Syrians' yearning for change is tempered by fear of how it might come about

The Guardian
August 18, 2005
By David Hirst

"The Americans won't control their side of the border, accept our offers of collaboration, allow us the surveillance equipment we need - then accuse us of aiding a resistance that, they know, is basically Iraqi, even if some foreign fighters do get over our frontiers, which - they also know - cannot be sealed without investing resources way beyond our means." The Syrian commander who made this lament was deployed at Wadi Sawab, in a hilltop outpost only a few metres high, but sited in a desert landscape so flat and featureless that from it you could see deep into Iraq - across the berms, barbed wire, concrete blocks and observation posts manned by 7,000 soldiers that Syria has put up along this central and most desolate stretch of its 600km frontier.

It wasn't proof that Syria is doing its utmost to stop foreign jihadists (the place to prove that is inhabited regions to the north), but it was proof it was seriously doing something. However, from the diplomats who agreed to go on this unprecedented public relations tour, Americans were conspicuously absent. And that, for the Ba'athist regime, was yet another instance of America "not wanting to know".

Officially the US might say that all it wants is a change of Syrian behaviour; but, said a senior official, "we have concluded in recent months that they really want to bring us down". European diplomats tend to agree that an apparently systematic refusal to engage the regime at any level reflects the influence of neo-conservative hawks, for whom Syria is a prime candidate for regime change in the region. Even if George Bush isn't ready to embark openly on such a policy, the neocons are strong enough to block any inclination in the opposite direction.

Syria, a Washington adage has it, is a "low-hanging fruit", harvestable by merely political means; the Ba'athists' translation is that Bush, already in such a mess in Iraq, is not mad enough to engage in another adventure against them. But the harvest could take forms, many Syrians believe, sufficient to put the survival of a decrepit, discredited regime at stake: a mixture of the external and internal, the strategic and ideological; the escalation of long-standing hostility to Syria's regional role allied with the new US crusade for "freedom and democracy".

Until recently, America treated Syria as a strategic adversary, but one with which it could do business in a give-and-take process that, if successful, would presumably have restored the Ba'athists' "right to exist" (a la Gadafy) in any new US-sponsored Middle East order. But now it spurns the "strategic dialogue" President Bashar al-Assad proffers, bent, it seems, on stripping him of all his regional cards.

When he gives something (proving, as US commentators say, that pressure works), America requires yet more - for nothing in return. When, with his army's withdrawal from Lebanon, he sacrificed his greatest asset, the US insisted that he was continuing to play a disruptive, subterranean role there, just as he was still doing little or nothing to seal the jihadist trail into Iraq. Whatever the truth, the US is clearly accumulating ammunition for new assaults in a diplomatic war of attrition whose end, said a European diplomat, is to "bring Bashar naked to the negotiating table".

Weakening Syria externally weakens it at home. For a despotic regime, regional influence was always a vital adjunct of internal repression. "And now," said a dissident, "the US is becoming the internal as well as the external player in our affairs that, before the Lebanon debacle, it couldn't be."

Faced with this double assault, does Bashar cede ground internally, as he has externally, in the hope, unsuccessful so far, of appeasing both America and a still weak, but growing, domestic opposition? Whatever choice he does make will, for the first time, be very much his own; for he has just wrought changes inside his the ruling apparatus greater than any since his father, Hafez, consolidated his personal power in the 70s.

Reform, cries the opposition, and we shall rally to you against America. For the opposition mistrusts America perhaps more than the regime does. Not that it belittles the impetus that US actions, even the abhorrent invasion of Iraq, have given their cause. "It's not a question of American intentions," said a former communist. "We have a suppressive regime. When it suffers from heavy outside pressure, its reach will be shorter."

But Syrians' yearning for change is tempered by the fear of the way it might come about. So the opposition's dominant orthodoxy is gradualism. They must, they say, reach out to reformists within the system; and, as both gain depth and cohesion, reassure the ultimate, and really maleficent, power-holders, and all their increasingly frightened adherents, that their eventual departure will not be the terrible reckoning that it would otherwise have been.

"If the Americans muscle in," said a human rights activist, "the shock will disrupt this process, unleash all the latent forces of chaos, of sectarian, ethnic and class conflict in our society, even create another Iraq without invading. We must handle this on our own."

Set against expectations, the results of the recent, supposedly make-or-break, Ba'athist congress were puny. Still, a sort of glasnost is under way. There is little doubt that Bashar encourages it. Little doubt either, however, that, fearing loss of control, he is simultaneously pulled in the opposition direction. The congress that promised change was also a classic show of strength and solidarity, Soviet style, of the single-party state. Directed at America and the opposition, it said: "The Ba'ath is here to stay." A Ba'athist reformist said: "Bashar's new guard might actually have to be tougher than the old."

If rigidity and repression do win the day, some of the opposition will be inclined to forsake the gradualist, Syrian-only orthodoxy. Of its three main components - the secular intelligentsia, the Islamists and the Kurdish minority of the north-east -the latter has emerged, after decades of obscure, unequal struggle against Arabisation and ethnic discrimination, as perhaps the key internal player, due to its own intrinsic strength and the example of its brethren's national achievement in north Iraq. "So long as the regime gives nothing," said a Kurdish politician, "it is our right to profit from international conditions. If America knocks on our door, we'll open it."

The fear in Damascus is that the US, in desperation, might actually do something military across the border, such as create an Israeli south-Lebanon style "security zone". It wouldn't work, experts say, and merely add local, tribally-linked Syrian resistance to the Iraqi one. But it could have a profoundly destabilising effect in the country as a whole, exacerbating those Kurdish-led, centrifugal forces whose original impetus, and disastrous potentialities, stem, as in a now manifestly decomposing Iraq, from decades of Ba'athist despotism.

David Hirst reported from the Middle East for the Guardian from 1963 to 2001

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