Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (34 page)

During his 2000 inaugural address to parliament, the new president used words little heard in Syria—democracy, free speech, a free press, and accountability. He talked about the “dire need” for “constructive criticism…from different points of view.”

Assad began his presidency by releasing 600 political prisoners and closing a notorious prison. Big satellite dishes soon proliferated on crowded rooftops. New Internet cafés competed with traditional coffeehouses, particularly for the young. Two mobile telephone networks transformed communications in a country where faxes once had to be registered with the government. A new satirical weekly,
The Lamplighter,
was the first independent paper in almost forty years to get a license to publish. It dared to poke fun at Syrians and their system.

From June 2000 into the winter of 2001, Syria was almost vibrant. Intellectuals published increasingly bold demands. The first was the Manifesto of the Ninety-Nine, so called because that many writers, academics, lawyers, doctors, and even a handful of cinematographers were brave enough to sign it. Issued in September 2000, it called on Assad to pardon all political prisoners, end censorship, establish the rule of law, allow the freedom to assemble in new associations, and end the pervasive surveillance.
⁷

It was soon followed by the Manifesto of the One Thousand, which reflected the burgeoning movement for reform and the growing number of people willing to publicly attach their names to it. The second manifesto demanded even more: an end to emergency law, democratic elections, no privileges for a “ruling front,” judicial independence, and human-and women’s-rights guarantees.
⁸

By January 2001, Seif was sufficiently emboldened to announce at one of the Wednesday-night forums that he intended to create a new political party to compete with the ruling Baath Party. He wanted to call it the Movement for Social Peace.

“I was very naïve. I found that people took it very seriously and immediately offered suggestions about how to build it,” he told me, laughing at the memory. “But the government also took it seriously. And it saw a new movement as a big danger.”

Syria’s Mukhabarat secret police soon showed up. “First, they called. Then they came here,” Seif said. “They asked me to stop.”

The tone of Syria’s new president also shifted. In one of his first press interviews, Assad warned the reformists against “any action threatening the country’s stability.”

The Forum for National Dialogue, the embryo for a new party, was shut down in February 2001.

Seif continued to gnaw away at the system, however. In parliament, he pressed for an official probe into corruption, the other big taboo in Syria.

Bribes, kickbacks, and rip-offs affect most aspects of Syrian life, often blatantly. One of the first taxis I took in Damascus was ordered to pull over by a cop who appeared out of nowhere on a street corner. The taxi had done nothing wrong, but the driver had no recourse. He could pay off the policeman, face a trumped-up ticket for more, or even be arrested. “It happens every day,” the cabbie shrugged. “Tomorrow the police will be on other corners doing the same thing.”

The bigger problem is at the top, where corruption impacts Syria’s deeply troubled economy. Most of it is tied to Syria’s political families, prompting comparisons with the mafia—dynasty founder Hafez al Assad as the archetypal Don Corleone and his three sons as the impetuous Santino, hapless Fredo, and wily Michael Corleone.
⁹

Seif specifically dared to question a monopoly on Syria’s new cellular telephone system by the Makhloufs, the other half of the Assad empire. Hafez al Assad married Anissa Makhlouf. Her family—particularly Bashar al Assad’s cousins—ended up running many of the most lucrative businesses and franchises throughout the country, reportedly including the Dunkin’ Donuts.
¹⁰

“As a member of parliament, I was very well-informed about the Makhlouf family deal with the mobile business. It was a big scandal that would cost Syria, an underdeveloped country, millions and millions of dollars,” Seif told me. “I spoke against it loudly in parliament and forced them to investigate it. But when I realized it was only going to be a formality, I made a study and printed three 3,000 copies of it—I did this on my own—and I distributed it all over Syria.

“The minister of communication warned me that, if I didn’t give up this matter, I was taking a big risk,” he continued, agitated. “And the Makhloufs sent around someone who made very generous offers—a lot of money—to back off. I told them to go away.”

Seif’s situation came to a head in August 2001.

As the scrappy politician distributed his booklet on corruption, he also moved to relaunch the Forum for a National Dialogue. Earlier meetings had been informal. Invitations had been by word of mouth. Local intellectuals had begun the evenings with commentaries on some aspect of reform and then opened it up for discussion. The idea was to stay below the radar. The regime had not allowed the forum to register as a nongovernment organization, so the meetings could be considered a violation of emergency law.

But Seif decided to do it up big. He invited a prominent Syrian exile to fly in from Paris to give a formal lecture. And he printed up invitations.

“As a member of parliament, I insisted that this was my right,” Seif recalled. “But the Mukhabarat contacted me three days before the event and told me not to hold it. They said it’s not allowed. I told them I was doing it anyway—and they could do what they like.

“The lecture was held on September 5, 2001. More than 600 people came from all over Syria. They were sitting down the stairway and into the street,” he continued, pointing beyond his living room. “We knew a lot of people would come, so we had loudspeakers for them. We talked from seven
P.M
. until one in the morning. People were really very energetic and courageous.”

The next day, Seif was arrested.

The police came five days after the arrest of Riad Turk, the grandfather of Syria’s opposition. Over the next few weeks—as the world was caught up in the al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—Syria arrested other increasingly vocal politicians, academics, writers, and journalists.

The Damascus Spring was over.

Seif was formally charged with defying the state and trying to change the constitution by illegal means.

“In court, I said, ‘By force? With these muscles?’” Seif told me, laughing. He looks a little like actor Tom Bosley, the portly father from the television series
Happy Days.

Seif was defiant when he faced the judge. There are no jury trials in Syria.

“I want an explanation as to why I am here. I am a deputy in the Syrian parliament. I performed my duties as a deputy, yet the existing regime in Syria does not accept any opposition or argument other than its own,” he told the judge, in front of a courtroom that included diplomats from the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Belgium, and Holland.

“I did not violate the constitution. I am here because I demanded a breakup of the political, economic, social, and media monopoly in Syria.”
¹¹

The legally elected and most popular independent politician in Syria, a leader of the Damascus Spring, was sentenced to five years in prison.

Seif was released in January 2006.

He emerged pledging to move ahead with his new party. To friends, colleagues, and well-wishers again filling his living room, Seif vowed to pick up where he had left off. With an eye on the future, Seif said, his new party sought a membership with a majority among the young.

“We have arrived at the point where we really have to change,” Seif told them. “There is no way to continue as it is now. We want to build, as soon as possible, democracy in Syria, because that is the only way to save the country and to avoid catastrophe.”
¹²

But when I met him three months later, Seif told me his ordeal had not yet ended. Four weeks after he went home, the Mukhabarat showed up at his door at two
A.M.
He did not hear the bell because of his deafness, so the secret police went to the homes of his cousin and then his son.

“They came back at five
A.M.
I looked through the door and saw my son surrounded by secret police,” Seif recalled. “As soon as they came in, they put handcuffs on me and a blindfold, then they took me to a Mukhabarat office. They talked to me, then beat me. They wanted me to sign a promise that I would not contact any diplomats or foreigners. If I didn’t sign it, they said I’d be humiliated every day for the rest of my life.

“The same officers warned my son. They said if he said one word about his father, one member of his family would disappear or be killed,” Seif added. “They said this without shame.

“Now, I have to report to the police every day from eleven until one,” he continued. “I am followed by an intelligence patrol wherever I go, twenty-four hours, seven days a week. They have warned my family, friends, and associates not to deal with me. They register everyone who comes to my office. People are very afraid to be in touch with me.”

Seif can not run for parliament again for five years—the time matching his prison sentence. “I have no business,” he added. “The government long ago forced me into bankruptcy. It started when they cut off supplies for my factories.”

“I am,” he conceded, “a little broken. Not completely,” he added hastily, “but a little.”

I asked Seif about the future. Words had been pouring out of him all evening, but this time he paused for a moment.

“Look,” he responded, leaning forward in his big chair. “The regime is very strong. Every farmer depends on the government. Maybe one quarter of all jobs are in the public sector, provided by the government.

“But the regime has also done many horrible things during its thirty-six years,” he continued. “Corruption is hurting everybody. Unemployment is horrible. No one believes they have the even most basic rights. And then there are hundreds of thousands of Mukhabarat—and they warn everybody, not just me. So a very big majority of Syrians are dreaming of change, but they are also not yet ready to pay the price. They are what we call the silent opposition.

“Myself and the others, the activists in the opposition, are determined to go on. We’re waiting and watching for opportunities to push,” he said. “They’ve been taking people back to prison again lately, but it’s backfiring. It makes us more committed.

“We’ve already paid a big price. But we’re willing to pay more. The key for us is that we just have to be steady. We can’t waver.”

The shifting political winds in the Middle East are upending perceptions about who the allies of democracy are and who are its enemies.

During the Cold War, the West encouraged the emergence of Islamic movements to foil Communist influence in the Middle East. Islam seemed a natural ally against an atheist ideology.

But with Islamic parties now rising rapidly, the ultimate irony in the Middle East is that so many of the secular activists putting their necks on the line for democracy are Marxists. Or, as some insist, former Communists who are now just leftists seeking a democracy that gives them political space.

In fairness, many have evolved, in varying degrees, in both tactics and goals since the Cold War’s end. The neo-Marxists are often taking the biggest risks, organizing the boldest demonstrations, penning the most scathing criticisms, and serving the longest prison stints. They are, in a delicious twist, becoming the best de facto allies of the West on democratic reform.

Nowhere is that truer than in Syria. Riad al Turk entered politics through Syria’s Communist Party. His position began shifting in the 1970s, forcing a party split. His breakaway faction became critical of the Soviet Union, opposed its invasion of Afghanistan, and put forward a program for multiparty democracy in Syria. In 2005, the party abandoned its Communist moniker; it is now the Syrian Democratic Socialist Party. But Turk remains a Marxist, albeit one willing to share power.

The neo-Marxist democrats are small in number. For millennia, political life in the Middle East has centered around family, tribe, religion, or neighborhood, with decisions left to a band of elders—not unlike other parts of the world before their own transitions. In Syria, the rise of ideology that crossed those traditional boundaries is a mid-twentieth-century phenomenon. Aflaq’s Baath Party movement, launched in the 1940s, was one of the first, and for more than a decade it was little more than a clique of intellectuals.