Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (38 page)

To get a sense of the Syrian government’s plans for reform, I went to see Bouthaina Shaaban. Born in 1953, she joined the Baath Party at the age of sixteen. In her forties, she became the regime’s face to the outside world. She rose to power as an interpreter for the two Assad presidents. Her Web site, www.bouthainashaaban.com, features an array of her pictures—standing between Hafez al Assad and Bill Clinton, translating for Bashar al Assad with Tony Blair. Educated in Britain and a specialist on the poetry of Shelley, Shaaban speaks snappy English.

During the rule of Hafez al Assad, Shaaban became an adviser to the foreign ministry.

After Bashar al Assad inherited power, she ended up in the Syrian cabinet. She now embodies the second Assad regime—and an attempt to make up for lost time on issues that make the regime most vulnerable.

In 2003, Shaaban was named minister of expatriates. It was a new post created to try to lure wealthy Syrian expatriates abroad—or at least their resources—back home. Her office is in a building so new that contractor’s paper was still on the elevator the day I visited in 2006. Her ministry has the reputation of being the one government office that reliably answers the phone and gets things done on time—or at all. Syrians can be engaging and hospitable, but the country lacks a sense of energy.

An old joke about poorly paid civil servants in Syria is that they go into work in the morning, put their suit jackets on the backs of their chairs, go out for coffee—and return at day’s end to retrieve their jackets.
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Shaaban was running late, so I waited in a reception room. I was chatting with the young interpreter I used when her mobile telephone rang. I could hear the tone of the male voice on the other end. The caller did not identify himself. He wanted to know who I was seeing, what I had been told, and what I was saying during my visit, the interpreter told me.

Surely, she replied, he knew everything I was doing.

He asked if she wanted to come in to talk to him in person.

“No,” she responded.

He kept pressing her. She explained that we were sitting in a government ministry. He said he would call back later.

“And he will,” the interpreter said. “I’m surprised he didn’t call earlier.”

I had been particularly careful on this trip. I have been going to Syria since 1981; I can usually pick out the Mukhabarat goons in a hotel lobby, restaurant, shop, or office in seconds. I have been to Syria with three American secretaries of state, and it’s always interesting to note the beefed up intelligence presence wherever we are staying. On this trip, I deliberately did not make telephone calls from my hotel room, even to the interpreter. I did not bring a cell phone. I did not plug my laptop computer into the Internet. I selectively checked e-mails at a business center and later changed passwords on the account. The intelligence officer’s call was either clumsy, or they wanted me to know.

I raised the issue with Shaaban as soon as I was ushered into her office.

“No, no, this is wrong. This is silly. Really. This should not be happening anymore,” she said. “I will make a telephone call later.”

I asked Shaaban to call the interpreter in—she had asked that the young woman not join us—and tell her the same thing. She reluctantly did.

Shaaban is a precise and brusque woman. She was wearing a navy business suit, navy stockings and a string of pearls. She wears her thick brown hair short, combed behind her ears. She has a Crest smile. She is also a devout Baathist.

Shaaban again became the public face of the regime after the Valentine’s Day assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, after Syria came under political siege from the outside world for what many Lebanese charged was its role in the murder. The United Nations launched an unprecedented investigation into the murder. Even traditional allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia demanded accountability by Damascus. The probe soon implicated top Syrian intelligence and military officials, including Assad’s younger brother Maher and his brother-in-law Asef Shawkat. Shawkat married Assad’s older sister Bushra, reportedly the most politically astute of the Assad children, against her father’s wishes.
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Bashar al Assad later named him head of military intelligence, tightening the family circle around him.

Shaaban was unleashed to defend the regime. She did slews of television interviews dismissing the international probe. She penned several op-ed pieces in the Arab and Western media pointing in other directions. She took on the kind of role that Tariq Azziz had performed for Saddam Hussein in Iraq as English-speaking front man.

Shaaban, who did a Fulbright Scholarship at Duke University, insisted that Israel and the United States were responsible for Hariri’s murder. A week after the massive bombing of Hariri’s motorcade, she wrote a rambling opinion piece alluding to former American intelligence operations as a precedent.

On the home front, however, Shaaban conceded her government had serious problems. “If the Baath Party wants to survive, it has to reform itself,” she told me.

“The most important thing is that we are looking at ourselves in the mirror, really bravely, and trying to face whatever problems we have,” she added. “I hope in the next two years, most people would feel changes in the way we are functioning.”

But Syria’s focus is on institutional efficiency, not individual freedoms, Shaaban made clear. Priority goes to the economy, not democracy.

Syria’s four-point reform package began with strengthening and streamlining government. “For the first time in government, we meet every other week with the cabinet so we can discuss strategy,” she explained. “Each ministry takes a turn and gives a report. And then we have one year to implement it and come back with the results.”

Shaaban was a bit rushed because her report was due at a cabinet session the next day, and she was still working on it. The regime had also hired a Malaysian firm to assess each branch of government and propose changes.

The second goal was to tap into Syria’s rich history and market the country as a tourist destination. “Syria could be a huge attraction,” she said, and tourism could be a vital supplement to revenues centered largely around oil and agriculture. The government was building new hotels and roads to attract more tourists. Bashar al Assad had just attended the opening of the lavish Four Seasons Hotel, one of the few new buildings in Damascus.

The third priority was her project to get expatriates to invest—and to keep their Syrian citizenship. “Syrians abroad have done extremely well. Our estimates show that there are 50,000 Syrian doctors in the United States and Europe. We also have many Syrian businessmen abroad,” she explained. “We encourage them to take the nationality they want but to keep their Syrian identity. There’s no conflict between being loyal to the country you chose and still being proud of your origins and culture.”

Finally, the government was trying to modernize its industry, in part for exports. “Most of the time,” she acknowledged, “our trade balance is in the red.”

When I pressed her on political reforms, Shaaban would not to go into specifics. Ideas floated after Bashar al Assad took office—about a more independent media and a new law on political parties—were no longer floating. Shaaban insisted, however, that new political space was opening because nongovernment groups were “springing up like mushrooms.

“In fact, we should be more careful,” she told me. “You don’t want to jump from one state to another without organizing how that move should happen. Society must remain stable.”

Stability has been the political catchword for Syria since independence. Syria has fourteen diverse religious and ethnic identities. Besides Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians, they include a restive and non-Arab Kurdish community that makes up almost ten percent of the population—in a country officially named the Syrian
Arab
Republic.
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If political parties were allowed to form freely, Syrian analysts warned me, many would be built around a religious or ethnic base.

Even his toughest critics credited Hafez al Assad with holding the country together—albeit through Soviet-style repression.

Under his son, stability was central again in the debate over reform. With chaotic Iraq on one frontier and troubled Lebanon on the other, Syrians both in and outside government were nervous about sectarian divisions erupting at home. The influx of more than one-half million Iraqis fleeing across the 450-mile border between 2003 and 2006 had driven home the potential dangers.
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On the day I strolled through the Old City’s historic souq, one of several huge maroon banners strung across the roof declared in awkward English,
WE ARE IN SYRIA THE COUNTRY OF SELF-ESTEEM. WE REFUSE YOUR DEMOCRACY AFTER WHAT WE HAVE SEEN HAPPEN IN IRAQ
.

A sense of vulnerability over the unknown impact of real reform ran deep. The end of Iraq’s Baath Party produced sectarian strife that killed dozens of Iraqis daily, worsened the economy and unemployment, increased crime, kidnappings, and rape, and brought with it a massive and prolonged foreign military presence. Many Syrians I talked to worried about what the end of their own Baath Party would mean.

The sense that Syria was fragile was visible in unusual ways.

The Middle East has its own version of
American Idol
—called
Superstar
—which runs on Lebanese television and is open to contestants throughout the Arab world. One of the strongest singers in the 2005 competition was Syria’s Shahed Barmada. Many Syrians thought she did not stand a chance because the show was in Lebanon—in the midst of the crisis over Hariri’s assassination and Syria’s troop withdrawal. A young Syrian told me she and her friends did not bother to telephone in their votes; they had assumed she would lose.

When Barmada was named runner-up, her father astonished viewers by racing onstage and wrapping her in the Syrian flag. The young singer quickly became the second-most-recognizable face in Syria, after Bashar al Assad. I saw her picture all over Damascus on billboard advertisements for Ford, often decked out in a baseball cap with the blue-and-white Ford logo. She had marketability because she was one of the few symbols of Syrian success.

Yet patchwork repair is also unlikely to be enough to placate Syrians, perhaps for economic reasons even more than political discontent.

Syria has been living on borrowed time for quite a while. The Assads, father and son, may have kept the country tranquil, but neither was a good money manager. Syria’s old-fashioned and incompetent socialist economy got a reprieve when oil was discovered in 1984. Exports began in the early 1990s. Reflecting the sorry state of the rest of the economy, Syria’s modest oil production soon accounted for half of government revenues and two thirds of its foreign exchange.
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In violation of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein, Syria also got a huge boost from smuggling Iraqi oil through Syrian pipelines and land routes for almost a decade. Damascus netted up to one billion dollars a year off illegal oil trading.
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The ouster of its brother Baath Party was costly, literally, to Damascus.

Syria’s health is now dependent on its own oil. But production peaked in 2000—and the oil has already begun to run out.

“Between 2008 and 2010, Syria will become a net importer of oil,” former World Bank economist Nabil Sukkar told me. “So our revenues are on the way to a major decline.” The current fields are expected to run out around 2025.

Sukkar, an older man with a patrician nose and expensive suits, now runs a consulting firm in Damascus. He blamed the regime. “Oil removed the sense of crisis, so it slowed down reform by creating a sense of complacency,” he continued. “We should have been renovating other sectors—agriculture, industry, and tourism as an alternative. But with oil, the attitude became ‘Why bother?’

“If we had done our homework in the 1990s, we would not be facing this future,” he added. “But there was no clarity of what the economy was going to be. Now, we face a crisis around the corner.”

Since 2000, Bashar al Assad’s renewed promise of economic liberalization has never been realized. As with political reforms, most ideas get no further than the proposal stage. In 2005, the Baath Party held its first national congress since the younger Assad took office. It declared that Syria was shifting to a “market social economy,” although the government offered few specifics.

“Of course the government had in mind China, which in 1987 introduced the idea of a market
socialist
economy,” Sukkar said. “In Syria, the idea is that we are to move to a market economy. But to alleviate the fears of the working class they added the word ‘social’—in order to keep some faith in the old system.