A rchive Date
[ 14-04-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Syria ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mmacdonald.html
Is Syria next?
There's freedom in the air on the breeze from Baghdad
By MOIRA MacDONALD -- Toronto Sun
April 14, 2003
Watching the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad last week reminded me of images of another Middle Eastern dictator - Hafez al-Assad, the deceased former leader of Syria.
Al-Assad's son, Bashar, is in power now. But I doubt if much has changed in the Orwellian cult of personality that holds sway in Syria, next door to Iraq. And it is Syria that some political analysts speculate will be next on the list of Middle Eastern dictatorships to be toppled.
I was there in 2000, just a few months before Hafez al-Assad's death. It was a wonderful place for a tourist. Syrians are extremely hospitable, friendly and interested in the world. They are often cultured and well-educated. Beautiful centuries-old mosques as well as ruins from the Roman Empire and the Crusades are spread across the country. And Syria must hold the title for best food anywhere in the Middle East.
Political repression isn't part of the tourism picture. But it's there.
"President Assad greeted us on our arrival in Syria yesterday," I wrote in my journal for April 7, 2000. "His picture is everywhere. It is almost as if there's a law decreeing his image must be placed every 50 metres or so. A few posters depict his sons, either with him or separately, who look quite sinister, wearing dark sunglasses."
These portraits were often several storeys tall, dominating traffic circuses or the sides of a building. It didn't stop there. Pages of stickers with Assad's portrait - of the size popular with schoolkids here - were sold on the street, along with his posters. And people bought them, maybe to show they had the "right" political allegiances.
Cars commonly displayed decals of Assad's face in their rear windows. A discreetly-traded joke went like this: A Syrian intelligence agent is trying to get into Israel. He has been trained and groomed to impersonate an orthodox Jew, speaking perfect Hebrew. He buys a car in Jordan with Israeli plates and then tries to cross into Israel. Israeli border guards grill him about his knowledge of Hebrew and Judaism. He answers each question flawlessly. Thinking he's made it he's shocked to be thrown into jail as a spy.
"But why?" he asks. "How did you know?"
"You forgot to take the Assad stickers off your car!"
Al-Assad was seen everywhere but little was said about him by everyday people. A fellow tourist asked his guide how old Hafez al-Assad was. The guide opened his mouth to respond, but then appeared to think better of it, saying only, "He's in his 50s."
When he died that June, it came out that Hafez al-Assad had been in his 70s and sick for years. But while he was living, no one dared say anything suggesting the officially esteemed leader might be sick and on his way out.
It was Assad who allowed the 1982 massacre and air-bombing of between 10,000 and 30,000 people in the city of Hama to put down an uprising by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. It's fair to say, though, that more than Muslim Brotherhood members lost their lives.
"The streets ran with blood," a Hama cab driver told me quietly in the privacy of his vehicle, never taking his eyes off the road. "After 10 days, I couldn't take it any more - I went to Damascus."
Intellectuals complained to us about the repression they faced. We encountered some ourselves when we watched a post office employee openly photocopying a fax we were sending, presumably to keep track of whom we were contacting and for what reason.
Bashar al-Assad has been thought to be more forward-thinking than his father. An ophthalmologist trained in the U.K., Bashar's succession quickly brought a relaxation in freedom of expression. Political discussion groups sprung up. State newspapers started running articles about political reform and democracy.
But it lasted only a few months before government hardliners saw to it that activists for freedom of expression and democracy were squashed.
It was reported last week that scenes of the toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad were not televised in Syria. But in the age of the Internet the word is undoubtedly out among educated Syrians. A neighbouring dictator and his iron-fisted regime are no more. The winds of freedom are blowing from Iraq across the desert to places like Syria and it may not take a foreign army to turn them gale-force.
"Just concentrate on the statue," one grinning Syrian man told a reporter for The New York Times last week. "We have a lot of statues here."
Reach Moira MacDonald at moiramac@canoemail.com Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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