Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (32 page)

In contrast, Nasrallah had been able to punish if not defeat Israel. And he had nourished a hungry loneliness. Hezbollah filled a void.

“The reason is not ideology but psychology—a basic human need for self-respect and affirmation,” said Rami Khouri, the columnist for Beirut’s
The Daily Star
newspaper. “Three generations of Arabs have endured painful humiliation at the combined hand of Israel and the West. Five major wars all ended in defeat. The false and cruel promise of peace talks withered just as regularly.”

Khouri is no Hezbollah sympathizer. He is Christian Palestinian. He graduated from Syracuse University and is a sports fanatic so devout that, in the middle of the Lebanon war, he e-mailed me his bet that the Yankees would beat the Mets in the 2006 World Series by four games to two.

Yet in the same e-mail, he also predicted that the outcome of the Lebanon war would have a bigger impact than the 1967 conflict—when Israel redrew the region’s map by capturing big chunks of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.

The 2006 war again had redefined political patterns in the Middle East, Khouri warned. “Almost overnight, Nasrallah produced what three generations of ordinary Arabs have yearned for: military effectiveness instead of haplessness, political empowerment instead of marginalization, and resistance instead of forced submission to Israeli and American threats. A new man, indeed, responding to a stubborn need among all Arab societies.”

Every Middle East war has had its political casualties—toppling kings and producing coups. Following the pattern, the chasm between rulers and the ruled clearly deepened during the Lebanon war. The leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan initially criticized Hezbollah for provoking a conflict, but then their own streets turned on them.

Egypt witnessed almost daily protests. In Cairo, where a public gathering of more than five people requires a permit, more than 1,000 demonstrators carried a large banner warning,
ARAB MAJESTIES, EXCELLENCIES, AND HIGHNESSES, WE SPIT ON YOU.
Most rallies condemned President Mubarak. In an overwhelmingly Sunni country, Egyptians carried posters of Lebanon’s Shiite leader—and took off their shoes to shake at their own government. Another protest featured a large poster of the Egyptian leader with a Star of David drawn on his forehead.
THE ENEMY OF THE EGYPTIAN PEOPLE,
it read underneath.
⁶⁶

Regimes soon changed their tunes. “The Arab people see now in Hezbollah a hero facing Israel’s aggression and defending their land,” said Jordan’s young King Abdullah. “This is a fact that the United States and Israel must realize: As long as there is aggression, there’s resistance, and there’s popular support for resistance.”

Beyond the twenty-two Arab nations, the fifty-three countries in the Islamic bloc also felt the impact. An emergency meeting of Muslim leaders issued a joint statement calling for an immediate cease-fire. “This war must stop, or it will radicalize the Muslim world, even those of us who are moderate today,” warned Indonesian President Bambang Yudhoyono. “From there, it will be just one step away to that ultimate nightmare: a clash of civilizations.”

Every Middle East war has also produced unintended consequences. In one of his curious, rambling videotapes to al Jazeera, Osama bin Laden said in 2004 that he had originally been inspired to attack the United States because of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon with American arms.

“When I saw those destroyed towers in Lebanon,” he said, “it sparked in my mind that the oppressors should be punished in the same way and that we should destroy towers in America—so they can taste what we tasted and so they stop killing our women and children…. I could not forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawling everywhere. Buildings were demolished over their residents’ heads, rockets were raining down on homes without mercy…and the entire world saw and heard, but it did nothing.”
⁶⁷

The Hezbollah war will also be a catalyst, with the impact still years from being fully felt or understood. “This war was crucial,” Nasrallah told al Jazeera a few weeks after the war ended. “It was not about the fate of Hezbollah, but about the fate of Lebanon, Palestine, the Arabs, and the whole region.”
⁶⁸

At the very least, the 2006 war spurred two phenomena that moved the center of political gravity in the region.

First, the war increased the already rising Shiite tide that began with Iran’s 1979 revolution, grew with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and expanded after Saddam Hussein’s ouster in 2003 brought the long-repressed Shiite majority to power in Iraq. Disgruntled but emboldened Shiites in the oil-rich kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain were also shaking up local politics.

In a conversation in 2004, Jordan’s King Abdullah fretted about the emergence of a “Shiite crescent.” An arc of Shiite-controlled regimes stretching across a strategic and oil-rich area, the Sunni monarch told me, would alter the regional political balance, heighten sectarian tensions, and Lebanonize other countries.
⁶⁹

A new wave of pan-Shiism seemed highly unlikely. Yet, once relegated to the margins of Arab politics, Shiites were clearly in political ascendance throughout the region. They were often the agents of change—of disparate kinds. There was also talk of a new “Shiite swagger” in their new found self-confidence.
⁷⁰

“For Shiites and the wider Arab world, Hezbollah has come out of the war as a symbol of resistance and defiance. Hezbollah did what governments could not do,” Barham Salih, Iraq’s deputy prime minister and a non-Arab Kurd, told me. “What it did for its own country was a disaster. But a lot of people, out of disgust at their own governments, now look to Hezbollah.

“I hate his politics, but I watch every speech Nasrallah gives,” the Iraqi leader, who is a Sunni and avowedly pro-American, told me.

“He’s true to his word. He’s not a thief. And he’s successful at what he promises to do. This war really gave him a platform. He’s now the most important icon in the region—in our era.”

Second, among both major Muslim sects, the Hezbollah war inspired a shift from Arabism to Islamism, from rallying around national ideologies and identities to mobilizing around faith. It was a natural progression.

The 1967 war, which was fought in the name of pan-Arab nationalism, was the Arab world’s most sweeping humiliation. Arabism, the root of all major ideologies as the region gained independence from European powers in the mid-twentieth century, also universally produced corrupt and despotic rule.

Islamism gradually became the alternative. In 1973, the Arab offensive against Israel was fought under a banner of Islam. The operation was named after the Prophet Mohammed’s sword. The rallying cry was “God is great.” It was the first war in which the Arabs performed well, albeit briefly.

Iran’s 1979 revolution exploited an Islamic identity as the force unifying rival political trends to bring down a dynasty that had ruled for twenty-five centuries. The Persian upheaval had a wide spillover on the Arab world, including the creation of Hezbollah.

Over the next generation, in every country where they have taken root, Islamic parties gained ground. In 2005 and 2006, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas became major political fixtures through elections—no longer on the margins.

The Hezbollah war will further fuel that dynamic.

“Since 2000, Hezbollah hasn’t known what its identity is,” Michael Young, the Lebanese Christian analyst and columnist, told me during my trip to Beirut shortly before the war. “Deep down, Nasrallah thinks he is better than Lebanese politics…. And to a certain extent, he’s right. To have to go into the pit with the rest of Lebanon’s politicians is not something he relishes. He’s inexperienced in sectarian bargaining. He’s still learning.

“But more fundamentally, he has to figure out: Is he just a local leader, or is he a regional Che Guevera?” Young said.

After the 2006 war, Nasrallah emerged as both.

The Outlaws

T
he human toll in the struggle for political change is the Middle East’s most inspiring tragedy. Tales of hardship and loss are often passed around only in whispers. Over the next decade or two, the pace of change in the Middle East will be determined in part by the democratic opposition’s strength, ideas, and increasing defiance. A regime’s response will in turn indicate whether it can be salvaged.

As the struggle intensifies, the human costs are certain to grow, in some cases exorbitantly. Yet the fledgling agents of change are a stubborn lot. Syria is a wrenching example.

Shortly before leaving for Syria, I went to the Beirut home of a Syrian dissident to view a homemade documentary, filmed secretly in Damascus, about Riad al Turk. Turk is the Old Man of Syrian opposition. Syrians call him their Nelson Mandela because of his noisy and unwavering resistance to authoritarian rule and his long incarceration. Turk was imprisoned four times, the total a bit shorter than Mandela’s twenty-seven years. But the conditions were significantly tougher. Mandela at least had a trial.

The subtle film is about Turk’s third prison stint. It’s a two-man show, a conversation between the filmmaker, as he holds the camera, and Syria’s most famous political prisoner. The film is called “Cousin”—Turk’s nickname on the Syrian street.

Turk begins with characteristic irreverence. Shouldn’t this film at least be managed by a qualified director?” he asks the filmmaker.

Born in 1930, Turk is a short man with thick glasses that magnify his eyes and his age. His hairline begins at the pate; his hair is a dull gray. The furrow in his brow and the lines astride his mouth are deeply rutted. He has heart and kidney ailments.

Turk’s entire life has been about dissent. He has opposed virtually every form of government in Syria since its independence from France in 1946. His tactics were never violent; they usually involved speaking out, rallying opposition, or membership in banned political movements.

Turk was first imprisoned in 1952, when he was only twenty-two, shortly after finishing law school. The first stint was for opposing a military regime that came to power in a coup d’état. He was held for five months, and tortured. He was never tried.

His next arrest was in 1958. The second stint was for opposing the merger between Syria and Egypt—under the banner of pan-Arab unity—in the short-lived United Arab Republic. He was held for sixteen months, and repeatedly tortured. He was never tried.

But Turk’s most costly dissent came during the rule of Hafez al Assad.

Assad was the former Air Force general who squeezed out rivals to win Syria’s powerful defense ministry in 1966. In a bloodless coup in 1970, Assad then ousted President Nureddin al Atassi, who was the leader of Assad’s own Baath Party. It was a coup from within; coups were the way Syrians dealt with politics even
within
a party.

In his last meeting with Assad and Atassi shortly before Syria’s coup and his own death, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser reportedly mused, “Ah, you Baathists. You’re so harsh with each other.”
¹
The ousted Atassi spent the rest of his life in prison. He, too, was never tried. He was finally released and allowed to go for medical treatment, basically to die, in France.

I watched the film in the Beirut apartment of the former president’s son, Mohammed Ali Atassi. He was the filmmaker.

The confrontation between Turk and Assad lasted a lifetime. Both were stubborn men. Both were dogmatic. It was also telling of the political times that the new Syrian president was of peasant stock, the first in his family to complete either primary school or high school.
²
Assad was a socialist. His leading opponent was a man orphaned at the age of seven because his father died and his mother could not afford to keep all her children. Turk was a Marxist. Yet they were rivals.

Turk was fifty when Assad’s secret police came to arrest him the third time in 1980. This time, he was held for almost eighteen years. It was all in solitary confinement. He was locked away in a windowless underground cell, about the length of his body or the size of a small elevator compartment, at an intelligence headquarters. Syria has more than one dozen intelligence agencies, so there are several headquarters. He was never charged with a crime. He was never tried. He never knew when it was going to end.

The film shifts back and forth between Turk’s reflections on politics and prison, and silent pictures of him carefully laying down tiny dark objects, like dots, on a sheet. In an opening sequence, there are only a few dots. There is no explanation.

The film then switches to Turk’s gravelly voiced recollections. He responds to the filmmaker’s questions with succinct answers, without drama, adjectives, or laments. He mentions beatings, almost in passing, and the months of healing that followed. He recounts sleeping on a concrete floor without a bed. For the first decade, he never saw the sun or the sky or the outdoors. He was never allowed out of his cell to exercise. Until the final months, he was not allowed a book, newspaper, mail, or anything else to keep his mind occupied.

“Any man rots, gets sick, and wears out. That’s what they wanted—to make me give up,” he told the filmmaker. “They frankly told me that: ‘You are here as a surety for the presidential palace.’”

Turk’s only activity was being allowed three times a day to go to a shared toilet, always when no one else was in it. He used the brief breaks to scrounge in the toilet bin for clothing thrown away by other prisoners as his own wore out and winters set in.

The film switches back, briefly, to Turk laying down more tiny dots. They are now forming a line.

Turk’s wife, Asma, was arrested the same month he was. They left two young daughters behind. Asma was held for two years, also without charges or a trial. Turk was not told when she was released after two years or what happened to his children. For the first thirteen years, he received no communication from family or friends. He had no idea what had happened to any of them or what was going on in the outside world.

The scene again switches momentarily to Turk silently hovering over his dots. A pattern is emerging.

The filmmaker asks how Turk survived with his sanity. By forgetting, Turk says.

“You lose the world where you used to live, your family, your party, your neighborhood, your friends. This world is gone, as if you were dead,” he said. “I could do nothing but suffer and groan, and I didn’t want to suffer and groan…I cut the bonds with the outside world so I didn’t carry its suffering…. The only position I took was to resist.”

Turk limited his focus. “I had only one mission, a unique mission, not to give to the regime anything that it could use against my party. No information. No political positions. You must accept hell as a price to pay for remaining faithful to your convictions, and that’s what I did.”

The film switches back to the tiny dots. A geometric pattern comes into focus.

As years passed, Turk began to suffer ailments. During dizzy spells, he sometimes called out to a passing jailer to let him breathe for a moment outside his airless cell. “The air in the hallway is cleaner than the one in the cell, even though the air of the hallway also stinks,” he tells the filmmaker.

Syrian officials claim that Turk was offered a chance to go home if he signed a statement supporting the regime.

Asked by the filmmaker if he feels remorse in his choice, which effectively meant abandoning his daughters, Turk is unflinching.

“No, I fulfilled my duties. I’m not at all responsible for what happened, except if you believe that I had to sign or do what the regime wanted in order to return home. If that was what needed to be done, then I consider myself criminal towards my daughters,” he says.

“But that’s not what needed to be done,” he adds. “On the contrary, I don’t like empty speeches. I will not keep anything for myself. No fortune. Nothing. At least I will leave to them the name of a father with a good reputation. And this is the best thing a father can leave to his children.”

At the end, the film switches back to the little dots. They now form a grand geometric design, intricate in the style of Middle Eastern architecture and artisan woodcraft. Turk explains: After repeatedly searching the garbage in the prison toilet for something to do, unsuccessfully, he turned to his food. The evening meal was often a thin soup with dark grain that failed to soften when cooked. Turk calls them his “little gravel.”

“I found them while I was eating my soup. The black grain is hard,” he says. “I thought about the time I was in school, where I used to like drawing.”

Turk began collecting them and, for the better part of eighteen years, spent every day in his silent world crafting large pictures from the tiny kernels. Over eighteen years, Turk collected thousands of grains.

“The big picture I composed used to take me more than a day,” he recalls. “At noon, I used to hope they didn’t bring lunch because that meant I had to ruin everything to have a place to eat. You must stand up very fast, and I had no glue to stick them. I had to ruin everything and then build everything again.

“I was like the guy with the rock—the Sisyphus myth, isn’t it?” Turk says. In the Greek myth, Sisyphus’s punishment was to be blinded and to have to repeatedly roll a giant boulder up a mountain to the peak, only to have it perpetually roll back down to the bottom. The tale was grist for Albert Camus’ 1942 essay exploring the absurdities and follies of life.

Turk was released in 1998. But in the 2001 documentary, Turk tells the filmmaker that he still feels stuck in a prison. “Prison represents oppression, and oppression is still practiced in my country. Destroying that prison is a major goal on which the country’s liberty depends. Prison is also made to scare people. People do whatever they can to avoid it. They shut themselves up.”

With uncharacteristic restraint, Turk also said nothing publicly for three years after his release. Then President Assad succumbed to longstanding heart disease in 2000 after ruling for thirty years. In less than an hour, Syria’s parliament amended the constitution to bring down the minimum age for the presidency from forty to thirty-four, so Assad’s second son, Bashar, could take over.

When the documentary was shot in 2001, Turk tells Atassi that he is growing restless. “Rebellion is still the same,” he says, “as if it were marked in me.”

In August 2001, as the filmmaker was editing his documentary, Turk reappeared in public. Political activity is restricted under Syria’s open-ended state of emergency, which was first imposed in 1963 when the Baath Party came to power. So Turk gave his first speech at a private home. Nevertheless, hundreds were willing to take the risk, including arbitrary imprisonment, to hear him.

In his talk, Turk dared to say publicly that the Syrian regime “relied on terror” to stay in power. He condemned the new form of “hereditary” rule passed from one Assad to another as “illegitimate.” He called on the regime to move “from despotism to democracy.” And he appealed to all opposition groups to reconcile their differences and unite in a common front. Ten days later, he made the same statements on al Jazeera, which beamed his remarks across the Arab world.
³

On August 31, Turk suffered an embolism that partially paralyzed his arm. The next day, he set off to get medical help. Then he disappeared.

A week later, the state-controlled media ran a brief government statement:

For the first time, Turk actually had a trial. In June 2002, he was sentenced to three years for “attempting to change the constitution by illegal means.”

Turk was back in prison.

Change in the Middle East requires confronting some of the most obstinate ideologies that still exist in the twenty-first century.

The morning after I saw the film, I drove from Beirut to Damascus. The trip winds from the sunny Mediterranean coast up into the cloud-shrouded Lebanon Mountain range, then down into the verdant plains of the Bekaa Valley to the border. Damascus is just twenty minutes beyond the frontier. The lonely stretch of road between the two border posts is broken up, incongruously, by a big pink-and-orange sign beckoning travelers to stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts.

The distance is the shortest between any two capitals in the region. For decades after their independence in the 1940s, Lebanese and Syrians said they were one people split up into two nations. But by 2006, the two cities were in worlds apart. Beirut is raucously open. Damascus is rigidly repressed.

Damascus is the world’s oldest capital. Among Arab countries, it is the city richest with history, the closest rival to Jerusalem. The main street of sprawling Souq Hamidiyeh, a bazaar filled with the smell of pungent spices, artisan stalls, and craft-your-own-perfume shops, dates back to Roman times. The old walled city is still bisected by the biblical “Street Called Straight,” which, in fact, is not straight at all. Saul of Tarsus was converted on the road to Damascus, took the name Paul, founded the first organized church at Antioch in ancient Syria, and spent the rest of his life proselytizing the new Christianity. After Islam’s birth in the Arabian desert, Damascus was the first foreign conquest by the Prophet Mohammed’s troops; it became the capital of the first Islamic dynasty. The armies of King David, Alexander the Great, the European Crusaders, Tamerlane, and the Ottoman Turks are among the many others that have either tried or succeeded at taking this strategic city and adding to its layers of history.