by Robert Fisk
Syria’s soldiers would fight to oppose the nascent Israeli state in 1948, and then to confront Israel in 1967, in 1973, in Lebanon in 1982. And they fought, also in 1982, at a city in central Syria called Hama—a name that is remembered with as much fear as it is left unspoken. When I began the long drive up the international highway, the cold, grey anti-Lebanon mountain range scudded with snow to my left, I found the very name of Hama oppressive. I had driven this same road many times as a reporter during the “Muslim Brotherhood” uprising of 1982, as the rebels of Hama assaulted the city’s Baath party officials. They had cut the throats of the families of government workers, murdered policemen, beheaded schoolteachers who insisted on secular education—as the GIA had done in Algeria, just as the Afghan rebels had hanged the schoolteacher and his wife outside Jalalabad in 1980; I still remembered the piece of blackened meat on the tree, twisting in the wind. Back in 1982 I had, for an extraordinary—and, I now realise, dangerous— eighteen minutes, succeeded in entering Hama as the army’s special forces under Hafez Assad’s brother Rifaat crushed the uprising with great savagery. I stood by the river Orontes as Syrian battle-tanks shelled the ancient city; I saw the wounded, covered in blood, lying beside their armoured vehicles, the starving civilians scavenging for old bread. Up to 20,000, it was said, died in the underground tunnels and detonated buildings. The real figure may have been nearer 10,000, but most of the old city was destroyed.178 Now I was going back and I had some uneasy thoughts. Only a week earlier, I had been to Algeria, reporting the massacre of civilians by the armed Islamic opposition, the throat-cuttings and beheadings, the death squads and torture rooms of the government. Back in 1982, the world condemned Syria for the cruelty of its suppression of Hama; now it was largely silent as the Algerian government bloodily eradicated its own “Islamist” enemies. Was there not, I asked myself as my car hissed up the rain-soaked highway, an awful parallel here? We demand respect for human rights in the Middle East—rather more loudly among the Arab states than in Israel, to be sure—but we also warn of the dangers of fundamentalism, of “Islamic terror.”
The roadblocks of plain-clothes intelligence men who had stopped me in and around Hama in 1982 had gone, but their presence could still be felt in a society in which any opposition to Assad’s rule was regarded by the authorities as treachery. There is no doubt about who rules Hama today—nor about the need to erase its past. Over the wreckage of much of the old Hama now stand gardens, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a luxury hotel and a magnificent new mosque under construction. The latest British guidebook to Syria made not a single mention of the events of 1982, save for acknowledging the mysterious—and unexplained—absence of the original Great Mosque. Only when I walked across a small bridge in the Keylani suburb did I find reminders of the past: eighteenth-century buildings scarred by bullets, a palace of black-and-white stone lying gutted behind one of the city’s famous noria water-wheels, a modern villa with a shell-hole where the window should have been. A few local painters were keeping alive what had been lost, in fragile watercolours that can be bought as postcards in the market.
And a few bold souls were prepared to recall what happened. Mohamed—it was the name he chose—stood in a narrow street in Keylani, speaking slowly and with great circumspection. “I lived here throughout the battle,” he said. “My home was on the front line between the army and the rebels. I lived in the basement with my family of six for eighteen days. You cannot imagine how we felt when we ran out of food. I crawled out and found some old bread by an oil drum—it had been soaked in oil but we ate it. At the end, on the last day of the battle, we were able to leave.”
The fact that Mohamed spoke at all to me was almost as extraordinary as his story. Was the climate of fear evaporating in Syria—or was the bloodbath at Hama now seen in a new perspective? A junior government employee—necessarily anonymous but genuinely loyal to Assad—tried to explain this to me as we lunched at the Sahara restaurant in Damascus. It is an expensive café of white linen tablecloths and bow-tied waiters, owned—ironically—by the man who oversaw the suppression of the Hama rebellion, the president’s brother Rifaat. “I know you disapprove of what happened at Hama, Robert, the killings and the executions,” he said. “But you must also realise that if our president had not crushed that uprising, Syria would have been like Algeria today. We tried to talk to the Brothers at first, to negotiate with them. We didn’t want this bloodbath. We asked them: ‘What do you want?’ They said: ‘The head of the president.’ And, of course, that was the end. We were not going to have an Islamic fundamentalist state in Syria. You in the West should be grateful to us. We crushed Islamic fanaticism here. We are the only country in the Middle East to have totally suppressed fundamentalism.” And over our plates of chickpeas and tomatoes and garlic-pressed yoghurt, the local arak burning our mouths, one could only reflect upon the devastating truth of the man’s last statement.
Assad’s own hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood comes through in a speech he made a month after the Hama bloodbath, his words now dutifully preserved in Hasna Askihita’s computer memory in the Assad Library under the date of 7 March 1982. Assad’s comments are astonishing, even frightening, for he might have been talking about Algeria. “Nothing is more dangerous to Islam than distorting its meanings and concepts while you are posing as a Muslim. This is what the criminal Brothers are doing . . . They are killing in the name of Islam. They are butchering children, women and old people in the name of Islam. They are wiping out entire families in the name of Islam . . . Death a thousand times to the Muslim Brothers, the criminal Brothers, the corrupt Brothers.”
And so it came to pass, just as President Assad said; death did find them, a thousand times and more.
Two years after Hama, Rifaat would try to seize power from his brother, trundling his T-72 tanks through the streets of Damascus, and would be exiled to Spain and would, even when Hafez died, speak of the “farce” of the presidential succession—which was not to be his. The restaurateur and nightclub owner and sword of vengeance against the Muslim Brothers of Hama would never come to power. Like Prince Hassan of Jordan, he had mightily—though more violently— displeased his brother.
Other enemies, meanwhile, remained at Syria’s gates. After agreeing to the land-for-peace formula of the old Bush administration, Assad was now being told by the Israelis that he must make peace without the return of Golan. Six times in 1996, the Israeli military talked of a possible war with Syria. When Assad transferred some of his 21,000 troops out of Lebanon and positioned an armoured brigade south of the Damascus–Beirut highway to prevent a possible Israeli assault that autumn, he was accused of preparing an attack on Israel. In reality, he was the only Arab leader to warn of the dangers of the “peace process” and to speak publicly of his suspicions that the Israelis would decide—after obtaining concessions from the Arabs—to hold on to most of the land they seized in 1967.
It is not difficult to see just how much land this involves. I sped down the long straight road to Quneitra, the Syrian city that the Israelis systematically destroyed when they retreated from the initial 1973 postwar ceasefire lines under the Kissinger agreement. To my right, the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967—and the very fulcrum of the “peace process”—grew purple through the winter haze, capped by a line of snow. Israel’s refusal to return this territory— contrary to the pledges given by the United States before the 1991 Madrid Arab–Israeli summit—remains, outside the occupied Palestinian lands, the one outstanding casus belli in the original Arab–Israeli conflict.
I drove past the old front lines of the 1967 war, the abandoned, overgrown gun-pits of the 1973 war, the new revetments of the Syrian army’s forward units, sprouting with radio aerials, defended with armoured vehicles and troop trucks. And far down the road, inside the UN ceasefire zone, I came to the ghost-town of old Quneitra, greeted as usual by an Assad statue and a string of banners above a ruined house, each portraying a smiling Assad and his son Basil. In the name
of the father and of the dead son, the land beyond this town—the heights of Mount Hermon and the string of hills boasting Israel’s high-tech radar stations—is all supposed to be liberated one day, whether by peace or by war. On the Syrian front line—so close that I could see the Israeli soldiers looking at me through binoculars—a Syrian lieutenant pointed to a group of tourists across the fields. “You see those three cars? They are probably Jews, foreigners, being told that Syria is their country, that everything they see should belong to them, Damascus and beyond.” This, I am sure, is what the lieutenant believed. And I was almost equally certain that the tourists in those three cars were being told that Golan was part of Israel and that Syria was only waiting to seize it.
A hundred metres away, neatly maintained amid yew trees and grass plots, I found the graves of the Syrian soldiers who fought across this ground over almost half a century. Most lay beneath Islamic headstones, though some were beneath Christian crosses. Here lay twenty-nine-year-old Major Ismail Bin Khalaf al-Shahadat, a Muslim who “fell martyr on October 9th, 1973.” Beside him lay Sergeant Mikael Srour bin Wahebi, a Christian from northern Syria, who was killed in action just one day earlier. There were twenty-one-year-old corporals from Latakia and Aleppo and, behind them, older remains. Here was Private Kamel Mohamed Yassin of the 2nd Infantry Regiment, killed in action “for the Pan-Arab cause”—the attempt to destroy the infant state of Israel—on 13 July 1948; and Corporal Salah Brmawi of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, and a hundred others.
At the edge of the cemetery, I found former Syrian air force Private Assad Badr, now the grave-keeper of Quneitra, tending his roses in the bright midday sun. How did he feel about the dead? “The feeling of any live man for the dead,” he replied. “We take pride in martyrdom.” But when I asked if he had seen death in war, the man’s smile clouded. Yes, he said, at the Dumair air base during the 1973 war. “We were sitting in a slit-trench eating our lunch out of tin cans when an Israeli Phantom jet suddenly came at us, firing its cannon. The bullets ripped right through the trench and just missed me. But my friend, Morem es-Sair, was next to me and the bullets cut him in half—right in half beside me.” Then two explosions changed the air pressure around us and, far above the front line to the west, two Israeli jets sonic-boomed their way northwards, their silver contrails hanging like ropes behind the war memorial and the white gravestones.
But Golan was not the only “lost land” the Syrians desired. The map of Syria that you can buy in Damascus bookstalls contains an intriguing anomaly. To the south, the Golan Heights are shown as Syrian—which they are, though under Israeli occupation—but in the north, the national territory is drawn up the Mediterranean coastline, way beyond Latakia. Yet drive up the coastal highway and the map seems to be a little ambitious. Even before I reached the town of Sweidiyeh, I found, beyond a Syrian customs post, the Turkish flag. And above the frozen mountain road inland to Aleppo, alongside the wood-smoked valleys and frosted orange orchards, Turkish flags stood upon the heights—100 kilometres south of the border printed on my map. Only on closer inspection did I notice a thin, almost invisible broken line on the paper, marking the modern-day Turkish frontier and another piece of lost Syria. The cartography told that largely forgotten story of France’s 1939 “gift” to Turkey of the Syrian city of Alexandretta in the hope of persuading the Turks to join the Allied side in the forthcoming war against Germany.
It was astonishing to realise how much Syria—as a land rather than a nation— had lost in the twentieth century. Portrayed as an expansionist state only awaiting the opportunity to seize all of Lebanon, Palestine, even Israel, Syria has contracted rather than expanded, losing northern Palestine, Lebanon and Transjordan after the First World War. Alexandretta in 1939, Golan in 1967—the first three through Western trickery and the last through war. If the Hashemites had spent their modern life losing land, so had Syria.
Just over a year after King Hussein departed, another caliph was to die, the Lion of Damascus himself, and in circumstances of some irony for Syria’s enemies. For almost a quarter of a century, Assad’s army had been present in Lebanon—to oppose Israel’s invasion, it is true, but also to ensure obedience. At noon on Saturday, 10 June 2000, Hafez Assad was talking on the telephone to his Lebanese protégé, President Emile Lahoud, telling him—and this was the way Assad spoke—that “our destiny is to construct for our children a future which reassures them.” At this point, Lahoud heard the telephone drop and the line cut. Ten minutes later, Lahoud was reconnected to the presidential palace in Damascus, to find another voice on the phone. It was Bashar Assad, the president’s ophthalmologist son. “My father has just passed away,” he said.
Another king, another funeral. Yet when at last it reached us, Assad’s coffin seemed ridiculously small, a narrow, polished wooden box under a Syrian flag, dwarfed by the truckload of sweating troops in front and the pale green field gun behind. The Lion of Damascus had also compared himself to Saladin, whose own twelfth-century remains lay little more than a kilometre from us. But then a few metres away—a shock in the heat and dust and xenophobia of Damascus—walked the tall figure of his son Bashar, black-suited, black sunglasses above a tiny moustache and prominent nose, ramrod-straight, brisk and businesslike behind the gun carriage that bore his father. If his uncle Rifaat, Assad’s brother, really wanted to dethrone him, as many in Syria believed—if there was anyone here amid the tens of thousands, a single person who wanted to destroy the life of the heir apparent— Bashar did not seem to care. In Amman, the leaders and the people had been kept apart. In Damascus, they walked together.
Bashar Assad, a computer enthusiast who never expected to be the crown prince of Baathism, was flanked by his braided generals, as all Middle East leaders must be, and I had seen most of them before, over the years: General Ali Aslan, the chief of staff whose 5th Division almost recaptured the Golan Heights in the 1973 Middle East war and who ordered Syria’s helicopter units to prevent Israel’s advance up the Lebanese mountains in 1982; General Mustafa Tlass, Assad’s faithful retainer and minister of defence, who almost died in an Israeli air raid on Lebanon. And there was Bashar Assad’s younger brother, Maher. And his uncle Jamil, who once, pleading for Rifaat after he had opposed Hafez Assad, was told by the old man now lying in the coffin: “I am your elder brother to whom you owe obedience—don’t forget that I am the one who made you all.” Thus the creation of the dead president followed him on his last journey through Damascus. “How can we bring Assad back?” the crowds thundered. And their reply was the beat of a funeral drum.
It was an orderly affair as such things go in the Middle East, less of the shrieking chaos of King Hussein’s funeral, more of the regimented mourning learned in ministries and police stations. The Republican Guard with their automatic rifles faced away from the cortège, towards the Syrian “masses” who so often gave— and here we take a sublime leap into the mysteries of Assad’s electoral system— 98 per cent of their votes for the now dead president. The two police cars in front had the word “PROTOCOL” in capital letters painted in white on their bonnets— which is the way this regime liked to conduct its affairs: ordered, measured, ruthlessly uncompromising.
So it was surprising, amid the dust rising from the feet of the running crowds and the soldiers screaming at the young men in black to stand back from the gun carriage, to hear a youth turn on a policeman. “ Lesh amtet fauni?” he bawled. “Why are you pushing me?” And equality, I suppose, is what Baathism was supposed to be about. Thousands of teenagers in cheap shirts and jeans—smelling of sweat and cigarettes and, some of them, crying—ran level with the coffin, and there was indeed an equality of hysteria and desperation. But at the People’s Palace, we learned what equality was really about. U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright marched like a Georgetown teacher into the state rooms in blue hat and white scarf, ahead of President Mohamed Khatami of Iran. But there she stayed while the Syrians brought the dignified, robed Iranian leader at once to the coffin.
Where was Clinton? How come Hussein of Jordan deserved an American president but not Assad of Syria? Was this bureacracy? Or was it because Hussein did what the Americans wanted and Assad did not? Khatami prayed before the flagdraped casket, lips moving, just as President Mubarak of Egypt had done a few minutes earlier, the Egyptian president’s eyes all the while moving fishlike across the diplomats in the same room. Did Mubarak reflect on the two stars that still adorned the flag on the coffin, the almost forgotten symbol of union between Syria and Egypt, the very last vain attempt at Arab unity?
Arafat was given his moments at the coffin, but merely coffee beside Bashar, his left, Parkinson’s-quivering hand clutching the side of a chair. How Hafez had raged at this little man in his ill-fitting uniform and kuffiah, once expressing his irritation that Arafat’s Arab slobbering kisses lasted far too long. For once, there were few mourners with blood on their hands—barring, I suppose, the long-congealed blood of those tens of thousands of Iraqi children who had died under the sanctions that Madeleine Albright had so sternly supported. Vladimir Putin, the killer of Grozny, sent the old Russian prime minister, Primakov. Sharon could never have come. Rifaat, the butcher of Hama, faced arrest if he turned up for the funeral. But there were guerrilla fighters aplenty: as well as Arafat, the chairman of Hizballah, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, and a clutch of minor, soon-to-die Palestinian fighters from the old, beaten days of Fatahland in southern Lebanon.
