Moubayed and Abdulhamid on where Syria is headed

Monday 21 of November, two Syrian soldiers were badly wounded by US soldiers on the border. The Americans were carrying out activities on the border and they shot in the direction of Syrian soldiers. They returned fire. Two Syrian soldiers were shot by sharp shooters. They were taken to the hospital at Bu Kamal and then to the hospital at Deir ez-Zor. One reporter here also said that Syrian soldiers then returned fire and blew up a hummer which might have had up to six Americans in it. Presumable they were killed. There are several reporters trying to confirm this story.

Sami Moubayed and Ammar Abdulhamid go head to head in their contrasting analysis of the Syrian opposition and how Syria will bear up under international pressure. Sami believes Syrians will pull together to back the government for fear of becoming another Iraq and that Bashar will reach out to the Muslim Brotherhood and "nationalist opposition," in order to keep them close and avoid their cooperating with the US.

Ammar writes that the "Syrian regime is no longer viable, and that a search for an alternative is now not only legitimate, but mandatory," in order to "prevent the creation of another haven for jihadists and terrorists." Although he does not rule out the case for military action, he argues that "the downfall of the Syrian regime is better induced through a combination of diplomatic pressures, targeted economic sanctions and various activities and gestures meant to empower the internal opposition in the country and perhaps also the growing disaffection within the middle ranks of the army." Interestingly Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told cabinet colleagues Sunday that Syria would "likely" soon be forced to abandon its support for terrorism. He holds a view opposite to Ammar's about Syria becoming a haven for terrorism. If Ammar has a particularly bleak view of where Syria is headed, Sami is perhaps too optimistic. The government is not likely to make any real opening toward the opposition. Nevertheless, the mere fact that the opposition refuses to reach out to the Americans, who, they consider beyond the pale, means it is boxed in. Here are the two articles:

Making new friends in Damascus?
By Sami Moubayed
Al-Jazeera
Thursday 24 November 2005

A few years ago, the term nationalist opposition was introduced to Syria by President Bashar al-Assad. This means "opposition that has no ties with foreign parties". Mainly, this meant everybody except the Muslim Brotherhood and the Reform Party of the US-based Farid al-Ghadry.

The Muslim Brotherhood had received money and arms from neighbouring Arab countries in 1982 to topple the Syrian government and al-Ghadry has been collaborating with the Americans since 2003 for the same purpose.

Previously, there was no "nationalist opposition" in Baathist Syria. The opposition, regardless of its ties or orientation, was always considered unpatriotic, and its leaders were described as enemies of nationalism, the state and the Syrian people.

That time has long passed and Syrian politicians today have been trying to reach out to various groups in the opposition, aiming at acheiving national unity to ward off US pressure mounted after the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Harriri on 14 February 14 2005.

The Syrians have realised that the only way to avoid further isolation is to establish a united front inside Syria, where the Baathists and all their traditional enemies (the Muslim Brotherhood included) can work together.

After all, the opposition might be opposed to the government for a variety of political reasons, but it is by far more opposed to the United States. This opposition includes the Communist Party, Marxists, founding Baath Party members and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Syria's rapprochement with the "nationalist opposition" was begun by al-Assad when he came to power on 17 July 2000.

On 22 July seven days after he began his constitutional term as president, al-Assad released 30 members of the Muslim Brotherhood from prison.

Another gesture included the return of Abu al-Fateh Baynouni, the brother of the Brotherhood's leader, Ali Sadr al-Din al-Baynouni, from exile in September 2001.

The ban on the scholarly works of Mustafa al-Sibaei, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was lifted after being on the Baath blacklist for over four decades.

President al-Assad then issued a general amnesty in the summer of 2000, releasing 600 political prisoners, 90% of them were from the Muslim Brotherhood.

In November 2001, al-Assad released another 113 Muslim Brotherhood members, most of whom were arrested in 1979 for a massacre they had conducted at an artillery school in Aleppo in 1979.

In December 2004, 112 Muslim Brotherhood members were also released. Another 55 prisoners were set free, mostly from the Brotherhood, on 12 February 2005.

The Brotherhood found more reason to cooperate [with the Syrian government] when al-Assad refused to join in the US-led war in Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003.

They hailed his commitment to the Palestinian uprising, and his support for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Hizb Allah in Lebanon.

Both al-Assad and the Muslim Brotherhood have repeatedly said that democracy cannot be imported to the Arab world from the US, nor can it be imposed by President George Bush.

The only way to democratise is from within the Arab world by the Arabs themselves, they often said. This view is shared by a vast majority of Syrians and Arabs.

The Muslim Brotherhood also hailed al-Assad's refusal to abide by American terminology on terrorism, vis-a-vis Hizb Allah and the Palestinian resistance, and his declared commitment to restore the Golan Heights to Syria, and Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

One week after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, members of the Muslim Brotherhood appeared on Aljazeera and called for dialogue with Damascus, refusing to use the US campaign against Syria to settle old differences with the regime.

They stressed, in interviews and press releases, that there was no Ahmed Chalabi among the Syrian opposition. This notion was repeated by opposition members inside Syria, thereby earning the title of "nationalist opposition".

The message was taken by authorities who responded with similar goodwill, permitting many members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who had lived in asylum in Iraq, to return to Syria after the invasion in March 2003.

After that, these dissidents were not arrested or harassed in Syria, as long as they did not engage in illegal political conduct (by law, the Muslim Brotherhood is a banned organisation).

Between 2003-2005 domestic political reforms stalled in Syria as a result of Syria's entanglement in a web of complex issues, related to Iraq and Lebanon.

Soon enough, the Muslim Brotherhood raised its anti-government rhetoric, much to the displeasure of Damascus. In May 2005, the writer Ali al-Abdullah, a member of the Jamal al-Atasi Forum, read a speech sent to the forum by Baynouni from London. Immediately, the Syrian authorities ordered his arrest.

The forum founders cried foul and the authorities requested that they issue an official apology, saying that they had not intended to spread Muslim Brotherhood propaganda in Syria - by law 49 being a member of the Brotherhood, or spreading its views, was a capital offence. When they refused, they too were arrested.

The arrests, which included the forum's president Mrs Suhayr al-Atasi, and the veteran Baathist Husayn Uweidat, gave the Syrian authorities bad publicity. They were released after one week but Abdullah remained in jail until November 2005.

The government knew that arresting these people was going to give it very bad publicity, especially now that the world's attention was focused on Syria. But this was a price it was willing to pay to send a clear message to everybody: that the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam were a red line that nobody could cross in Syria.

To make this point loud and clear at the Baath Party Congress in June 2005, authorities said they would formulate a new multi-party law, ending the socialist monopoly over political life in Syria (existing since 1963).

Parties not affiliated with the Baath would be allowed to operate. The only exception would be the Muslim Brotherhood and other Muslim parties.

The calls for abolishing law 49, which had been proposed by the moderate Muslim cleric and parliamentarian Mohammad Habash, faded out in the weeks preceding the Baath Party congress.

The publication of the Mehlis report in October and the subsequent adoption of UN Resolution 1636 have made the Syrians put aside their differences and unite in opposing foreign pressure on their country.

Marches, anti-US demonstrations, and rallies condemning Mehlis have become a daily scene in Damascus.

Syrian nationalism is soaring and the majority of Syrians feel that it is their duty to stand by the government at this difficult stage because although they might have reservations about the government's actions, they would not want it to be weakened or removed by the US.

Those who have second thoughts are asked to look next door and see the chaos prevailing in Iraq to see how un-rewarding it would be to side with the Americans.

The government has embarked on a series of reforms intended to reduce, in anticipation of eliminating, any reasons for discontent in the Syrian Street. The authorities are planning to raise wages, authorise bank loans facilities and create more jobs.

The Brotherhood found more reason to cooperate [with the Syrian government] when al-Assad refused to join in the US-led war on Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003

On the political front, the government issued a general amnesty in November 2005, releasing 190 political prisoners, mainly from the Muslim Brotherhood.

Many expected that the two famous parliamentarians, Riyad Sayf and Maamoun al-Homsi, would be released. They were not, probably, because the government did not want any big names to make headlines, except those of the Brotherhood. The state was sending a clear message: we are releasing what remains of the Muslim Brotherhood from Syrian jails.

The reason is that owing to the increasing religiosity in Syria society, the only party which can truly and genuinely mobilise the street are the Muslim groups.

The Muslim Brotherhood, and a variety of other opposition groups in Syria, issued an opposition document called The Damascus Declaration in October 2005, right after Detlev Mehlis issued his report, criticising the government for stalled political reforms.

The authorities surprised everybody by refusing to arrest or harass any of the politicians who signed the document.

Then, in another gesture of goodwill towards the Brotherhood, al-Assad had an unofficial conversation with members of the Arab Nationalist Congress meeting in Damascus shortly after his speech at Damascus University on 10 November 2005.

The speech, it must be noted, made no reference whatsoever to the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Assad reportedly told his guests that he does not have a problem with anybody who opposes the government politically.

The government only has a problem "with those who collaborate with Syrias enemies". This was a clear message to the US-based al-Ghadry. Al-Assad added that he is willing to conduct dialogue with everybody, including the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is a new atmosphere in Syria. It will be worth watching how Syria will deal with the Brotherhood in the months to come since all indicators, including the Syrian president's Damascus University speech, suggest that Syria's relations with Washington will deteriorate rather than improve.

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst. He is the author of Steel & Silk: Men and Women Who Shaped Syria 1900-2000 (Cune Press 2005)
[end]

WHY WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT?
A new Iraq is forming in Syria

By Ammar Abdulhamid
Commentary in the Daily Star, Friday, November 25, 2005

Although Syria has for long been hailed as one of the Arab world's most secular countries and the heart of Arab nationalism, its religious and ethnic diversity has always been more complex than this image suggests. The northeastern parts of Syria are inhabited mostly by Kurds and Assyrians, while the society's allegedly secular character has reflected, in reality, an informal though complex arrangement between the various religious groups in the country. In recent decades, the arrangement has involved, in particular, the majority Sunni population and the Alawite minority.

The arrangement was first introduced by President Hafiz Assad. It allowed, in essence, a core of Alawite officers to control the country's security, leaving management of the economy to a handful of Sunni, Christian and Druze officials and merchants. But the arrangement was by no means perfect and would have collapsed in the early 1980s had Assad not put down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama. Memories of this event still loom heavily in the minds of many Syrians today.

The accession to power of President Bashar Assad in June 2000 threatened to dissolve this arrangement. Under the new leadership, the regime's main props narrowed to a clique centered on the president, his immediate family members and close friends. If the old arrangement was imperfect, its dissolution at the hands of the "new guard" was even worse. For the ruling elite did not offer any new vision for Syria's future. Transparency, reform, modernization and development were words often used by Assad and his advisers, but, for the most part, they remained just that: words. No programs, policies or action plans were offered.

As later developments would show, this fact seemed to denote not only a lack of interest in such matters on the art of the new guard, but, more importantly, a lack of real understanding of the basics of governance and of the nature of the global geopolitical changes that took place following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Syria's old patron. As a result, the history of the last five years has been characterized by endemic corruption,

adventurism and serious miscalculations paving the way for the regime's current international isolation.

Indeed, under the current regime, Syria seems to be heading toward disaster, a point recently highlighted by Assad's petulant defiance of the international community and his refusal to cooperate with the ongoing UN probe into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. But this is not surprising: a witness seems to have already implicated the president's brother and brother-in-law, and this fact could well point the finger at the very top of Syria's leadership.

It is safe to say, therefore, that in these circumstances, the Syrian regime is no longer really viable, and that a search for an alternative is now not only legitimate, but mandatory as well in order to preserve regional stability and prevent the creation of another haven for jihadists and terrorists.

However, and since no one can rationally advocate recourse to another militaristic venture in the region, the downfall of the Syrian regime is better induced through a combination of diplomatic pressures, targeted economic sanctions and various activities and gestures meant to empower the internal opposition in the country and perhaps also the growing disaffection within the middle ranks of the army.

On the other hand, now that Syria's leadership seems to have opted for a confrontation with the international community, a case for the use of force against the regime can no longer be completely ruled out. In fact, the latest UN Security Council resolution on Syria, Resolution 1636, was passed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which allows for forceful measures.

While we should all hope not to witness the making of another Iraq, the Bush administration needs to continue to follow a multilateral approach and coordinate its moves with France, Europe and the Security Council. Unilateral moves will only stoke anti-American sentiment, a development that Assad and his entourage seem to be counting on in order to shore themselves up and focus the Syrian people's attention away from the fact that the regime is ultimately responsible for the current crisis threatening the stability, if not the viability, of the country.

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian dissident and blogger. He is currently serving as a visiting fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
[end]

Hassan Tahsin, writing in "Arab News," claims there is a Hidden Agenda Behind US Interest in Hariri Murder

In brief the Western attacks in the Middle East are neither for the sake of fighting terror nor for imposing democracy. It is in fact to enrich the American economy and ensure cheap and uninterrupted fuel supply, particularly after China has notched up to the second position among the world powers. A weakened Iraq and Syria would also guarantee the security of Israel.

Therefore it is the duty of all peace-loving people of the world to back Syria against a US-French war of aggression.

Al-Hayat argues that Syria must not allow its economy to become isolated in The Syrian Economy in the Political Climate of the Middle East Region

SANA, the Syrian news agency claims "that a number of economic measures and decisions will be soon issued to facilitate foreign trade and to expand in financing it."

Issam al-Za'im, past Minister of Planning (2000) and Minister of Industry in the Miro government, gave a talk in Homs in which he voiced optimism that Syria would be able to surmount its economic challenges as she had done many times before noting importance of the social economic market in this respect. He said Syria has faced many economic and political challenges in the past years mainly in the 80s of last century but she was always capable of confronting and facing it by depending on her national economy and being self-suficient. Today, however, he argued for the merits of the newly announced "social economic market," saying that Syria was seeking by this system to achieve many positive advances, such as the integration into the world economy, and the enhancement of its national production so as to compete in the international markets and boost the national economy. He said Syria could make an increase in the Gross Domestic Production DGDP reaching to about 7% which is the percentage put by the government for the coming phase. He noted that this would be made through controlling population growth and restructuring the law of investment number 10 in a way that contributes to estblish investors confidence.

Syria says 400 Mossad agents in Lebanon

Syria's official Al-Thawra newspaper claimed Thursday that more than 400 agents from Israel's spy agency Mossad are in Lebanon in the latest volley in an increasingly vitriolic war of words with Lebanon's new leaders. "You have to recognize the danger of having more than 400 men from Israel's Mossad in Lebanon who are working with the other (Lebanese) agents who once supported the Zionist enemy and its militias," wrote editor Fayez Sayegh. "These agents are encircling Lebanon like a belt that will explode when Israel and its strategic ally the United States decide," he said, charging there was also an increasing number of agents from the CIA and European states in the country.

"All these agents came to Lebanon... to sow dissent, revive hatred, reinforce pressure on Lebanon and Syria and above all spy on national forces, the Lebanese resistance and Palestinians," said the paper.

Syria's state run Tishrin newspaper and the Baath newspaper had tried to stir up strife in Lebanon earlier this month, when they ran editorials calling on its allies to hold demonstrations in Lebanon against Premier Fouad Siniora's government and the economic situation in Lebanon. The call was widely dubbed by the local media as a flagrant intervention in Lebanon's domestic affairs in defiance of unrelenting global pressure on the regime of President Bashar Al Assad to take its hands off Lebanon. No demonstrations took place and no political group in Lebanon announced any plans to demonstrate.

Ex-Lebanese Security Head Quizzed in Death , by By ZEINA KARAM, BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP)

The former head of the wiretapping unit for Lebanon's army, Col. Ghassan Tufeili, was questioned Thursday by members of a United Nations commission investigating the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, officials said.