by Robert Fisk
So page 1 of the Syria Times would invariably contain a large photograph of President Assad, often seen reading a newspaper—though never, I noticed, the Syria Times—and even more frequently pictured as he addressed crowds of supporters or denigrated “Zionist expansionism.” The Syria Times was one of those papers—brave in a perverse way, I suppose—that risked sending its few readers to sleep with front-page stories of five-year industrial plans, agricultural overproduction and long telegrams from flour-mill workers in northern Syria congratulating President Assad on the anniversary of his “correctionist movement.” Its inside pages would be filled with dull poetry, anti-Israeli tracts of inordinate length and, occasionally, articles by me which the paper had cribbed—without permission— from The Independent. I took the charitable view that this was obviously a mistake made with a “good heart.” It was surprising how easy it was to adopt Syria’s policies for oneself.
The Syrian ministry man who always greeted me with an invocation was the same luckless official who would sit by my side one day when I asked the editor of the Syria Times if I could buy his newspaper, printing press and all. Why would I want to do that? the editor asked me. Because, I replied, I could close it down and would never have to read it again. The editor looked at me down his nose and said he didn’t understand my reply. I smiled. He smiled. That’s how it was done in Syria. Another “mistake” by me. The Syrian ministry official remains anonymous in this book because he still works for the present minister. That is the nature of Syria: obedience, faithfulness and continuity, the qualities every father-figure desires from his family. But Syria was a “middle” dictatorship. If you flew in from London—or drove from Beirut—Damascus was the capital of a police state. If you arrived from Baghdad, it felt like a liberal democracy.
Every journalist would seek to find out something new about Syria. Was there any hope of political reform, a new purge on corruption perhaps? A new banking system that would ease the economy out of the hands of the old Baathists that surrounded the president? But Syria was not a country that lived on its future. It was in many ways devoted to its past, and its people—however much they might freeze politically in the sparse Baathist drawing rooms of Damascus—understood their country’s history in a way that few Westerners did, or even tried to do.
One cold day in November 1996, I set out for the village from which President Assad came, high in the Alawi Mountains of western Syria, to Qardaha where his son lay in a mosque of grey concrete under an equally leaden sky. They were still building the shrine over Basil Assad, chevalier of Syria, leader of men, enemy of corruption, favourite son of Hafez, the president of Syria. At the gates of the unfinished mosque at Qardaha, a paratrooper in a red beret and a young man greeted me.
The civilian was dressed in black and I noticed at once that he was wearing a black tie bearing the image of Basil, in which the president’s dead son wears black sunglasses. Another young man approached me, the guardian of the shrine, unwilling to give his name because “Basil outshone all of us who remain alive.” I gesture towards the monument to my right, a tall concrete spire upon which an artist’s impression of Basil, in the uniform of the Syrian army, is riding his show-jumping horse upwards towards the stars of heaven while his father Hafez, in presidential blue suit, holds out his arms in farewell, his face a mask of sorrow and pride. Tell me about Basil, I ask the anonymous guardian. Is Basil not now more present in death—in all his portraits—than he ever was in life?
The guardian of the shrine smells of musk. He smiles and clutches my hand. “The late Basil had no peers—as a leader, no one could match him,” he says. “He won a gold medal as a horse-rider in the tenth Mediterranean games. He had no rival in sportsmanship. As a free-fall paratrooper, he was one of our heroes.” I try to ask another question but the guardian politely raises his hands in protest. “Thanks to the late Basil, the government has computers—he was the founder of the Syrian Data Processing Society. He was a staff major in the army, winning all his military courses, and he graduated with a Ph.D. in military science from the Khrushchev University in Russia as well as a civil engineering degree at Damascus University.” I wanted to talk about the monument but the admonishing hand rose again. “The late Basil spoke French and English fluently. He was modest. He talked to all the people in an ordinary way. He embodied the modesty of our president but you would never think the late Basil was the son of so important a man. He was against corruption and encouraged the youth to turn to sports in order to avoid the evils of drugs. He symbolised the morality of the younger generation.”
There was here, I thought, the faintest ghost of Tom Graham, V.C., the fictional British soldier who went to fight in Afghanistan and whose “life” appeared to inspire young Bill Fisk. The man was perfect. It was as simple as that. Basil could do no wrong. He was the sans pareil. It was an oral version of the words carved on the shrines of great Arab nobles, but unstoppable—at least until I ask the dates of Basil’s birth and death. “He was born on 23 April 1962. He died on 21 January 1994.” Died, it should be added, on a foggy morning on the Damascus airport highway when his car overturned as he rushed to catch a flight to Germany.
The guardian invited me to enter the shrine. A cloud of incense funnelled towards the roof and, beyond a glass door, there stood the catafalque of Basil Assad, draped in green silk and embroidered with gold Koranic script: “God is Great and his Prophet is Mohamed.” The tomb is that of a nobleman, faintly modelled on that of the horseback warrior who drove the Crusaders from the Holy Land and who rests today under an equally green canopy scarcely 135 miles away in Damascus, the same Saladin whom General Gouraud had mocked in 1921. Behind the catafalque, two bright sodium lamps illuminated a startling oil painting of Basil: unsmiling, bearded, handsome, hair tossed carelessly over his forehead, a look of grim determination on his face, a man—like his father—not to be crossed, in life or in death. The young mourners in black were there to ensure respect and watched me carefully for a minute, but then—with a sudden flourish of open arms—told me I could take photographs. “Because it is darker here, I suppose you’ll be using 800 film,” the guardian said softly. It was like the end of a religious service, that moment when the priest warns his congregation that it is raining outside, that they will most certainly need their umbrellas. Yes, I needed 800 film.
Assad means “lion,” and the roadside outside Qardaha greeted me with the words: “Welcome to Qardaha, the Lion’s Den.” The lion’s den turned out to be an unremarkable village—save for its luxury hotel and modern highway—buried in a fold of hills below the mountains east of Lattakia in north-west Syria where the minority Alawite people, to whom President Assad belongs, form a majority of the population. The Lion of Qardaha became the Lion of Damascus on 16 November 1970, when, as minister of defence in the Baath socialist government, Hafez Assad toppled his rivals in a bloodless coup—this was the “correctionist movement” of which the Syria Times so often wrote—opening up his country to economic and political liberalisation but ensuring that his rule remained—with the help of an efficient secret police apparatus—unchallenged.
But now that his favourite son was gone, could Assad’s regime survive his own death? It was a question that every Syrian asked. Assad gave his country stability and unity, crushed his internal “Islamist” enemies and fought the Israelis, in a vain attempt to recapture the Golan Heights in 1973 and in a successful battle to prevent Israel from subduing Lebanon in 1982. He had wanted to bequeath to his favourite son a Syria that had regained its lost lands, that stood unchallenged as the vanguard of the Arab world. The son had now died; but Assad’s Syria was still demanding the return of the Golan Heights from Israel. There could thus be no Middle East peace without Syria—this became Baathist shorthand for many months of negotiations—but it was Basil’s ghost that now stood sentinel over Syria’s future. “He is with us still,” the guardian of the shrine tells me in the frozen wind outside the mosque. “He will always inspire us.” And he holds my h
ands in both of his, looking into my face.
As I drive out of Qardaha, the smell of musk comes from my hands—it will remain with me all day. On the right of the road, towering over the trees and embankment, a massive statue of Basil and his horse stares down at me. Basil will follow me all over Syria, on banners and flags and posters, in the camouflage uniform of the Syrian army, in khaki dress on horseback or, in bronze, striding towards me beside the international highway north of Damascus. And so will his father, the sixty-six-year-old man whose giant statues and busts appeared at the gates of Syria’s great cities. From some of his plinths, he holds out his arms towards me. From others, he stares at my passing car, eyes fixed, presidential sash over his shoulders. At the village of Deir Attiah, the home of Assad’s chef de cabinetand close personal friend, Abu Selim Daabul, his statue dominates a cliff-face, waving down at me cheerfully through the winter rains. “We cannot stop the people from erecting his statues out of gratitude,” a Damascus newspaper editor insisted when I raised with him what could easily be mistaken for a personality cult. “The president did not ask for these statues. They were not his doing.” And the editor watched me for a long time after saying this, to see if I believed him.
It was certainly true that the cult of presidential adoration with which Saddam Hussein had surrounded himself in Iraq—a Saddam City, Saddam International Airport, Saddam hospital and a Saddam art gallery—was quite absent in Syria. While Basil’s name had been given to hospitals and provincial airports, there is only one Syrian institution which is dedicated in the name of the father. In Damascus, he sits today on a mighty iron chair—open book in his right hand—outside the Assad Library, a vast institution whose 22,000 square metres of pre-stressed concrete galleries contain the very continuity of Syrian history: 19,300 original manuscripts dating back to the eleventh century, 300,000 volumes, an audio-visual and computer centre, a series of state-of-the-art halls for ancient manuscript repairs and preservation. When I meet Dr. Mazin Arafi, director of the library’s “cultural activities,” he speaks in near-reverence, in a whisper, of the mass of information now being placed on computer, including every Syrian law enacted since 1918— when the Syrians briefly enjoyed freedom from the Ottoman empire before French colonial rule was clamped upon them. Every Syrian-produced film, including Palestinian documentaries of the 1948 war with Israel, has been videotaped. Even those books banned by the regime are available for student research, including the later works of Michel Aflaq, who co-founded the secular, socialist Baath party in 1940, but who subsequently exiled himself to Iraq when the party divided between Syrian and Iraqi factions.
Dr. Nihad Jord opens the cabinet at the entrance to the manuscripts department and there, six inches from my face without a sheet of glass to separate us, lie pages of gold-and-blue Farsi script, a work of Islamic philosophy by Bin al-Marzouban al-Azerbaijani, handwritten in western Iran in 1066. As Harold of England was preparing to fight William of Normandy at Hastings, al-Azerbaijani was completing a text that would, nine centuries later, be photographed and placed on a database at the Assad Library. Dr. Jord walks through a narrow passageway. Lying beside us are a 1649 French translation of the Koran, a 1671 Bible in Latin and Arabic, a 500-year-old Arabic dictionary, the collected speeches of the Caliph Ali—dated 1308—and a 1466 study of how an Arab warrior should ride his horse while fighting with sword and spear. All have been transferred to the computer where Syria’s modern history is also carefully recorded for posterity.
It is like a brain, this library; I understand this when Hasna Askihita takes me into the computer room. “Here we have put on our database every speech made by our president since 1970,” she says. And how many speeches has the president made since he came to power? I ask. Quick as a flash, she replies: “He has made 544 speeches. Would you like to call for one?” And she trawls through the computer memory. Up on the screen comes an angry denunciation of fundamentalist violence in 1982, a presidential meeting with British journalists on 30 January 1992, a conversation between Assad and Time magazine editors the same year, a 1994 press conference with President Clinton. Here is immortality indeed—and, I reflected, a demonstration of just how formidable must be the capacity of Syria’s other computerised institutions; its intelligence services, for example. But it has greater relevance than this.
For the Assad Library is clearly intended to provide a continuity that connects the caliphate with the Baath, the ancient Islamic philosophers with Hafez Assad, as carefully as the women in the archive repair rooms bind together the torn pages of fifteenth-century books. Indeed, the president’s latest speech is that very day being entered into the database, Assad’s address to mark the twenty-sixth anniversary of the “correctionist movement.” “With adamant resolve,” it begins, “we continue our march for victory, working with all strength for increased immunity of the homeland.” Which, come to think of it, must have been what Harold of England was telling his troops on his way to do battle with William of Normandy in 1066.
What Syria tells its soldiers today is inscribed in a Koranic quotation around the top of the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier opposite Assad’s hilltop palace above Damascus. “Don’t think that those who have been killed for the cause of God are dead now. They are alive and are now enjoying the gifts of God.” In the crypt, a flurry of Syrian officers walk over to me, small moustaches above grey and brown uniforms. “Do you know what this is?” one of them asks, pointing to an oil painting of a brown-walled building with smoke pouring from its windows. Like all Syrians, he wants to test the foreigner’s knowledge of history, to see where he should start his narrative. I know that the building is the Syrian parliament in 1946, under fire from troops of a French government that refused to abandon its old League of Nations mandate after the Second World War—twenty-five Syrian MPs and soldiers died in the bombardment. In showcases in the wall, there are three-dimensional tableaux depicting a similar continuity to that established at the library. In one large showcase, Saladin is depicted slaying Crusader occupation forces at the battle of Hittin north of Jerusalem. Another shows Syrian Special Forces retaking the hilltop Al-Shaikh observatory from the Israelis in 1973 before the Israelis stormed back onto the heights of Golan. A third display shows Syrian infantry destroying Israeli tanks at the battle of Sultan Yacoub in southern Lebanon after Israel’s invasion of 1982.
A fourth tableau displays a struggle about which every Syrian learns at school but about which almost every Westerner is ignorant: the 1920 battle of Maysaloun. In the aftermath of the 1914–18 war, France was given the League of Nations mandate for Syria, an obligation that it honoured by chopping part of the Mediterranean coast off from Syria—to create the Christian-dominated Lebanon which was to collapse in civil war fifty-five years later—and destroying the Syrian army which had trusted the British promise of Arab independence in return for its help against the Turks. The Syrian minister of defence, Youssef Azmi, led his cavalry against French tanks in the narrow valley at Maysaloun, on the border between present-day Lebanon and Syria—there was, of course, no border then because “Lebanon” was part of Syria—on 24 July 1920. General Henri Gouraud’s mechanised armour—in a largely unrecorded historical precedent to the German tank attack on Polish cavalry nineteen years later—annihilated the warrior horsemen from Damascus and left them to rot in the summer heat.
The road to Maysaloun today is a six-lane motorway; Azmi’s tomb lies almost hidden in a grove of trees to the south. When I arrived there on a cold evening, I found only his grave and a group of broken houses on the main road that appeared to have been destroyed by shells. Up on the hillside, however, was an old man who had vague memories of the battle: Hamzi Abdullah could not remember his own age but he had a clear recollection of a boyhood in which he spent weeks picking up the cartridge cases and shell fragments after the hopeless, doomed Arab cavalry charge of 1920. Hamzi was unshaven but wore an old kuffiah headdress. “The French came down from Wadi Nemsi with their Algerian and Senegalese troops,” h
e said. “There were aircraft too and we didn’t have any chance.”
Hamzi held his right hand and wobbled it from side to side like a biplane caught in an updraught of air. “It was all over in hours and the French killed almost everyone they found. My mother was taken prisoner and put in a house just over there. Youssef Azmi and another of our leaders were tied up and the French decided to execute them. My mother has been dead twenty-seven years but I remember her telling me how she saw Azmi led to a telegraph pole to be executed. He threw his kuffiah at her and the other women and said: ‘This is for you to remember me.’ My mother said the women were crying but they threw it back to him, saying: ‘You are the hero and you are the only one worthy of wearing these clothes.’ He was tied to a post over there and the French told the French Algerians to shoot him. But they refused. They were good Muslims. So the French told their Senegalese colonial troops to do it. And the Senegalese shot him as he was tied to the telegraph pole.”
Hamzi Abdullah’s family produced the obligatory hot, sticky coffee, and a younger man joined us, a soldier who had fought in Lebanon. “I’ll show you the place where they kept the women and Youssef Azmi,” he said, and led me down the dirt hillside to one of the smashed Ottoman houses by the road. “This is where the French imprisoned them. But the house was mostly destroyed in 1967 when the Israelis shelled this area.” So what the French had left undone, it seemed, the Israelis had finished. But not quite. For the ex-soldier’s story was not complete. “This has always been my home. In 1982, I fought across the border in the battle of Sultan Yacoub—we captured the Israeli tanks there—and the next year, when I was at home here, the American navy shelled us right across Lebanon and the shells of the battleship New Jersey fell on the hills up here.” There was a silence while I scribbled this powerful example of historical continuity into my notebook. In 1920, the French had destroyed the Arab army at Maysaloun. In 1967, at the end of the Six Day War, the Israelis had shelled Maysaloun. Another sixteen years later, the U.S. 6th Fleet, supporting President Ronald Reagan’s collapsing NATO force in Beirut, had shelled the Syrian army’s supply route through this very same valley of Maysaloun. And the man who was telling me this had himself fought in the tank battle commemorated in the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier. France, Israel, America. If the Syrians were xenophobic, it was easy—here in this valley where the bodies of men and horses were once left to decay—to see why.
