Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (39 page)

“But frankly, if you ask what that means, I don’t think anybody knows,” he said. “Nothing has really changed.”

With revenues already dwindling, Syria’s looming new burdens will be tougher to address. The demographic baby bulge is expected to put growing and unattainable demands on the economy over the next two decades. The regime is already unable to absorb the 300,000 young people looking for jobs every year. During my visit, unemployment hovered uncomfortably at around twelve percent officially, but more like twenty-five percent in reality.

One of the toughest steps for the Syrian regime may be cutting back on public subsidies, from basic foodstuffs to petroleum products, which are pivotal to both the Baath Party’s populist ideology and its constituency. Syria heavily subsidizes gasoline, for example. The cost to the consumer is only one third of the market price.

“The government has wanted to reduce the subsidies for over seven years but always hesitates,” Sukkar explained. “Jordan and Yemen faced sporadic street demonstrations for months after the governments began a gradual rise in fuel costs.

“Governments,” Sukkar noted pointedly, “are particularly reluctant to take those kinds of steps when they are already under siege politically.”

Before leaving Damascus, I went to see two men. The first was Anwar al Bunni, a wiry, gregarious man with a big mustache.

Bunni was born in Hama in 1959. He was eleven when the first Assad came to power. He was twenty-two when he almost became a victim of the military’s surprise crackdowns in Hama. He and a few friends often went out to check on older couples without children to fetch food, water, or medicines. As Christians, he told me, he and his friends felt less vulnerable to the military sweeps against Muslims. But during one roundup in 1981, Bunni was stopped by a Syrian army officer who asked what he was doing.

“We said we were going to help families without food,” Bunni recounted.

The officer asked Bunni if he was Muslim or Christian.

“I told him, ‘I’ve lived in Hama over twenty years and no one has ever asked me this question. Why do you have to know?’” Bunni recounted.

The officer butted Bunni’s head with his bayoneted rifle, Bunni told me, then stabbed him. Bunni showed me what he said were the scars from that encounter, visible a quarter century later.

Bunni was saved when neighbors rushed out to tell the officer that he was a Christian and only trying to help them.

“He stopped trying to kill me, but he ordered his soldiers to handcuff me in the back, and then they set fire to my beard,” Bunni recounted. Many personal accounts at the time and subsequent reconstructions detailed how the Syrian military set beards ablaze.
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Bunni was comparatively fortunate. The military moved on, and neighbors brought out buckets of water to douse the flames. He is clean-shaven today.

Bunni left Hama before the slaughter in 1982. But since his own run-in with arbitrary justice, he has spent most of his life defending Syria’s dissidents.

He was a lawyer when Riad al Turk finally had his day in court, the fourth time around. He defended Riad Seif and another member of parliament arrested at the end of the Damascus Spring. He was the attorney for the satirist whose popular independent newspaper,
The Lamplighter,
was shut down within months of its first issue. He defended a doctor imprisoned for criticizing corruption, minority Kurds arrested after a series of protests, and dozens of others.

Bunni jokingly told me that he also became a lawyer to defend his own family. He was the only child who had not served time in prison. Since 1977, his three brothers and one sister, plus two of their spouses, had spent a total of sixty years in Syria’s dungeons. They were all leftists.

The Syrian lawyer defended most dissidents pro bono. To pay the bills, he began selling his belongings. Then he sold his car. In 2005, he sold his office.

Bunni acknowledged that much of his work was for naught. His clients rarely had even a remote chance of being acquitted, he told me when I visited his small and sparsely furnished apartment in Damascus.

“The charges and the verdict come to the judges in the same envelope, before the trial even starts,” said Bunni, who has the crow’s-feet of a continuous smoker, as he puffed on another Marlboro. “But our duty as lawyers is not just to help our clients; it’s also to bring their cases to the public’s attention.”

Bunni had been on the defensive himself in recent years. Since 2002, he told me, the Syrian bar association had been trying to get him disbarred on six different counts. He had appealed and was awaiting the outcome. His activities and his telephone, he said, were routinely monitored by security police. He was also barred from leaving the country. Bunni had been invited to Germany to stand in for Riad Seif when his imprisoned client was unable to receive a human-rights award from the government in 2003. But one of the regime’s favorite tricks is to ban its critics from traveling, as I heard frequently from opposition figures in Damascus. They are not informed. They find out at the airport or at the border when immigration refuses to let them leave. They are given no reason.

A prominent dissident had shown me the small slip of white paper given him in 2004 when he tried to fly to France to receive his own human-rights award. The paper said only that the recipient should report to the investigation branch of the office of political security. Few Syrians bother to report, I was told, because they know what it means. They have no effective recourse or appeal.

“We are like hostages in the hands of this regime,” Bunni told me. But he quickly added that he was not seeking to oust the regime. “If this government, with all its crimes, starts to practice human rights, I will say ‘Welcome.’ But we also can’t wait three or four generations to have our freedom.”

In 2006, the European Union funded a project to open the Center for Legal Research and Studies. They tapped Bunni to head it. The goal was to write an assessment of Syria’s legal system, particularly laws affecting the press, women’s rights, the economy, the judiciary, and the penal code. The center would also provide training for civil society or nongovernment groups. The opening day was February 21, 2006.

The regime originally approved the project, then abruptly closed it nine days later, on March 1.

With a resilience that is often surprising in a police state like Syria, Bunni decided to fight back—peacefully. He drafted a new constitution. He spent months studying Arab and Western constitutions as well as earlier Syrian laws. He paid particular attention to Iraq’s experience in writing a new constitution in 2005.

Syria’s 1973 constitution actually stipulates, “Freedom is a sacred right.” But laws subsequently passed by parliament have taken freedoms away or left the opposition and minorities vulnerable to bad practices.

Bunni’s twenty-one-page constitution, widely available on the Internet in Arabic, French, and English, imposes two-term limits on the leadership, bans political monopolies, and provides guarantees of equality for all Syrians in a multiethnic, multireligious, and multiracial state. Arabic is the first language, but Kurdish is the second language, and other minorities can fully exercise their languages and cultures. It guarantees the right of defense in court, while arrests and searches are barred without legal warrants.

Bunni’s proposal also safeguards the right to form political parties but stipulates that they must be based on democratic principles. It separates the branches of government and specifically limits the executive’s ability to meddle beyond its duties. Even the Supreme Court would be elected by parliament based on a list of candidates put forward half by the president and half by a parliamentary committee. The top justices also would have a fifteen-year term limit.

Bunni’s constitution is laden with layers of guarantees—and a provision that they can not be changed without ninety percent of a popular vote. The media may also not be shut down, censored, or confiscated.

“I wrote it for two reasons: The constitution must be the background of all politics and a place for people to meet and to act,” Bunni told me. “When they made their new constitution, the Iraqi political parties had discussions, but each tried to get a larger space than the other for its interests. No one thought about those not represented by political parties. A constitution should be the foundation and protection for all people, whether represented by political parties or not.

“The second point,” Bunni added,” is that all activities in Syria come from a background in nondemocracy—communist or religious or Nasserist or nationalist. All of them now ask for democracy because they’re in the opposition.

“I tried to draft a constitution,” he said, with a smile, “to put them all to the test.”

Two weeks after I left Damascus, Bunni was disbarred. A week later, he issued a statement condemning the arrest of Michel Kilo, another client. A few hours later, Bunni was leaving his house for an English class when he was stopped by two security officers. They asked him to get into their car, according to his brother. Bunni demanded to see an arrest warrant. When they refused, he struggled to get away and began shouting for help.
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The two men then shoved Bunni into the car and drove away, according to his brother. He, too, was hauled off to prison.

I ended my trip to Damascus the same way I had prepared for it—with Riad al Turk. We met for coffee on a cold, rainy spring day. He was dressed in a light gray suit, with a yellow shirt and a navy sweater underneath. He clung to a small umbrella.

Although he underwent major heart surgery after completing his fourth prison stint, Turk had resumed his political activities. He was still active on the central committee of the Syrian Communist Party. At age seventy-six, he remained noisy and defiant.

“I will never, ever make a truce with this government,” he told me.

The looming question in Syria and other Arab autocracies, however, is not the government’s power. In 2007, Syria held a presidential “referendum.” Voters went to the polls to vote yea or nay for a second seven-year term for Bashar al Assad. There were no other candidates and no choices. Not surprisingly, he won ninety-seven percent of the vote. So change will depend on the opposition’s muscle and endurance. Specifically, how effective can the dedicated but outlawed dissidents be in prodding autocrats to either change or share power? And how does the balance of power finally shift?

Dissatisfaction with the status quo in Syria is clearly growing, spurred by a confluence of demographics, economic realities, international pressure, access to information, and particularly what has transpired in neighboring states. The 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein’s own version of the Baath Party in Iraq and the forced withdrawal of Syrian forces in 2005 from Lebanon were the biggest blows to Damascus since the loss of the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967. The timing made them a double whammy that provoked strong nationalist feeling, but also a lot of soul-searching, among Syrians.

Bashar al Assad also has neither the intimidating aura nor the political leverage of his father. He has pushed aside most of his father’s closest lackeys in favor of his own. But, at least for now, he still relies heavily on the Assad name, the family, the tribe, the minority Alawites, and the security police.

For the opposition, the Damascus Declaration was arguably the most important moment in more than thirty-five years. It moved beyond reform to regime change. It brought together the full range of dissidents—secular and religious, leftists and liberals, urban and rural—to enunciate a common and peaceful agenda of change.

“The opposition’s position improved significantly after the Damascus Declaration. People started to look at the opposition more seriously,” Turk told me.

“This declaration contained—in addition to all political parties—new faces and new democratic national figures,” he said. “And it linked the parties that emigrated outside Syria, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, with those of us inside.”

Dissidents have also emerged in increasingly diverse fields, among businessmen, in the new blogosphere, even among cartoonists and cinematographers. At the same time, because the vast majority of Syrians are silent or not yet politically educated, the opposition is almost as much of an elite minority as those in power. And Syrian activists remain so vulnerable to harassment, punishment, or banishment that their leverage is limited.

Despite the vaunted position he holds among the opposition, Turk comes under fire from colleagues for being too outspoken, even inflammatory. But he, in turn, is disdainful of fellow dissidents for not taking a bigger leap in challenging the regime.

“The opposition doesn’t yet have a compass,” Turk said, as he began sipping a small cup of espresso. “It’s really bad that some in the opposition are afraid. When they express their opinions, they do it in a way that avoids angering officials.

“Unjust Arab regimes are living in their last stage,” he added. “But I don’t think this opposition will be able to change the system. And what the Damascus Declaration created is not an authority that can replace the regime.”

If the current opposition is not an alternative, I asked Turk if he felt he had wasted his life in protest and in prison—and also how he could be so confident of transformation in the future.

“The regime will eventually collapse on its own, due to isolation internally and internationally. Its own forces will dissolve. That’s what happened in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia,” Turk explained.