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Foreign Exchange with
Fareed Zakaria
Roundtable: Syria in the Hot Seat
November 4, 2005
Syria is in the hot seat for its role in the
Valentine's Day assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri,
who opposed Syrian domination in his country. Is cooperating with a UN
investigation political suicide for Syrian President Assad?
Hisham Melhem, the
Washington Bureau Chief of the Lebanese newspaper
Annahar,
and Ammar
Abdulhamid of the Syrian publishing company
DarEmar take
us inside the world of Syrian politics.
Fareed Zakaria: Syria is on the hot seat for its role in the
Valentine’s Day assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik
Hariri, who opposed Syrian domination in his country.
A United Nations investigation into the bombing took the unusual step of
naming names and it pointed right to the inner circle of Syrian
President Assad’s government.
Now Assad faces the prospect of increasing isolation and pressure if he
does not cooperate with the investigation, but political suicide if he
does. To take us inside the strange world of Syrian politics, I’m joined
by two astute observers from the region--Ammar Abdulhamid, an
independent publisher and human rights advocate in Syria, and Hisham
Melhem, correspondent with Annahar, the leading Lebanese daily.
Gentlemen; let me ask you. When we look at
Syria--simple question Ammar because you know we see it as this very
closed society, almost a black box. All we know is that it’s ruled by a
dictatorship, the Assad family; how powerful is this--is this family?
How powerful is the--the current President?
Ammar Abdulhamid: Well if you want to measure their power in
terms of their ability to crack down they’re very powerful still. But in
terms of decision-making, in terms of ability to actually govern and do
the positive things that --that are expected of rulers, they have been
very brittle for years now. They have not been able to implement any
kind of reforms. They have not been able to establish a good vision for
foreign policy especially in the aftermath of the collapse of the peace
talks, of 09/11, of the end of the Cold War even, so they have been out
of touch with reality for quite a while now and the constant crisis that
they keep on putting themselves in, the constant blunders they keep on
making especially in the realm of foreign politics is dividing the
regime, is weakening the regime; it’s weakening its image internally and
it’s weakening its position internally.
Fareed Zakaria: Is it--is the regime precarious
though; is it in some way--is there a danger of a collapse?
Ammar Abdulhamid: I believe so; I believe that the power base of
the regime which has always been sectarian has continuously been
narrowed over the last five years.
Fareed Zakaria: Explain that, because when you
say sectarian what--what--those who know say well the Alawites, the
Assad family comes from, it’s a tiny sect. I mean what is it--10 percent
of Syria? How can they--so how can they--how do they run all of Syria
with this very narrow power base?
Ammar Abdulhamid: Well that--that narrow power base is--actually
it controls the military which is the important way of--and the security
apparatus, which is how they--they keep people in check, but at the same
time they do have coalitions on the upper level with Sunni businessmen
and politicians and--and Jews and Christians; so at one point under
Bashar there was a ruling coalition really. The core of it is the
Alawite military complex, but there are a lot of people taking part, so
there is enough blame to go around for the mismanagement of the country
over the last few decades. But increasingly under Bashar this power base
has been narrowed down; the coalition has been broken apart. The Sunnis
in the regime are not happy anymore. The Alawites in the regime are not
happy. The only people who seem to be happy are the family of the
President because they are--they are controlling everything right now.
So this continues erosion of the power base of the regime--is why it’s
little today and right now after the “suicide” of the Minister of the
Interior three weeks ago there is the disaffection within the Alawite
community is coming to the fore. There are a lot of people right now in
the Alawite community that are saying this is regime has taken us all
the way to hell and people don’t want to follow.
Fareed Zakaria: Hisham let me ask you; do you
think that these miscalculations relate to this--this weakness, this
brittleness? The miscalculations--I mean murdering Hariri in this very
obvious way which triggered an international investigation.
Hisham Melhem: Oh absolutely. I mean if you compare Bashar Assad to his
father, his father--I used to wish to refer to him as the man who could
drive the sequel to Machiavelli’s Prince. He was cunning; he was cool,
occasionally cruel; he was a very calculating man and a very rational
man and he understood the application of power and he used it when he
had to and he could be as I said--cruel. His son is completely
different--inexperienced, reckless, petulant. And as Ammar said, when
Assad--when Hafez Assad was around the regime had a cool--[inaudible] to
it, but then he worked on building coalitions within Syria with various
groups--minorities, merchant class, the Sunnis, Christians, and others.
And in the Arab world and beyond with Iran he built also some sort of a
concentric circle. He had this relationship--special relationship with
the Saudis and the--the Egyptians who gave him an Arab cover because he
realized that Syria in its own way cannot stand up to Israel for
instance. The minute he died, Syria shrunk and shrunk considerably.
Fareed Zakaria: Let me ask you about Iraq
because this is of interest I think to Americans. Do you believe that he
has making a mistake by encouraging the--the--the transfer of Jihadees
into Iraq?
Hisham Melhem: Sure, absolutely; look, the Syrians were against
the war like most people in the Arab world are against the war but they
put themselves into Saddam’s camp and if you ask the American Ambassador
in Damascus at that time, they would tell you that from the American
Embassy they would watch the buses full of Jihadists across the street
at the--the Iraqi Embassy going there and then senior Iraqi officials
from the former regime went to Damascus and the Americans knew about it
and the Syrians knew about it. So they were involved, and in fact the
Syrian Foreign Minister on the floor of the Syrian Parliament when the
war began said it’s in our interest that the United States is defeated
in Iraq.
Fareed Zakaria: But now let me ask you about
this. Is--are they creating a Frankenstein’s monster because the Sunni
fundamentalists, the Jihadees who go to Iraq--when they come back to
Syria surely they don’t like the idea of this secular Alawite regime
ruling them. I mean the--the--you know they are--is Syria creating an
Islamic fundamentalist problem again for itself? I say again because of
course very famously they had--there was an opposition movement that was
Islamic fundamentalist and Hafez Assad dealt with it in a particularly
brutal way.
Ammar Abdulhamid: Well I think that they have began creating this
problem ever since 1970; this is not something new. The--the very
arrival of President--President Hafez Assad took power, established
or--or put to the floor the issue of communal identities, him being an
Alawite, and….
Fareed Zakaria: And once you--for a Sunni
fundamentalist, an Alawite is not even considered a Muslim.
Ammar Abdulhamid: Exactly.
Hisham Melhem: It’s a heretic almost.
Ammar Abdulhamid: And so--so--and--so there was a problem
from--from that time on and he never was able to resolve it and after
the crackdown in Hamah in ’82 he did not try to even appeal to the
Muslim brotherhood for reconciliation or you know--it was--it was a
complete break-off with the Muslim brotherhood, but also the huge chunk
of the Sunni community, but he did not carry the program further. He did
not try to secularize the country; instead he simply hung onto power,
but he kept the society basically under the veneer of Islamism and in
the beginning of the 1990s as Syria emerged to form its isolation, all
the Islamic forces were allowed to come and preach and establish schools
and put on its schools and establish their influence again and created
the factor Islamizational society; meanwhile he was curbing all secular
currents that are in--in charge because he considered them as rivals. So
the problem began under Hafez himself and Bashar simply inherited it and
made it worse.
Fareed Zakaria: A regime in this condition--is
it going to be able to get out of Lebanon, because Lebanon provides
first of all a certain kind of stage for Syria’s larger regional role.
Secondly am I right--that they--it provides cash, the Bekàa Valley
provides a very substantial amount of the resources that fuel the Assad
dynasty. So are they really going to get out?
Hisham Melhem: Not completely and that’s why it’s very difficult
for them to adjust to this new reality. For 30 years they ruled Lebanon
worse than the way the Soviet Union used to rule Latvia, Estonia, and
others and many if not all senior Syrian officials have enriched
themselves from--from Lebanon. It was like a milking cow and--and…
Fareed Zakaria: And we’re talking about drug
money?
Hisham Melhem: Drug money, there’s--you know we’re talking about
Lebanon and Syria economically it’s always been referred to as--it
will--we borrow a phrase from Adam Smith; there’s an invisible
hand--smuggling, all sorts of drug money and others in the past. So
losing Lebanon is not only political humiliation but it’s--it’s an
economic blow. Today Syria under Hafez and Bashar is like I said a house
with no roof essentially; it’s more exposed than ever. They have never
been in such isolation and they have yet to adjust themselves to
these--to these changing environments in the region and in the world.
They still act as if they are living in the 1950s. This is Ceausescu’s
Romania on the Mediterranean.
Fareed Zakaria: My goodness; so it seems to me
that the Bush Administration has actually played this one quite cleverly
in that they have gotten the international community involved, they have
gotten the United Nations involved, and they have quite critically
gotten the French involved. Is this--I mean do you just need more of
this kind of pressure?
Ammar Abdulhamid: Well I’m--I’m not sure who got who involved in
this case. I think the French ought to lead in the show in many--many
ways in this and I think one of the reasons why we are seeing this kind
of successful coming together of the international community and why the
policies are being implemented with such sort of cool-headedness is
because of the French influence and they know a lot about the
inner-workings of the Syrian regime. In a sense, the French took in
Bashar and he was supposed to be a nicer fellow and a more reform-minded
fellow and more amiable to French interests in the region--in other
words to the separation between Syrian and Lebanon and he was not able
to deliver on any of these expectations, and for this reason the French
have given up on him.
Fareed Zakaria: Is that because he’s personally
weak that he does not have the power base his father had?
Ammar Abdulhamid: I think he’s personally involved frankly in
this--in this corruption, the things that are going on. It’s very
difficult to imagine that his….
Fareed Zakaria: But so was his father; his
father was a [inaudible].
Ammar Abdulhamid: Exactly; so it’s very difficult to--to--to ask
a person like him to envision something different. He was--he grew up in
the system and he doesn’t know any other way of doing it and he’s not
necessarily a person who went and studied political science and
economics in the--in the--in England. He studied ophthalmology and he
was not really prepared for this job and he spent seven years before
1993 and 2000 knowing that he was going to be a President but he never
tried to form his own team.
Fareed Zakaria: You’re an outspoken human
rights advocate; you’ve been part of this thing called the Damascus
Declaration. One would have thought for a Syrian to say all this would
be a one-way ticket to jail.
Ammar Abdulhamid: When I was--when I was being interrogated--I
was interrogated for a while, especially after my first stint at the
Brookings Institution, I was under a travel ban and I was interrogated.
And my interrogators used to say well you know under--you know under
Hafez Assad you would not be here, you know. You would--we would simply
take you and you’d disappear but here you are you know. You have--you
know you can--you can bad-mouth us, and I did, and--and you’re not
responsive and you’re there to drink your cup of tea and you leave and
we don’t do anything to you. This is unprecedented but our orders are
very clear and I think it’s because Bashar is trying to--to maintain a
certain image. He cannot simply burn all his bridges; however if there
would be sanctions of course then there would be a different
consideration and there might be an attempt at in fact cracking down.
It’s going to be difficult though; it’s going to be difficult to crack
down now because the Army is not necessarily 100 percent you know in
this mode of dramatically obeying orders.
Fareed Zakaria: Let me ask you the last
question. Do you believe that in the next year or so we will see a
significant political shift in--in Syria? Is this regime in that much
trouble?
Hisham Melhem: I think the regime is flailing and it may not
survive the--the international pressure that it is being subjected to.
It’s very difficult to predict what will happen in Syria. I mean a lot
will depend on the investigation on the final report by the Mullahs
and--and whether the United States--and the international community will
apply sanctions against the regime, but the regime definitely is--is
very brittle at this stage and it lacks any veneer of legitimacy. And I
think what is lacking in the American approach to--to Syria , Fareed--is--is
the issue of democracy and empowering the Syrian people. And we should
tell the Syrians that they have a stake in this and that change is
coming and that it should be peaceful and democratic.
Fareed Zakaria: Well we will all be watching
Syria very closely. Thank you--thank you very much.
See Video
here.
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