Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (35 page)

Modern ideology is also a luxury of the literate. And literacy is a phenomenon of the late twentieth century in both Syria and the wider Arab world. Literacy doubled from forty percent in 1970 to almost eighty percent in 2000 in Syria. Education politicizes, intentionally or not. Hafez al Assad’s own experience was proof—and one of the reasons, as Syria opened up schools, that he ensured that teachers and university professors were all certifiable Baathists.

Since Assad’s death, Syria’s leftists have done the most to define a different future. They have established the parameters and rhythm of action. And, seasoned in Syrian prisons, they have been realistic about the long view.

Michel Kilo is a neo-Marxist democrat and one of Syria’s leading opposition thinkers. We met late on Easter Sunday, after he returned from Easter dinner. Kilo is Greek Orthodox. Amid the hundreds of books squeezed onto shelves that line his living room and hallways are religious icons, including a picture of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. His wife offered me Easter cookies.

“I am a democrat, an Arab, and a leftist, in that order,” Kilo said, when I asked him how he identified himself. Kilo is a man of imposing heft and height with Nixonesque jowls, and he speaks with a baritone certainty. “I have always been a Marxist,” he added, “and I will always be a Marxist.”

During the days of Hafez al Assad, Kilo was imprisoned once and harassed often for his opposition. He was jailed—without charges or a trial—for two-and-one-half years. He was released in 1982. Since then, he told me, he had been summoned frequently by Syrian intelligence for extended questioning, and his telephone and activities were heavily monitored. He and his wife said they could always tell when they were being tailed—by the cigarettes glowing in the dark across the street at night, or when cars with three men are parked nearby during the day.

I asked Kilo, who was educated in Germany, how he distinguished between Marxism and the socialism of the Baath Party.

He scowled, his big black eyebrows knitting. “There’s a huge difference! Baathism is Stalinism. Neither includes the idea of the citizen or liberal freedoms. They don’t talk about civil society. There is nothing of the ideas of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. They just have the authority, the state, and the one class,” he said. “Baathism and Stalinism are the opposite of Marxism.”

After Hafez al Assad’s death in 2000, Kilo became an engine for change in Syria. During the Damascus Spring, he mobilized the opposition behind the Manifesto of the Ninety-Nine; his signature is sixth on the list. In 2001, he was a sponsor of the Manifesto of One Thousand.

Kilo often negotiated with other dissidents at Café Rawda across from parliament in the modern business district of Damascus. It is a bustling, noisy place with a canopied courtyard where men smoke hubble-bubble waterpipes and play backgammon or chess. After the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq, Kilo also designed a petition imploring the government to avoid a similar “looming danger.” It warned that “cumulative mistakes” had “exhausted” Syria and exposed the country “like never before.”

On his own, Kilo also pressed the regime for specific reforms, including distinctly non-Marxist changes in banking and insurance to help jump-start Syria’s troubled economy. “We have banks, but only to put your money into. They’re not modern,” he said, shaking his head.

“Whenever I think about this government, I think ‘They are stupid.’ Really,” he added, then laughed derisively. “They’re donkeys. When you have clothes that don’t fit anymore, you buy new ones.”

But Kilo launched his boldest initiative in 2005 when he set out to unify Syria’s often querulous opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood. He proposed a detailed statement of unity on all the major issues facing Syria and a common platform to tackle them. Kilo wrote the first draft.

The result was the Damascus Declaration.

Syria, the Declaration warned, was at a crossroads requiring an urgent “rescue mission.” In blunt language, it said, the monopoly on power by an “authoritarian, totalitarian, and cliquish regime” had torn apart the country’s social fabric, put it on the brink of economic collapse, and led to stifling isolation. Syria’s foreign policy was “destructive, adventurous, and short-sighted,” especially in Lebanon.

That’s imprisonable language in Syria.

“The present moment calls for a courageous and responsible national stand,” the Declaration added. The proclamation represented a huge leap for Syria’s opposition. The Damascus Spring in 2001 had been about ideas of reform. The Damascus Declaration in 2005 was calling for regime change.

The five-page document, boldly unveiled at an unauthorized press conference in October 2005, laid out an alternative vision based on reform that would be “peaceful, gradual, founded on accord, and based on dialogue and recognition of the other.” It acknowledged Islam as the “more prominent cultural component,” but it stipulated that no party or trend could claim an exceptional position. The role of national minorities must be guaranteed, along with their cultural and linguistic rights.

The document was signed by more than 250 major opposition figures as well as parties both secular and religious, Arab and Kurdish. It was also the first time the opposition inside and outside the country came together in a national accord.

Kilo personally traveled to Morocco and Europe to meet exiled Muslim Brotherhood leaders and convince the Islamists to join their secular counterparts.

Riad Seif, the former parliamentarian, was the first name on the list. He had signed it while still in prison. The regime, Seif had told me, later tried to force him to withdraw his signature.

“They were crazy that I signed it,” Seif had said. “They asked my son and my daughter to convince me to take my name off it. The chief of the prison came and talked to me many times. I told him the last time, ‘You can hang me, but I won’t make this announcement.’”

When I talked to Kilo, he was working with other dissidents on the next steps. The fathers of the Damascus Declaration were trying to establish a permanent leadership, with a general secretary, a media office, and an outreach program for the public. The goal was a national conference to bring all sides together to make decisions.

I told Kilo that the odds of success seemed pretty remote. The government had publicly ignored the Declaration. The Damascus Spring had been squelched after less than one year. And Kilo had admitted that he was increasingly being summoned for questioning by Syrian intelligence.

“The Damascus Declaration represents the coming together of ninety-five percent of the opposition—the democratic opposition, the Islamist opposition, and the Kurdish opposition,” Kilo replied.

“The opposition is now strong enough to emerge as a new pole on the political spectrum. It is strong enough to develop a program of democratic change,” he said. “For the first time since 1963, when the Baathists took over, it is strong enough to try to assemble its own system and leaders.”

“Yes, the spring is over,” he added. “But each step builds on the last one.”

It is likely to be a long march, however.

Three weeks after I left, on May 14, Kilo was summoned by Syrian intelligence. He had just helped craft yet another defiant pronouncement. This one called on Syria to normalize diplomatic relations with Lebanon, define their borders, and open an embassy—a step that would have recognized the separation of the two countries, formally ended any Syrian claims to its little neighbor, and cost Damascus its one trump card in negotiating for the return of its own Golan Heights from Israel. The petition, signed by 500 prominent Syrians and Lebanese, was quickly dubbed the Damascus-Beirut Declaration.

This time, Kilo did not return home.

Three days later, he was charged with “weakening national sentiment” and “spreading false or exaggerated news that can affect the standing of the state.” The crimes carried the potential for a sentence of decades, even life, in prison.

Kilo’s arrest marked the beginning of the biggest crackdown since Bashar al Assad assumed power. The opposition was maturing, but Assad was proving to be little different from his father.

The neo-Marxists have taken a circuitous route to their current democratic agenda. They have assumed a leadership role largely by default; Syria has few Western-style liberals, while the Muslim activists are either in exile or underground. Most of the neo-Marxists have mellowed with time, their thinking shaped by the Soviet Union’s collapse, Lebanon’s sectarian civil war on one border, Iraq’s bloody chaos on another, and the general triumph of Islamic movements in elections regionwide. Most now want to avoid both radical ideas and sudden upheavals.

Yassin Haj Saleh and his wife Samira al Khalil are both neo-Marxist democrats. To see them, I drove to one of the new Damascus suburbs, which are mostly blocks of sterile apartment buildings on the barren hills surrounding the capital. Their small apartment is on the sixth floor and, like many buildings in Syria, theirs did not have an elevator. The walls on the walk up were splattered with cement drippings, and on a windy day the stairwell was a cold wind tunnel.

Saleh and Khalil, who were both born in 1961, are former jailbirds. Both were arrested because they were members of one of Syria’s Communist Parties, although not the same one. (They did not meet until after they were released.) Saleh belonged to Turk’s party; his wife was a member of the communist Labor Party. All communist parties were outlawed, even though Syria’s Baath Party is socialist.

Saleh is a tall, handsome man with prematurely silver hair and the easy demeanor and attire of an academic. Khalil was wearing jeans and a denim jacket, and she wore her brown hair in a flip with big, curled bangs. Her pale lipstick was outlined by a darker lip pencil.

Saleh was a nineteen-year-old medical student at the University of Aleppo, in Syria’s second largest city, when he was arrested in 1980. He was held for the next sixteen years. He told me the now familiar tale of detainee torture during interrogations—the floggings with electric cable that crush muscle and break bones, the infamous “wheel” that detainees are chained to for hours, and another wooden device to which the hands and legs are tied so tightly that it leaves hands paralyzed for months.

Saleh had no inkling of his fate until well into the eleventh year, when he was finally charged. The first count was opposition to the Baath Party goals of “unity, socialism, and progress”; the second was belonging to a group whose aim was to overthrow the regime. He was tried along with 600 others at the Supreme State Security Court—without lawyers, witnesses, or evidence. He was sentenced to nine years for the first offense and fifteen years for the second, both at hard labor, to serve concurrently.

At the end of fifteen years, Saleh was asked to cooperate with the regime, effectively to become an informant. “I said to them, ‘It’s not enough to jail me for fifteen years? It’s now my right to be released,’” he recalled.

So Saleh was held for another year—“and fourteen days,” he noted. “They don’t even respect their own laws or their own courts.” He was transferred to Syria’s most notorious prison, in Tadmur, also known as Palmyra, which means “city of palms.” It is an oasis in the eastern desert with Roman ruins dating back to the second century. It was once a caravan stop between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. It is a city far from the fertile strip between the coastal mountains and the desert where most Syrians live.

“The extra year was the harshest and most atrocious,” Saleh told me.

“Tadmur is a place that literally eats men. It was worse than the ‘house of the dead’ described by Dostoyevsky. Fear is a way of life in Tadmur, where every day primitive and vengeful torture is carried out at the hands of heartless people,” he added. “I was always hungry and always afraid.” When he was released in 1996, he weighed 104 pounds.

His wife, Khalil, spent four years in jail. She and her sister were arrested for membership in the communist Labor Party. A bakery worker at the time, she was never charged, never tried, and never told how long she would be held.

“We just wait,” she said. Khalil was freed in 1991 when Hafez al Assad pardoned female prisoners.

After his release, Saleh returned to medical school, since employment is difficult for former political prisoners. He graduated in 2000 but never practiced. He instead became one of Syria’s most outspoken critics. The state-controlled press will not publish Saleh in Syria, so he writes opinion pieces in papers ranging from Lebanon’s
An Nahar
to
The New York Times
to air his view on changes needed in Damascus. He now lives, somewhat precariously, as a freelance intellectual.

Saleh chuckled when I asked him why the Marxists of the twentieth century have evolved into the most outspoken Middle East democrats in the twenty-first century.

It was, he replied, largely a reaction. “We originally became Marxists because the first generation of liberals failed to solve the national problems that faced our countries after independence,” he said.

“The majority of Syrians and Egyptians and Iraqis were poor farmers. In fact, they were more than poor, they were nearly slaves. But the old liberals of the Arab world, the people who led the struggle for independence against colonial rule, generally came from a class of urban notables—people who were rich and had big landholdings. They were not interested in agricultural reform.”

“They collapsed completely in Syria in the 1960s. That’s why the Baathists had an easy victory over them,” he added.