the Baath Party’s populist ideology and its constituency. Syria heavily subsidizes gasoline, for example. The cost to the consumer is only one third of the market price.

  “The government has wanted to reduce the subsidies for over seven years but always hesitates,” Sukkar explained. “Jordan and Yemen faced sporadic street demonstrations for months after the governments began a gradual rise in fuel costs.

  “Governments,” Sukkar noted pointedly, “are particularly reluctant to take those kinds of steps when they are already under siege politically.”

  Before leaving Damascus, I went to see two men. The first was Anwar al Bunni, a wiry, gregarious man with a big mustache.

  Bunni was born in Hama in 1959. He was eleven when the first Assad came to power. He was twenty-two when he almost became a victim of the military’s surprise crackdowns in Hama. He and a few friends often went out to check on older couples without children to fetch food, water, or medicines. As Christians, he told me, he and his friends felt less vulnerable to the military sweeps against Muslims. But during one roundup in 1981, Bunni was stopped by a Syrian army officer who asked what he was doing.

  “We said we were going to help families without food,” Bunni recounted.

  The officer asked Bunni if he was Muslim or Christian.

  “I told him, ‘I’ve lived in Hama over twenty years and no one has ever asked me this question. Why do you have to know?’” Bunni recounted.

  The officer butted Bunni’s head with his bayoneted rifle, Bunni told me, then stabbed him. Bunni showed me what he said were the scars from that encounter, visible a quarter century later.

  Bunni was saved when neighbors rushed out to tell the officer that he was a Christian and only trying to help them.

  “He stopped trying to kill me, but he ordered his soldiers to handcuff me in the back, and then they set fire to my beard,” Bunni recounted. Many personal accounts at the time and subsequent reconstructions detailed how the Syrian military set beards ablaze.36 Bunni was comparatively fortunate. The military moved on, and neighbors brought out buckets of water to douse the flames. He is clean-shaven today.

  Bunni left Hama before the slaughter in 1982. But since his own run-in with arbitrary justice, he has spent most of his life defending Syria’s dissidents.

  He was a lawyer when Riad al Turk finally had his day in court, the fourth time around. He defended Riad Seif and another member of parliament arrested at the end of the Damascus Spring. He was the attorney for the satirist whose popular independent newspaper, The Lamplighter, was shut down within months of its first issue. He defended a doctor imprisoned for criticizing corruption, minority Kurds arrested after a series of protests, and dozens of others.

  Bunni jokingly told me that he also became a lawyer to defend his own family. He was the only child who had not served time in prison. Since 1977, his three brothers and one sister, plus two of their spouses, had spent a total of sixty years in Syria’s dungeons. They were all leftists.

  The Syrian lawyer defended most dissidents pro bono. To pay the bills, he began selling his belongings. Then he sold his car. In 2005, he sold his office.

  Bunni acknowledged that much of his work was for naught. His clients rarely had even a remote chance of being acquitted, he told me when I visited his small and sparsely furnished apartment in Damascus.

  “The charges and the verdict come to the judges in the same envelope, before the trial even starts,” said Bunni, who has the crow’s-feet of a continuo
us smoker, as he puffed on another Marlboro. “But our duty as lawyers is not just to help our clients; it’s also to bring their cases to the public’s attention.”

  Bunni had been on the defensive himself in recent years. Since 2002, he told me, the Syrian bar association had been trying to get him disbarred on six different counts. He had appealed and was awaiting the outcome. His activities and his telephone, he said, were routinely monitored by security police. He was also barred from leaving the country. Bunni had been invited to Germany to stand in for Riad Seif when his imprisoned client was unable to receive a human-rights award from the government in 2003. But one of the regime’s favorite tricks is to ban its critics from traveling, as I heard frequently from opposition figures in Damascus. They are not informed. They find out at the airport or at the border when immigration refuses to let them leave. They are given no reason.

  A prominent dissident had shown me the small slip of white paper given him in 2004 when he tried to fly to France to receive his own human-rights award. The paper said only that the recipient should report to the investigation branch of the office of political security. Few Syrians bother to report, I was told, because they know what it means. They have no effective recourse or appeal.

  “We are like hostages in the hands of this regime,” Bunni told me. But he quickly added that he was not seeking to oust the regime. “If this government, with all its crimes, starts to practice human rights, I will say ‘Welcome.’ But we also can’t wait three or four generations to have our freedom.”

  In 2006, the European Union funded a project to open the Center for Legal Research and Studies. They tapped Bunni to head it. The goal was to write an assessment of Syria’s legal system, particularly laws affecting the press, women’s rights, the economy, the judiciary, and the penal code. The center would also provide training for civil society or nongovernment groups. The opening day was February 21, 2006.