SYRIA: 'It's Assad or chaos,' Syria has told western and Arab interlocutors, writes Lara Marlowe in Damascus
In less than a year, President Bashar al-Assad's regime has absorbed an extraordinary number of blows.
Syria was forced to pull out of Lebanon; Ghazi Kenaan, a pillar of the regime, was found dead in his office; the German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, investigating for the UN, said he was certain Syria was behind the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri; Abdel Halim Khaddam, who was vice-president of Syria for 21 years, defected to Paris and says he too is certain Damascus killed Hariri.
Now Mehlis's replacement, the Belgian judge Serge Brammertz, wants to interview Assad in person. The threat of economic sanctions hangs over Syria.
"I am not worried," Assad declared in a speech to the Arab Lawyers' Union on January 21st. Why is he so confident? A high-ranking Syrian source told The Irish Times that Syria has "reached an understanding" with Washington, whereby the US will let the inquiry into Hariri's murder fade away without serious consequences for Damascus.
"The deal is done," the source said. "That's why the [ Iraqi parliamentary] elections went smoothly in December. The US needs Syrian help in Iraq, so Washington will ease up on Damascus."
Rostom Ghazaleh, the head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon until last spring, is being set up as a scapegoat. Furthermore, the same source said, Saudi Arabia has forgiven Syria for its suspected involvement in Hariri's killing. "When Bashar went to Saudi Arabia with his family this month, King Abdallah met them on the tarmac," he said.
Hariri made his fortune in Saudi Arabia, was a close friend of the late king Fahd and held dual Lebanese and Saudi nationality.
It's Assad or chaos, the regime tells its Arab and western interlocutors. "If we go down, we'll bring the whole Middle East with us," the source explained, referring to Syria's ability to help the Iraqi insurgency and stir up extremist groups in Lebanon, as well as the possibility that Sunni Muslim extremists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could gain a foothold in Syria.
Iran has ties with the anti-American Shia leader Moqtada Sadr; the Syrians with former Iraqi Baathists. "Tehran and Damascus could unite the two groups and wreak total havoc for the Americans in Iraq; it's the Americans' nightmare," says Issam al-Zaim, a former cabinet minister and the director of the Arab Centre for Strategic Studies here.
Word of the secret modus vivendi with Washington seems to be common knowledge. "The Syrians will get out of it," Zaim, predicts of the UN enquiry. "There is already a convergence between the Americans, Europeans, Saudis and Egyptians that it's not in anyone's interest to take the risk of destabilising Syria."
The same undertone of menace permeates Syrian pronouncements on Lebanon.
"Lebanon is very dangerous right now," the high-ranking source observed, alluding to the assassinations and bombings that continued there throughout 2005. "We are not interfering in Lebanon," he insisted. "That doesn't mean we don't have influence there."
After Mehlis's report concluded in October that there was "converging evidence" of Syrian involvement in Hariri's assassination, thousands of Syrian flags appeared at windows and balconies in Damascus.
"When we face an external threat, we don't hold out our hand to the aggressors," says Hind Kabawat, a lawyer and public relations executive who is trying to improve Syria's image by campaigning for internal reform. "We stand with the government; it's: 'my country right or wrong'."
The regime tried to discredit Mehlis while he led the UN enquiry. When a satirical play asserting that Mehlis's mother was Jewish and lived in Israel opened in Damascus, President Assad sat in the front row.
Syrians argue that their crude intelligence services are not sophisticated enough to have carried out the truck-bombing that killed Hariri and 22 others. They also say it was not in Syria's interest to kill Hariri when he was about to join the anti-Syrian opposition, or to murder the anti-Syrian journalists Samir Kassir and Gebran Tueni.
It was obvious that Damascus would be blamed, the argument goes, ergo the perpetrators had to be Mossad or the Maronite Lebanese Forces. Only occasionally does a tinge of doubt creep in, as when a Damascus housewife asked me plaintively: "You don't think we killed Hariri, do you?"
The depredations of the Mokhabarat [ secret police] and corruption dominate conversation here. The intelligence services record every telephone conversation and every message posted on the internet. "In Syria, you cannot find the real feelings of people," says the human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bouni. "The fear in their hearts makes every Syrian two people."
I put it to Mehdi Daklallah, the information minister and former editor of the official newspaper al-Ba'ath, that Syrians are fed up with meddling by the Mokhabarat. "It's much better than it was a few years ago," Daklallah said. "The proof is that people are talking about it."
Zaim of the strategic studies centre told me earlier: "Syria suffers from two kinds of corruption: corruption by poverty and corruption by greed."
On this issue too, Daklallah was contrite. "We have a legacy of corruption. We cannot get rid of it in one shot," the minister said. "What people are saying is true, but we are combating it."
An anecdote told by Ryad Saif, the opposition leader who was released from prison last week, speaks volumes about Syria's variety of Baathist "dictatorship-lite". Had Saif been arrested in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, he would not have survived to tell the story.
Last summer the Syrian minister of the interior, Ghazi Kenaan, visited Saif in Damascus's Adra prison. "All this for you?" Kenaan asked, looking around the room. By Syrian standards, the political prisoners arrested in 2001 lived in a five-star jail.
"You made a terrible mistake in crushing the 'Damascus Spring'," Saif told Kenaan.
"You've become very arrogant," Kenaan replied.
"No, you are the arrogant ones, because you believe you'll be in power forever," Saif retorted.
Kenaan stormed out of the cell. Guards removed Saif's luxuries: furniture, radio, computer, cell-phone. Three new cell-mates arrived: a convicted killer, a mental case and a homosexual who made advances to Saif. For a month, Saif endured an ingeniously Syrian form of torment.
Kenaan's death three months later is believed to have been the result of a failed palace coup. A Damascus joke says it was Khaddam, the former vice-president, who wanted to kill himself, but they went to the wrong house.
Kenaan's suicide was genuine, Saif insists. "They told him if he didn't kill himself, they would do it. He preferred suicide, because he knew how he would die, because he'd done it to so many others."