Roots of the "Kurdish Problem"

Katherine Zoepf of the New York Times has written an excellent article on the Kurdish problem in Syria (copied below). Bashar al-Asad's long stated goal to resolve the painful problem of the 200,000-plus stateless Kurds in Syria has taken on particular urgency now that a larger bill on national rights sits before the parliament. It is designed to give all Syrians, not only men, the right to confer nationality. But before it can be acted on, the Kurdish question, a subset of the national law, must be resolved.

Solving the Kurdish question has become urgent not only because of the glaring inequality the stateless Kurds in Syria, but because of the radical changes to the status of the Kurds in neighboring Iraq and Turkey. Syria has always been able to boast that it treated its Kurds better than its neighbors did. That boast is now hollow. In the future, Syria's Kurds of the North-East will no longer be content to submit to the deprivations of old. The riots of last spring testify to this. If Syrians want the loyalty of the Kurds, they must accord them equal respect and rights. The plight of the stateless Kurds has long been a stain on Syria's claim to treat its people with equality and dignity regardless of ethnic or religious background.

The question of stateless Kurds in Syria began in 1962, when President Qudsi, passed a law that required that the inhabitants of the Governorate of Hasaka (the region of North-East Syria between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers) be counted in one day. Those who were found to have come into the country without proper papers were stripped of their citizenship in August 1962 along with any children born in Syria.

Based on the French archives, it is estimated that some 22,000 Kurds out of more than 200,000 living in Syria during the 1930s had fled into the country from Turkey where they faced persecution following Kemal Atatürk's brutal suppression of the Shaykh Said revolt of 1926. The descendants of those 22,000 now make up the stateless Kurds in Syria.

Why did Nazim al-Qudsi, ordinarily a liberal man with a long record of honorable political achievement who died only a few years ago in Geneva, pass such a discriminatory law? There can be little doubt that it was discriminatory, for none of the other minorities of the region who had fled or migrated into Syria were touched - not the Armenians, Assyrians, Syriacs, or the Arab tribes which continued to settle in the Jazira throughout the 1950s and 1960s and who come from Iraq, Jordan, or the Arabian Peninsula. Only the Kurds were targeted for suspicion.

The census was also arbitrary. A number of ministers and high officials were deprived of nationality by the half-hazard census takers. These included General Tawfiq Nizam ad-Din, Chief of Staff of the Syrian Army in 1955 and his brother who was a minister and parliament member, the family of Ibrahim Pasha Milli, who was a founder of the Syrian Parliament in 1928, and many other Kurds of high rank and long service in Syria. The powerful were able to retrieve their Syrian nationality, but the poor and less fortunate remained stateless.

As Sami Moubayed has recently written,

"the Qudsi regime came to power when Syria dissolved its merger with Egypt in September 1961, and was coming under daily fire by president Gamal Abd Nasser, who accused the new leaders of Damascus of being opponents of Arab nationalism.

To prove their Arab zeal, Syria's new leaders passed decree number 93, stripping about 120,000 Syrian Kurds of their Syrian citizenship. The argument of the authorities in 1962 was that the census was aimed at identifying "alien infiltrators" in Syria; those who had illegally crossed the border from Turkey. Kurds had to prove that they had lived in Syria at least since 1945, or lose any claim to Syrian citizenship. The census was rigged, and led to the fiasco of Kurdish "unrest" in Syria, which exploded in 2004.

The insecurity of the "infisal" (separatist) regime in the face of Nasserist and Baathist attacks goes a long way to explain the context of the decree stripping Kurds of Syrian nationality, as Moubayed suggests, but it should also be seen in the longer context of both growing Arabism and Communism in Syria as well as the ongoing attempts by the Western Powers to use the Kurdish tribes as a means to destabilize Syria and thwart Arab nationalism.

Citizenship laws were put into place in Syria beginning with the Lausanne treaty of 1924. French Mandate law established a "Syrian" citizenship based on birth on Syrian territory. After independence, citizenship was recast in terms of a "Syrian Arab" identity, where an Arab racial designation was introduced into the criteria for national privileges. Thus the present law, which has its roots in laws passed under Adib Shishakli (1949-1954), states that citizenship is enjoyed by those born to "Arab Syrians." There is no written legal status for non-Arab Syrians. Thus the law states that citizenship is given to those:
- من ولد في القطر أو خارجه من والد عربي سوري.
من ولد في القطر من أم عربية سورية ولم تثبت نسبته إلى أبيه قانونا.
"who are born in Syria or abroad of a Syrian-Arab father."

The question begged by this law is what happens if you are born to a Syrian-Kurdish father or to any non-Arab Syrian father.

The rise of the Communist Party, led by Khalid Bakdash, a Kurd, which had a considerable following among the Kurds in the North-East, also caused the enmity of Arab nationalists. Likewise, the US worried about the spread of the Communist Party in Syria. During the 1940s and 1950s, US diplomats in Damascus frequently recommended that the Syrians keep a close eye on and suppress the Kurdish led Communists.

When an American diplomat pressed Fuad Bey al-Halabi, the Director General of Syrian Tribal Affairs, in 1948 to explain why he was not worried about the Kurdish community situated on Syria's northeast boarder with Turkey and their pro-Soviet inclinations, the director replied:

The Kurdish tribes were in reality akin to feudal institutions. The tribal chieftains owned all the land and can control their ‘serfs.’ In turn the Syrian government can control the Kurdish leaders.

Practically without exception the principal Kurdish leaders are under death sentence in Turkey and were they to show signs of asserting too much independence of action or to disregard the wishes of the Syrian Government in any important matter they could be conveniently disposed of by arranging to have them fall into Turkish hands.

This quote comes from: US National Archives, James H. Keeley (Damascus) to Sec. of State (29 December 1948) "Comments of Fuad Bey al-Halabi, Director General of Syrian Tribal Affairs, Regarding Tribal Control Policy and Certain Special Aspects of the Kurdish Tribal Problem," 890D.00\12-2948.

Everyone, not just the Sryian authorities, tended to view the Kurds of the Jazira region as a problem and infiltrators who could be dealt with in the most humiliating and discriminatory fashion. It is this past, which Syria is now struggling to put behind it.

After Decades as Nonpersons, Syrian Kurds May Soon Be Recognized
By KATHERINE ZOEPF, April 28, 2005

AS EL AIN, Syria - Saleh Osso, a Kurdish plumber, has tried to live as far outside the reach of the Syrian government apparatus as possible. Since Mr. Osso, 34, is stateless - one of perhaps 200,000 Kurds living in Syria who are denied citizenship - that has been fairly easy to accomplish.

He has no right to own property, to travel abroad or to send his four children to high school. Officially, Mr. Osso scarcely exists.

It was a surprise, therefore, when the mayor of Mr. Osso's district visited him at home two weeks ago and began to ask probing questions about his family.

"He asked how many children I had and about whether my brothers were married or not," Mr. Osso recalled. "He stayed for about half an hour, asking so many questions and writing everything down.

"I finally asked him, 'Why are you counting us?' " Mr. Osso continued. "He said, 'It's so that you people may become citizens.' "

Though there has been no official announcement, and Syrian officials would not comment on the subject, speculation that President Bashar al-Assad is planning to do something about the "Kurdish problem," as the issue of Syria's stateless Kurds is known, has been circulating widely in recent weeks. It has generated discussion among foreign diplomats and human rights activists and cautious hope among the nation's marginalized Kurdish population.

Now, reports that government officials in the heavily Kurdish northern province of Haseke on the Turkish border have been quietly taking a census of stateless families seem to be adding heft to the rumor.

Stateless Kurds in three towns inHaseke - Ras el Ain, Tell Tamir and Amude - told a reporter that government agents had been going from house to house in recent weeks, gathering information about Kurdish residents' registration status. In some cases, stateless Kurds said, there have been two visits: one from a local official collecting census data, followed days later by a visit from a political security agent who verified the information.

The reports come at a moment when international pressure has pushed Syria into withdrawing its troops from Lebanon and the United States is challenging it, along with other Arab governments, to be less autocratic.

Meanwhile, Kurds across Syria's eastern border, in Iraq, are coming into political power in the new government there, while Kurds to the north, in Turkey, are being granted new rights under pressure from Europe.

About 1.5 million Kurds live in Syria as the country's largest ethnic minority, and also its most historically troublesome. Their very difference presents a living challenge to the militant Arabism of the dominant Baath Party.

Kurdish parties, although illegal, are among the country's best-organized opposition groups, a fact that became clear in March of last year when, within hours, the parties organized a series of demonstrations across Syria to protest what they called police brutality against Kurds demonstrating in the northeastern town of Qamishli.

In 1962 the government stripped thousands of Syrian-born Kurds of their citizenship. They and their descendants carry laminated orange identity cards that testify to their statelessness. International human rights groups estimate their numbers at 200,000; tens of thousands of other Syrian-born Kurds lack even the orange cards and are known as maktoomin (those who are muted).

But the estimates are rough. Syrian Kurdish leaders say the total number of stateless Syrian Kurds is about 300,000. The government says the number is about 150,000.

In the past the government has repressed expressions of Kurdish identity in a variety of ways, forbidding the publication of books or newspapers in Kurdish, for example, and jailing Kurdish leaders without trial.

But recently Syrian policy has seemed to ease.

On March 30, 312 Kurds who were imprisoned after the demonstrations last year in Qamishli were released under a presidential amnesty. On April 6, when the Iraqi Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani was chosen as president of Iraq, Kurds living in Damascus played the Kurdish national anthem without official interference in a street celebration, an act that Syrian Kurds say would have been unthinkable a year ago.

But giving citizenship to stateless Kurds would be far more meaningful. Some experts on Syria believe that President Assad may be contemplating doing so as a good-will gesture, a way to partly pre-empt the international pressure to democratize that is likely to follow Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon.

"There are people close to the president who would like to see the Kurdish problem resolved quickly," said Joshua Landis, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma who is living in Damascus. "They know it makes Syria look bad."

The Syrian state is clearly doing its research first, because giving citizenship to the stateless Kurds could open up a host of practical problems. Kurds who were denied degrees because of their stateless status, for example, or whose family property was seized in 1962 might well begin clogging the courts to seek compensation.

But Ammar Abdulhamid, the director of the Tharwa Project, an organization based in Damascus that monitors minority rights issues in the Arab world, said he had conducted a survey and believed that most Syrian Kurds were willing to accept a clean-slate approach: citizenship without immediate reparations.

"The Kurds just want basic rights," Mr. Abdulhamid said. "They're not thinking about accountability for the past. Ideally, along with citizenship, the government would set up a committee that would systematically look into some of these other demands."

Despite the possibility of technical problems, Mr. Abdulhamid added, the Syrian government has compelling political reasons to offer citizenship to stateless Kurds. The government fears that a domestic Kurdish separatist movement may be growing, he suggested, and that disenfranchised Kurds could be manipulated by outsiders to destabilize Syria.

"The situation for the Kurds has really eased in Iraq and Turkey," a Western diplomat said. "The Assad regime probably realizes that the best way to weaken any separatist sentiment is to give the Kurds more of a stake in the country."

But according to Faisal Badr, a Kurdish lawyer based in Damascus whose wife is stateless, most Syrian Kurds harbor no separatist ambitions and, citizenship decree or no, their leaders will continue to push for change within Syria.

"The vast majority of us want our problems to be solved within the framework of the Syrian nation," Mr. Badr said. "Giving citizenship to the Kurds would be a positive step, but it's still very partial. We want to see democracy in Syria."

Syria's Ba'athists Loosen the Reins by Sami Moubayed

This excellent article by Sami Moubayed gives an overview of party politics in Syria and explains what is likely to happen at the up coming Regional Baath Party Congress.

Syria's Ba'athists loosen the reins
By Sami Moubayed

DAMASCUS - A new Ba'ath Party law is to be created in Syria, breaking the socialist parties' monopoly over politics in that country, in place (with the exception of the years 1961-63) since 1958. The move is a calculated gamble on the part of the government, and will also challenge a US bill against Syria calling for "Assistance to Support a Transition to Democracy in Syria".

On March 8, 1963, the Military Committee of the Ba'ath Party came to power in Syria, pledging to restore the Syrian-Egyptian Union of 1958. All parties that had supported the post-union order were outlawed, creating a one-party state in Syria, headed by the Ba'ath, modeled after Gamal Abd al-Nasser's Egypt since 1952.

The offices of the Communist Party, the Syrian Social Cooperative Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab Liberation Movement, the National Party and the People's Party were all shut down, and their newspapers were banned. Already on the blacklist of political parties in Syria since 1955 was the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP).

Over the years, as the founders and members of these political parties died, either in exile, jail or political retirement, the parties evaporated from the consciousness of the four generations that emerged in Syria. The only exceptions were the Muslim Brotherhood and the SSNP, which although banned (for different reasons) remained popular, and the Communist Party, which decided to cooperate with the Ba'athists after 1970 to avoid the fate of other parties in Syria.

The 1974 party law, which laid ground for the National Progressive Front (NPF), a parliamentary coalition headed by the Ba'ath, allowed more parties to emerge, yet conditioned that they had to be from the socialist orbit. President Hafez Assad ended the one-party system, conditioning, however, that new parties be socialist ones, and allowed the creation of other socialist parties such as the Arab Unionist Party, the Democratic Socialist Party and the Unity Socialist Party.

The NPF monopolized power in the hands of the socialists, who functioned under the umbrella of the Ba'ath. Apart from the Ba'ath, which has nearly 2 million members, these parties have no power base throughout Syria. In 2000, independent figures tried to re-establish the National Party of Damascus and the People's Party of Aleppo, but for a variety of reasons the projects never materialized. The SSNP reactivated itself in public life, and so did the Communist Party in 2001, by republishing its two political weeklies, outlawed since 1958, al-Nour (The Light) and Sawt al-Shaab (Voice of the People). In February 2001, vice president Abd al-Halim Khaddam reportedly promised Riyad Sayf, the Damascus deputy in parliament, a new party law for Syria.

For various reasons, that did not happen in 2001, but today it is almost certain in Damascus that a new party law will be created, and announced at the upcoming Ba'ath Party Conference in June, breaking the socialist parties' monopoly over politics in Syria. President Bashar Assad was very clear about that when speaking to Spanish journalists in Syria in March. He said, "The coming period will be one of freedom for political parties" in Syria.

In 1973, Article 8 of Syria's new constitution said the Ba'ath Party was the ruling party of the state and society. Ba'athist Syria was modeled after the USSR with regard to the ruling party and its relationship with state and society. Just as in Syria, the Communist Party of the USSR became virtually indistinguishable from the USSR, from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 until the Communist Party Conference of 1986, after which membership dropped significantly. When the conference took place, the USSR had 19 million people registered in the Communist Party. In Syria, with different proportions, the number is 1.8 million.

In both Damascus and Moscow, membership in the party became a privilege, and a guaranteed path to success in government, society and the civil service. The Ba'athists created the political elite of Syria from the 1960s onward, just as the communists did in the USSR. It became virtually impossible, in both the USSR and Syria, to assume senior government office without being a member of the ruling party. Some joined out of conviction, yet most out of a desire to advance in the civil service, military, diplomatic corps and government institutions. Not anybody could become a Ba'athist. And not everybody could become a Communist. One had to be recommended by an existing member, and one's past was closely studied. The slightest history of deviance was enough to turn down membership application. As several consecutive generations grew up under one-party rule, it became normal, and in some cases expected, for an ambitious man or woman to join the Ba'ath Party.

In the USSR, a youth organization was founded called the "Young Pioneers", where young members would join until the age of 14, from which time they would become members of the Komsomol (Young Communist League) before becoming full-time members in the Communist Party. In Syria, the steps were repeated, only replaced with the Ba'ath Pioneers, Revolutionary Youth, and eventually full-time membership in the Ba'ath Party.

The SSNP in today's Syria
Under the new party law expected in June, parties not affiliated with the NPF will be permitted to operate as long as they are not Islamic, or encourage sub-national loyalties (eg Kurdish, Circassian, Armenian, etc). The first party expected to receive a license is the SSNP. It is also the party expected to obtain the widest popularity in Syria.

Founded in Beirut in 1932, originally as a secret society of five intellectuals, by the revolutionary philosopher Antune Saada, it grew into an official party and became immensely popular in Syria from the 1940s onward. A radical and secular party, it originally flourished among students at the American University of Beirut and spread to other intellectual centers in Lebanon and Syria, calling for the unification of Greater Syria (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Jordan), and challenging the ideas of modern Arab nationalism that became popular in the 1950s under Nasser of Egypt. Meaning, the SSNP was uninterested in North Africa (Egypt included) or the Arab Gulf region.

It was outlawed in Syria in 1955 when some of its members were accused of assassinating Adnan al-Malki, the deputy chief of staff of the Syrian army. Malki was an Arab nationalist, an ally of the Ba'ath, and his brother Riyad was a ranking Ba'athist in Syria. Authorities cracked down on the party, forcing it to move underground, and greatly persecuted SSNP members from 1955 onward.

Restrictions softened when Hafez Assad came to power in 1970, reportedly because he sympathized with the SSNP, and in February 2001, his son, President Bashar Assad, gave an interview to the Jordanian weekly al-Majd saying that he "did not mind" a relaunch of the SSNP in Syria. A few months later, the SSNP was permitted to attend a meeting of the NPF as an "observer".

This was seen as an indicator that the state was willing to grant more freedoms to the SSNP, especially since it tolerated its members having seats in parliament. After an uprising started in Palestine in September 2000, the party was permitted to stage a rally in Damascus, in favor of the Palestinian resistance, for the first time in 50 years. This month, Assad received a delegation of SSNP leaders in Damascus, including Issam al-Mahayri, the aging secretary general of its Syria branch since the party founder's death in 1949.

All of these are indicators that the SSNP is back on its way to becoming a main factor in political life in Syria. The failure of modern Arab nationalism, and the distance of countries once considered as solid Arab "brothers" such as Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Kuwait, Yemen and Oman, all explain why the concept of Greater Syria is on the rise in modern Syria. Of all the other parties that will be authorized, the SSNP probably has the largest power base (unofficially estimated at more than 90,000), matched only by the Ba'ath.

Other parties expected to emerge are the Coalition for Union and Democracy, a Nasserite organization, and the Arab Socialist Union of Jamal al-Atasi, a party that is Arab nationalist in outlook, pro-Nasser, relatively popular in Syria, which deviated from NPF ranks for ideological reasons in the 1970s.

If the arrested Damascus parliamentarian Riyad Sayf is released from jail (his prison term ends in 2007), he will strive to re-establish his Movement for Social Peace. An unofficial party, it was created and abrogated in 2000, lobbying for the creation of a multi-party system, a release of political prisoners, and an end to socialism in Syria. If no legal obstacle prevents him from getting a license (he might be stripped from his civil rights), then Sayf might succeed and his party would win during election time, because he is popular in Damascus.

A moderate Islamic party might be permitted to operate under the leadership of Dr Mohammad Habash, the regime-friendly Islamist deputy in the Syrian parliament, but no license will be given to the Muslim Brotherhood, which tried and failed to topple the Assad regime in 1982, inflicting a lot of blood in Syria.

Law No 49, which makes membership in the Brotherhood a criminal offense punishable by the death penalty, will most probably be abolished in the upcoming Ba'ath Party conference. This is seen as a gesture on the behalf of the government to build bridges with its opponents. Other similar gestures have been the return to the country of General Jasem Alwan, a Nasserist officer who tried to topple the Ba'athist regime in July 1963, four months after it had come to power. He was sentenced to death, escaped to Egypt, and ever since has been a loud critic of Ba'athist Syria.

Having spent more than 40 years in banishment, he returned to Syria this month, and so did Yusuf Abdelki, a popular and widely respected artist, persecuted and arrested previously for his communist views. Abd al-Hamid al-Sarraj, the ruthless director of intelligence who persecuted the Ba'athists from 1958-61, and has also been in Egypt ever since, is also due for return in 2005.

Probably, in a healthy political environment, independents will strive to re-establish the National Party of Damascus, loyal in the 1950s to Syria's late president Shukri al-Quwatli, who died in 1967, and others will work for the People's Party of Aleppo, whose president and co-founder Nazim al-Qudsi died in 1998. Both parties were non-ideological, unlike the Ba'ath and communists, but rather mirrored the socio-political interests of their respective communities, and promised to represent them adequately in parliament during the 1940s and 1950s.

The National Party ruled Syria from 1946 to 1949, and again in 1955-58, while the People's Party reigned in 1949-51 and 1961-63. These parties did not have firm objectives, and were pragmatic, doing what was in their communities' interest to survive politically. When it was popular to demand union with Iraq in 1949, for example, the National Party did that, yet when it became needed to support a union with Egypt instead in 1958, it also did just that.

The new generation of Syrians will head toward politicians who have no ideological convictions, and are working only for the interests of their respective communities. It is not a crime in politics, contrary to what many believe, to be pragmatic, and change sides and convictions according to needs and circumstances. Since ideologies have failed their founders all over the world, these non-ideological parties will probably be the most popular if a true multi-party system emerges in Syria.

In 2000, Paris-based Syrian businessman Umran Adham tried to re-establish Quwatli's National Party, but the project was delayed "because the state was unenthusiastic". A legal team was put in charge of paperwork, and the National Party's 1946 constitution was updated to apply to modern Syria. Adham had explained that the party should be ready by late 2001 and able to take part in the parliamentary elections of 2002. He then spoke to the Beirut-based Daily Star and said the project had been delayed "for another three to four years". He added that he had "sent out signals" showing that the project was ready and awaiting approval, and received "an extremely passive response" from senior state officials, showing that no Ba'athist leaders wanted to resurrect the National Party in 2001.

Today, the mood is different in Damascus. It is very likely that a resurrection for the National Party, the People's Party and the SSNP will happen. To succeed, they need credible people to lead them. The success of the National Party, for example, was due to the immense popularity and trust that people had in its unblemished leader Quwatli and his prime ally Sabri al-Asali. There aren't many people in Syria today with the caliber of someone like Quwatli to inspire immediate confidence among the public. Without real leaders, both the National Party and People's Party will be failures.

The question that many are asking: "Why now?" Why has the Syrian government decided to create a multiparty system which might challenge the power of the Ba'athists? Contrary to what many believe, the Ba'ath Party is very strong in Syria, and has a lot of active supporters. Changing the views of a society indoctrinated with Ba'athist views since 1963 will not be easy. The masses, who generally lack a proper democratic culture, will not readily join other political parties, especially ones that challenge Ba'athist ideology.

This is the exact reason. The state is confident enough that no real threat will be presented to its power if a multi-party system emerges in Syria. Let the parties operate, and let them win parliamentary seats. The ruling party of the state and society will still be the Ba'ath Party, since amending Article 8 of the constitution, which gives it that leadership status, will not be discussed at the upcoming conference. A multi-party system will threaten nobody, and yet be greatly welcomed by the Syrian masses, who are demanding such a kind of political reform in Syria.

The Syrian masses will be pleased, and the Syrian government will get good public relations credit for it. It will also challenge a US bill against Syria, presented on March 8 in the House of Representatives, calling for "Assistance to Support a Transition to Democracy in Syria". It reads: "The president is authorized to provide assistance and other support for individuals and independent non-governmental organizations to support transition to a freely elected, internationally recognized democratic government in Syria."

The message from the public and government alike in Damascus is clear: there is no need for US help, the Syrians will democratize on their own, at will.

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.

It is worth reading the commentary on the article by ComingAnarchy.com, which Tony B brought to my attention. They think that opening up new parties will be the beginning of the end for the Asad regime. I can't agree. Many other Middle East authoritarians have done this as a means to let off social steam, please Washington, and build a more responsible and organized civil society. So far liberalization in the Middle East has not led to democracy. But that does not mean it won't in the future. Certainly having elites practiced in party life, even circumscribed party life, is a good thing. Syria's reforms will be window dressing at first. But maybe with time that will change as the regime and society work out better ways to organize political life and reestablish some sense of trust and dialogue.

What introducing party life means is that Bashar is trying to move Syria off the list of "Dictatorial Regimes" and put it into the growing camp of "Liberalizing Authoritarian Regimes," such as those of Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. It means some party life, more active NGOs (which Syria has yet to allow) and allowing for the growth of civil society.

Syria's Withdrawal from Lebanon Means More Internal Change

Yesterday was a day of celebration in Lebanon: 29 years of military occupation by Syria came to an end. Although the Lebanese and world press covered the story in detail, Syrians largely ignored the fanfare. It was not a proud day in Syria. In fact the Baath newspaper included no story about Lebanon on its front page.

There was some relief here as most people want to see the sordid affair of Syria's withdrawal concluded; they pray that the world spotlight will move elsewhere and the barrage of incriminations coming from Lebanon will subside. Relations between the two countries, which are so complex and intimate, are always described by Syrians in terms of a family. For the last thirty years they have been dysfunctional. Syrians now hope real brotherhood can be reestablished between the two societies. Everyone knows that will take time. The painful TV coverage of the demonstration in Beirut by family members of Lebanese who disappeared into Syrian prisons drove this home. My wife had to get up and leave the room when al-Arabia showed the wailing mothers and distraught brothers of missing Lebanese, who were demonstrating in front of parliament in Beirut, being beaten back by Lebanese troops. It was not easy to watch. Many in Syria hope Bashar will release the remaining Lebanese held in Syria and account for the missing as rapidly as possible. Only then will old wounds heal properly.

If Syrians have lost interest in Lebanon, they are ever more concerned about internal developments. The main story in the Baath newspaper was about the first round of elections for the Regional Party Congress that was concluded earlier this week. None of the statements by the successful candidates mentioned Lebanon or Syria's foreign relations. All were concerned with internal reforms. Candidate after candidate demanded that economic reforms be speeded up and that the public sector be realigned with the new demands of the Syria people. Without being explicit, the candidates are demanding more capitalism and a broadening of the free market. Many spoke out in favor of better healthcare and schools. All asked for better qualified public servants and administrative reform. Most complained that party members don't come to meetings implying that they are useless and that the party has lost its way. Society sees it as a bastion of clientalism and patronage. The candidates are clearly concerned that they are wasting their time running for elections and hope for the status and duties of the party can be clarified. How that will happen is anyone's guess.

The withdrawal from Lebanon leaves Syria facing a deep identity crises. All the billboards around town demanding that Syria strengthen its role in the region and defend Arabism cannot hide the fact the Syria has very little clout in Arab affairs. Perhaps this is a good thing. Syrians can now focus on putting their own house in order. The humiliation Syrians have experienced outside their borders over the last several months may be expiated by forward movement at home.

Hassan Fattah of the New York Times, helped by our very own Katherine Zoepf in Damascus has the most thoughtful and detailed report on Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, entitled, "Syria Force Leaves Lebanon, but Political Puzzles Remain." In its last lines, the always smart Sami Moubayed is quoted:

In Syria the soldiers were met by rice-throwing well-wishers apparently organized by the government. But the sense of humiliation was hard to hide. The Syrians generally dismissed the Lebanese as ungrateful, said Sami Moubayed, a Syrian political analyst.

"But the intellectual elite understands very well how Syria's place in the world has changed," Mr. Moubayed said. "The nationalists among them feel that everything Hafez al-Assad built is being squandered."

Nicholas Blanford has a good report as well With Syria out, Lebanon clout grows: The last Syrian troops left Lebanon Tuesday, ending 29 years of military domination.

Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribute has a fine series of articles on Syria, which suggest that although the president's authority is limited and he must pit his own agenda against those of the powerful men around him, he has consolidated his power over the last months. (Thanks to Tony Badran for sending them my way.) Here is a bit from "Reform hinges on Syria's leader."

Old guard and new

At a Damascus meeting in October 2002, Assad waited until his aides left the room before he made a startling admission to Burns. If U.S. officials really hoped to talk to him, Assad said, they must avoid usual government channels and rely only on the special intelligence route created to share data on Al Qaeda. Only that channel, he said, "comes to me unfiltered," according to a former senior U.S. official briefed on the exchange.

Analysts have long described Assad as prisoner to an entrenched "old guard." But there are distinct signs that Assad holds far greater power than he did several years ago--and his decisions have not marked the decisive turn toward reform that many had predicted.

Indeed, some of the "new guard" he has promoted have been shunted aside, while others, including relatives, are becoming as entrenched as the men they replaced.

Three-quarters of the top 60-odd officials in political and security ranks were replaced by the end of 2002, according to German foreign policy analyst Volker Perthes. Last June, Assad retired 500 more military officers over age 60--a delicate move he considers vital to removing checks on his power, advisers say.

"The old officers believe that Hafez al-Assad brought them to power, but that they brought Bashar al-Assad to power," a senior adviser to the government said.

To understand that older generation, visit Jibran Kourieh, who spent 22 years as Syria's lead government spokesman until he retired three years ago. As he puffs a water pipe at a Damascus cafe, his crown of white hair, V-neck sweater and pinstriped suit give the air of an aging apparatchik, reinforced by his contempt for Mikhail Gorbachev as a leader who "destroyed the Soviet Union." Above all, Kourieh blames the U.S. for pressuring Assad into the position he faces today.

But asked how the father might have handled similar pressure, Kourieh said: "If President Hafez al-Assad was here, it wouldn't have reached this point. He passed through very serious situations in his time."

To counter the influence of that old guard, Bashar is turning to younger, largely Western-trained technocrats. His wife, Asma Akhras, a Syrian financial analyst raised in London, has taken a more public role, encouraging a civil society and small businesses. The president's younger brother Maher heads a key military unit, and Bashar promoted his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat to head of military intelligence.

But diplomats and critics say Assad's failure to rein in the economic advantages senior officials and relatives enjoy limits his power to reform the economy. Without Assad combating that corruption, critics say, powerful interests quash change.

"There is urgent need for economic reform," said economist Hussein Amach. "Unemployment is high, poverty is widespread, economic enterprises are losing in every kind of operation. Bureaucratic corruption is widespread."

But Amach knows that voicing such criticism can be dangerous. After openly urging reform of Syria's deeply corrupt public sector, he was fired Jan. 1 as head of Syria's Agency for Combating Unemployment. Like many before him, he had touched the government's rawest nerve. And for Assad, the criticism couldn't have come at a more sensitive time.

"OBSTACLE TO CHANGE: Corruption, nepotism stand in way of democracy"By Evan Osnos
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published April 22, 2005

DAMASCUS, Syria -- Like many Syrian entrepreneurs, Adnan Tarabishy knows what it takes to survive in business today.

"We have to bribe the officials from the Ministry of Finance to all other bodies in the government," he said. "It's a necessary fact."

Among obstacles to democratization in Syria, few loom larger than corruption, say analysts, diplomats and Syrian officials. Tax evasion is common. Political and family connections yield prized government contracts. Bribery is routine.

That integration of politics and economics is an important element in understanding why Syrian President Bashar Assad's pledges to reform his government have foundered. To supporters and critics, Assad appears caught in a political spiral: Corruption and inefficiency put mounting pressure on his government, but the reforms required could undermine his power.

Syria's economy is languishing. Economists say it has been in continuous recession, except for a few years in the early 1990s, since 1981. Moribund public companies cost the state millions in subsidies, and restrictive finance laws curtail private-sector development.

That is a bleak picture for businessmen like Tarabishy, an energetic, earnest 28-year-old who parlayed $1,500 and a roomful of rented furniture into a bustling business-training center and later an advertising firm. He sees a growing brain drain.

"We're supplying the market with highly educated people," he says of the Professional Development Institute he founded. "I don't like to be pessimistic, but 90 percent of our graduates are now out of Syria."

Assad bemoans the lack of economic and administrative reform.

"There are literally thousands of mediocre and fossilized bureaucrats who have been entrenched in their ministries for decades, don't want to change and don't know how to think . . . in a different way," he told former National Security Council analyst Flynt Leverett last year.

But Assad's family also profits from that system. His younger brother Maher "is increasingly notorious for his personal greed and complicity in corruption, as are the Makhlufs, Bashar's uncles, aunts and cousins on his mother's side," Leverett writes in a new book on Syria.

Those connections circumscribe Assad and his advisers' ability to make bold changes. "They do not want social upheaval," said Damascus economist Riad Abrash, a former deputy minister of planning. "They want stability."

I am also copying the useful information about the recently fired Presidential advisor, Nibras al-Fadil, given by one recent comment.

Here's a link to a bit more information on the Nibras al-Fadel affair. The site is that of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the last time I was in Syria it was blocked, so I don't know if you'll be able to open it:

Check it out today because the site is updated daily so you might miss it if you wait. Apparently his firing is the talk of a very large number of people, and seen as a major loss to reformers. Let me also note that the website is among the most reliable and accurate, so despite my disgust of the brotherhood and their ilk, u can probably count on what they're saying.

Also I did a search in the Daily Star newspaper, trying to find what exactly Nibras said that got him fired (of course that is if the all4syria account that the interview was the reason he was kicked out is true)...I found about 4-5 articles that mentioned him, and given that the all4syria said the interview he did with Daily Star was about a month and a few days old, I think that they are referring to this article:

If I am correct that it is this article, the words that might have done him in are his saying that in order to maintain stability and prosperity in Syria, one of the things that should be done, in his words, is "not pitting different religious, ethnic and other population groups against each other".

Perhaps the leadership circles saw it as his hinting that that's what the Alawi regime is doing.... However other things he said that might have done him in are his saying that its important to have "good governance and democratic values, promoting human rights, dignity and freedom".... or his saying that: "the leadership should take advantage of the upcoming Baath Party congress to transform it from a party to a national congress, setting the stage for the sorts of deep, structural changes that are needed to provide the foundation for economic and political reforms".....or perhaps his complaining of: "high levels of corruption, informality and patronage"... (focus on the word patronage).

Anyway, I'll leave you to read the article, but his words are truly impressive, and unheard of in Syrian official circles...which is unfortunately why he was probably fired.
Peace, Syrian in Canada

If anyone wants to know what it is like reporting on the Iraq-Syrian border this story by FRONTLINE/World reporter Kate Seelye is interesting and well done.

Bolton and the Politicization of US Intelligence on Syria

I am posting an article on Syria's security network in Lebanon below that comes from intelligenceonline.com. It was sent to me by a reader who asked that I publish it even though he noted that "I feel it's too much talk, not enough facts."

I post it, nevertheless, because there have been a number of articles reporting the same thing. One never knows about the truth of such unsubstantiated claims.

I never now how to pass on such articles. US intelligence agencies and institutes have been so damaged by their propensity to spin that one must take this sort of unverified news with a large grain of salt and remain skeptical until ones sees some facts.

Nothing has done more harm to our confidence in US intelligence warnings than the willful politicization of intelligence by the ex-Under-Secretary of State John Bolton, whose nomination for the position of US Ambassador to the UN has now run into grave problems in the Senate.

The recent hearings on Bolton underline his intelligence misrepresentations only too well, something I have sought to point out on Syria Comment for the past year (see this post of May 20, 2004, or this post of June 26, 2005, or this post).

The most damaging allegation about Bolton involves his 2002 efforts to prod the intelligence community to back his allegation that Cuba might be seeking to export WMD from an offensive biological weapons program. In February 2002, he prepared a speech that, according to an unclassified Senate Intelligence Committee report, "contained a sentence which said that the U.S. believes Cuba has a developmental, offensive biological warfare program and is providing assistance to other rogue state programs."

The problem was that Bolton's charges went well beyond what the intelligence community viewed as solid evidence. They claimed Cuba had a "limited, developmental, offensive biological warfare research and development effort." In 2004, the intelligence community revised its 1999 estimate even further downward because it was even less sure that Cuba had any such offensive WMD effort.

Bolton did the same thing to Syria as he did to Cuba. From 2002 to 2004, he consistently insisted that Syria was a growing threat because of WMD and even accused it of developing nuclear weapons capabilities for which there was no evidence and only allegations. Even more egregious, he kept on insisting that Saddam Hussein had smuggled his WMD into Syria even after it had become quite clear that Iraqis could provide no evidence of this and that US agencies had found no evidence that Saddam had preserved any of his WMD. The politicization of intelligence has done a great disservice to US creditability.

After writing this last night, I saw this morning that the New York Times published an article on Bolton's Syria misrepresentations. It says:

Ex-Officials Say Bolton Inflated Syrian Danger
By DOUGLAS JEHL, April 26, 2005

In the speech itself, Mr. Bolton pointed to Cuba, Syria and Libya as "rogue states intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction," a trio that extended "beyond the axis of evil" of Iran, Iraq and North Korea that President Bush had described in his State of the Union address several months earlier. On Syria, Mr. Bolton said in the 2002 speech that the government in Damascus "is pursuing the development of biological weapons and is able to produce at least small quantities of biological warfare agents."

In testimony to Congress in June 2003, Mr. Bolton said American officials "know that Syria is pursuing the development of biological weapons." But a report sent to Congress by the C.I.A. in April 2003 was more guarded in its assessment than Mr. Bolton had been. Using an abbreviation for biological warfare, it said only that it was "highly probable that Syria is also continuing to develop an offensive B. W. capability."

David Sanger also has an article in the Times entitled, "Arms Move to Syria 'Unlikely,' Report Says"

The Bush administration's senior weapons inspector said in a report released last night that it was "unlikely" that Saddam Hussein's forces moved weapons to Syria, though he expressed concern about nuclear-related equipment that was apparently removed after American-led forces invaded Iraq.

It is good to see that the administration is finally getting around to clearing up the false allegations that Syria had spirited away Iraqs WMD. Even the CIA has now included a disclaimer on its website.

Here is the article on Syria's Network in Lebanon. Most of its information is tied to one unnamed "diplomatic source," who mysteriously knows exactly what was said in a high level meeting of Syria's top security officers. For this "diplomatic source" to know what went on in the meeting, one of Syria's top security officers must have leaked the information in order to undermine Syria's position in Lebanon. This does not seem likely to me, but here it is anyway.
Syria's New Network in Lebanon

Syria is officially pulling out of Lebanon but appears to be simultaneously deploying clandestine networks throughout the entire country.

According to a diplomatic source, Syria's leadership held one of its most important meetings ever on the Lebanese situation in Damascus on March 24. In attendance for the occasion were president Bashar al Assad; his younger brother, Maher, commander in chief of the Republican Guard; his brother-in-law, the all-powerful general Assef Shawkat, chief of Military Intelligence; his influential sister Bushra, wife of Shawkat; general Ghazi Kanaan, interior minister and former head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon; general Bahjat Suleiman, chief of Section 251 of the General Intelligence Directorate; general Mohamed al Mansourah, new boss of the Political Security agency (IOL 493); and general Roustom Ghazale, chief of Syria's secret service in Lebanon.

While Assad called for Syria to disengage itself from the Lebanese "quagmire", Kanaan, Shawkat and Maher Assad pushed a plan to set up covert networks taking their orders from Damascus throughout all of Lebanon.

As a result, Syrian intelligence operatives have begun infiltrating the 12 Palestinian camps housing 400,000 refugees in Lebanon, and particularly the Ain el Heloue camp east of Saida in the southern part of the country. Other agents carrying fake Lebanese ID papers have installed themselves in the southern suburbs of Beirut with the assistance of Hezbollah, which put apartments at their disposal.

And to retain a presence in the capital and in Christian regions the Syrians have activated their local networks, and specially among Lebanese political parties that have long been beholden to Damascus.

This is the case of the Syrian National Social Party (PSNS) in which Christians are an active minority; the Lebanese branch of the Ba'aath Party; the Habashis, a Sunni fundamentalist movement; and the Movement for Islamic Unification.

Syria's new strategy is reflected in events affecting the Movement for Islamic Unification, which is also a Sunni fundamentalist outfit established in Tripoli in northern Lebanon. At the outset the movement close to Syria's Moslem Brotherhood violently opposed Syria's presence in Lebanon.

Following a deadly rift within the movement the Syrians started in 1994 to arrest and jail several hundred of its members. But early this month, the Syrian secret service began releasing the prisoners who flooded back to Tripoli, this time to serve Syria's interests. According to sources in Tripoli, large amounts of weaponry have been distributed in the city.

There was a demonstration yesterday of about 50 people in front of the State Security Court: See Syrians stage rare protest at trial of rights activists. One photographer, Ghaith, whom I spoke to said that he was impressed with the courage of the demonstrators, who were surrounded by security people in full riot gear and who out numbered the demonstrators. He took pictures until he was told to leave.

Ghaith, an Iraqi, came to Syria only a week ago from Baghdad and says how pleasantly surprised he has been to find Syria so different from Saddam's Iraq. He said that he was amazed to see the demonstrators holding their small sheets of paper above their heads and demanding that emergency law be lifted. "No one ever dared to do that in Iraq." He was hardly checked at the airport, and he was able to help his fiancé, a British reporter and novelist, get an extension for her reporter's visa for several months with a minimum of fuss, just a small payment to an officer who made the telling eye contact. They both sang Damascus' praises for being so much fun and cosmopolitan.

They are both refugees from Iraq, driven out by the deteriorating security situation.

Economics of the Syria - Lebanon Relationship

Thank God for Andrew Tabler. Once again he has cut through the fog to tell us what we do know about the Syrian-Lebanese economic relationship. His article from "Executive", copied below, should be of interest to many readers who have been carrying on a vigorous debate on these pages about who is going to be hurt more - Syria or Lebanon - if relations between the two countries worsen.

Tabler's article is followed by an interview with Fouad Siniora, who was economic minister of Lebanon. He also helps to shed some light on the economics of the relationship.

The economic relationship: Beyond all political fallout, the economies of Syria and Lebanon remain deeply intertwined and complimentary
Executive Magazine, (April 2005 No.70)
By Andrew Tabler,

In the current political furor, it must be remembered that the Lebanese and Syrian economies are and have been strongly interdependent – a situation that predates Syria’s military intervention in 1976 and will probably remain so in the short to medium term.

Prior to former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination, the Lebanese economy was finally picking up steam, built on stronger trade with the region, including Syria. Should the opposition win the upcoming Lebanese elections, it will not necessarily mean that Lebanon will be cut off from Syria economically. The special bilateral agreements of the early to mid 1990s have been replaced with Arab-wide trade pacts that have slashed tariffs on a wide variety of goods and facilitated inter-Arab investment. They will remain binding. Restrictions on Syrians working in Lebanon are a possibility, but the fact of the matter remains that Syrian labor is not easily replaced by other foreign workers, as they require housing and residency permits to the tune of $1,800 per year. If economic reform accelerates in Syria in response to the crisis, which it has in terms of banking, Lebanon’s could lose its share of Syrian savings, and with it, a vital source of deposits that can be invested in everything from Lebanese treasury bills to credit cards – all of which keep the Lebanese dream of material progress going. But as US pressure increases on Damascus, Syrian reform is likely to grind to a halt for the foreseeable future unless a working compromise can be found.

Trading partners

Despite ebbs and flows in Lebanese-Syrian relations over the years, bilateral trade has continued unabated and has seen rapid growth in bilateral trade. In 1997, for example, the volume of bilateral trade stood at $76.81 million, for which Syrian exports to Lebanon accounted for 92.7%. As more agreements were signed, Lebanon gradually began tipping the trade balance in its direction. In 2000, for example, bilateral trade volume stood at $190.1 million, with Syrian exports making up 87.8%. By 2003, trade volume stood at $277.2 million, but Syria’s share of the pie had slipped to 74.06%. In the first half of 2004, total trade volume stood at $136.95 million, of which Syrian production accounted for only 63%. While such figures are susceptible to fluctuations in energy prices (almost half of Syrian exports to Lebanon are oil products), Lebanese exports to Syria more than doubled between 2001 and 2003, and Lebanon’s share of official trade volume continued to grow.

Official statistics on Lebanese-Syrian economic activity are deceiving, however, as they do not reflect services Lebanese enterprises provide to Syrian clients, as well as rampant black market activity. The Lebanese state’s ability to assess taxes and customs duties during the war was severely curtailed. Getting a handle on the volume of black market activity between the two countries is therefore incredibly difficult. But a brief look at some of the reasons Lebanese and Syrians took their economic activity underground sheds light on what remain important needs of both sides that are likely to quickly show through the current political posturing.

Refuge for Syrian money

First and foremost are financial activities. Following Syria’s Ba’athist Revolution of 1963 and the nationalization of the banking sector, Syrian money poured into Lebanon. Syrian financiers set up shop in Beirut and in Chtoura to service the needs of Syrians, due in large part to the inefficiencies and restrictions that accompanied state domination of Syrian finance. Syrians are not inward-looking people cut off from the rest of the world and over the last century, Syrians migrated to the West in large numbers due to extensive political instability, and carried their trade with them. Thus, unlike many other “socialist” countries, Syrian had a strong need to keep and effectively use hard currency.

Lebanon fits Syrians needs to a tee. Its famous banking secrecy laws made it easy for Syrians to hide their true income and worth from the Syrian authorities. The banks’ top-rate services, in terms of transfer facilities, suited the needs of Syrian traders all over the world. Last but not least, the banks’ ability to make smart investments and make strong returns made Lebanon Syria’s piggy bank.

When the Syrian state imposed harsh foreign currency restrictions following its forex crisis in 1985 to 1986, Lebanon became an important conduit for black market currency transactions in and out of Syria, known in the region as the HAWALA system. When Syria’s private sector began to grow in the early 1990s, and Syrian banking regulations remained high restrictive, this activity became semi-sanctioned, with Syrian authorities openly turning a blind eye to the illicit activity. Lebanese banks asked few questions, as per their banking confidentiality regulations.

Lebanese banks also became active in loans to major Syrian enterprises, charging high rate of interest and special terms in exchange for forgoing the ability to secure collateral in Syria (which is restricted to Lebanese banks). Last but not least, Lebanese banks provide, and still provide, the lions share of L/C and other import finance facilities to Syrian importers. Only in the last few weeks, following Hariri’s assassination, have Syrian regulations been eased to allow Syrian banks to provide L/Cs in foreign currency.

The second area concerns black market trade activities. Despite changes in Syria’s customs regulations over the past few years, the country remains a highly protected economy. Lebanese products skirt these restrictions through the abovementioned free trade agreements. As Syria’s private sector has grown, so has its appetite for goods either banned by Syrian customs regulations, or those forbidden by US trade restrictions on Damascus. As a result, Lebanese traders have become masters of “re-exporting”, where goods such as US computers or car parts are shipped on to Syrian suppliers in violation of US law. In response, US corporations have put heavy pressure on Lebanese import agencies to obtain “end-user” licenses for various products. Strong family business ties straddling the border, high commissions made by Lebanese re-exporters, along with no increases in the capacity of the US embassy to monitor such transactions, make such demands virtually unenforceable.

Swapping expertise

In terms of services, Syrian producers utilize Lebanese expertise in everything from production techniques and marketing. Most Syrian businessmen say Lebanon’s close proximity and the international experience of its workforce make Lebanon the best source at the best price. But perhaps more important is the willingness of Lebanese companies to receive large “off the books” payments from Syrian sources that in most other economies would be considered money laundering. This fact is not due to the Lebanese penchant for “business” but rather their understanding of, and willingness to circumvent, Syria’s foreign exchange restrictions. Along with, of course, Lebanon’s banking secrecy policy.

Syria's manpower

The third area involves Syrian labor in Lebanon. Since independence, Syrian workers have satisfied Lebanon’s demand for skilled, cheap, and unreported labor – an important factor in the profitability of Lebanese businesses. While many Lebanese now complain that the estimated 1 million Syrian workers in Lebanon are in fact stealing jobs away from Lebanese, the simple fact of the matter is that Syrian workers, in the words of one Lebanese businessman, “will do what most Lebanese feel is beneath them.” It is easy to understand: Lebanon’s skilled and polyglot workforce invests in its education with the hope of obtaining a white-collar office job. Syrian workers, therefore, fill the blue-collar gap in Lebanon ask construction workers, garbage collectors, handymen and house cleaners. This makes Lebanon an important source of remittances to the Syrian economy, with some estimates reaching $4 billion per year.

Not all these funds leave Lebanon, of course, as most Syrians are still reluctant to repatriate their savings to Syria’s nascent private sector banks. Many Syrian workers are also married to Lebanese nationals, making estimates of the Syrian labor drain on Lebanon hard to quantify. Nevertheless, Syria continues to suffer from high unemployment, and the economic opportunities for Syrians in Lebanon are an important part of keeping food on the table among the families that straddle the anti-Lebanon range.

A brief history of Lebanese-Syrian economic pacts

In the year’s following independence, different Syrian governments tried to placate the wishes of businessmen from all over the country who historically preferred using Lebanese ports. This culminated in the signing of the Lebanese-Syrian Economic Pact of 1953 – a document designed to help integrate the two economies. The agreement allowed for quota and duty free trade in agricultural products and exempted industrial production from all or half of customs duties, depending on the product in question. In terms of labor and services, Lebanese and Syrians could obtain a six-month residency permit on the border, which allowed Syrian surplus labor to serve the Lebanese market – a situation that continues to this day.

During the civil war, Lebanese-Syrian trade continued, albeit on a much more limited basis with areas under the control of Christian militias. In the early 1980s, Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayal tried to uproot Syrian business ties with areas under his control and led the Azharis – a financier family of Syrian origin – to sell their controlling stake in Credit Libanais in 1984. Following Syria’s role in implementing the Ta’if Accord, both countries signed the agreement for Brotherhood and Collaboration of 1991.

While the agreement is often framed in terms of its bilateral commitments to overall cooperation, external affairs, and security, equally emphasized are economic and social affairs. Such matters are overseen by the Committee for Economic and Social Cooperation, an offshoot of the Lebanese-Syrian Higher Council, which oversees the agreement.

In 1993, Syria and Lebanon concluded yet another pact - The Agreement for Economic and Social Cooperation and Coordination. Perhaps more than any other agreement, it outlines in detail the goal of gradual economic integration between Lebanon and Syria, as well as the principles on which such goals would be met. Six clauses outline free movement of persons, labor (based on the laws of each country), services, goods, capital, and transport. In addition, a “mechanism” was established to coordinate national policies in water, energy, electricity, taxation, and finance, amongst others, with the goal of achieving a common market between the two countries.

As each state adjusted its legislation to meet such goals, bilateral trade expanded. When the Arab leaders began looking to liberalize pan-Arab trade in the mid 1990s, in part to counteract its free trade agreements with the EU and the WTO, the 1993 agreement was held up as a success story. This led in 1997 to the conclusion of the Greater Arab Free Trade Agreement (GAFTA), in which Lebanese-Syrian economic relations have been framed ever since. GAFTA established the goal of eliminating all tariffs and quotas (with some exceptions) on January 1, 2005. Ahead of that date, Arab countries were free to conclude bilateral agreements to accelerate economic liberalization – a clause Lebanon and Syria took quite seriously. Some 23 bilateral agreements were subsequently concluded, including everything from investment guarantees and industrial and agricultural production to the protection of the environment to emergency medical services.


Lebanese-Syrian Trade ($m)

Year Volume Exports (Syrian) Imports (Lebanese) % Syrian
1997 76.81 71.2 5.6 92.7
2000 190 166.83 23.2 87.8
2003 277.2 205.3 71.9 74.1
2004(1st hlf) 137 85.97 50.98 63

Source: Syrian Ministry of Economy and Trade/Central Bureau of Statistics



Top Bilateral Exports ($m)

Syria-Lebanon

Oil Products 89.3
Mutton 32.2
Phosphate products 16.8
Fruits and Vegetables 13.2
Legumes 6.6
Milk and Dairy Products 6.3
Iron rods and products 5.3


Lebanon-Syria

Paper products 10.7
Cement 9.3
Aluminum products 4.6
Marble 3.6
Sugar products 2.3
Juice and water 2.1
Alcohol .9

Source: Syrian Ministry of Economy and Trade/Central Bureau of Statistics


Q & A: Fouad Siniora - Forward thinking (April 2005 No.70)

The former finance minister outlines Lebanon's economic priorities and prospects amid ongoing political instability

What do you think of comparisons and calculations where people come up with numbers, how much we gave, how much they gave, how much they profited, and so forth? Do you have any view on the net balance of the Syrian-Lebanese relationship in those terms?

I think it is very difficult for anybody to say today but I can really tell you that there really is a synergy and it definitely is in the interest of Lebanon and in the interest of Syria to work together and have closer economic relations, not one overriding the other and taking advantage of the other. Syrian labor is very important to Lebanon and people are mistaken when they talk about Syrian labor. I personally have not heard of any situation under which somebody had Syrian labor imposed on him. In the agricultural sector, the basic labor force is Syrian, in the construction sector, the same thing. Lebanon imports cheap labor and Lebanon exports expensive labor.

After elections, what are the priorities in economic policy that need to be addressed?

We have to address growth, employment and the fiscal situation. Fiscal stabilization has been a big responsibility of the Hariri years. Under your leadership and direction, the ministry of finance has been successful in pursuing reform, implementing VAT since 2002 and lately increasing fiscal revenue. Does the current situation endanger this progress? What really counts now is to proceed in expediting the process and moving to the next phase, which must first begin with the [Syrian] withdrawal. Mind you, my point of view personally and one I believe shared by many reasonable Lebanese in this is that we have to really be on good terms with Syria. Syria is our neighbor and no matter what happens, nobody can change geography. It is our interest to be on good terms with Syria, because Syria is our gateway to the Arab world. We also have no interest in signing any agreement like the May 17th or anything of that sort because it is not in the interest of Lebanon to do so. On the other hand, we have to really work out with Syria something that we can abide by – a very simple formula, as Hariri once said, set by Bcharra Khoury in the old days, [which held] that Lebanon is not supposed to be a place or a passage for colonialism against Syria. As Hariri said, Lebanon cannot be ruled against Syria but it also cannot be ruled from Syria. This is the arrangement that we have to respect. I think this will lead us to great potential for the development of Syria and of Lebanon.

You mentioned that the Lebanese government has been very slow to implement measures. Would disentanglement of the political processes, meaning reduction of Syrian political involvement in Lebanon and reduction or removal of MOUKHABARAT structures, help to improve public sector governance decisively in the short term?

I think this is going to be very helpful, because it means that each organization will have to concentrate on what it is supposed to do. The MOUKHABARAT, according to the Taif Agreement, should really have worked for military objectives, not against the people, taping their phone calls. They are wasting their time. It would have been a very strong message if the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon had happened without the Hariri assassination. We would have seen the country going places.

How about the impact on Syria? Would it also bring a strong positive effect on Syria?
If I were in the Syrian shoes, yes, I think this is going to be. How are they going to take it; how they are going to deal with it? This is for the Syrians to decide. I am not going to interfere in their business, but I think this is something that can be converted into a new opening, a new opportunity.

From a fiscal perspective, does Syrian labor bring about damage to Lebanon?
They are creating value, my friend. I am not in favor of something that is the manipulation of certain things or the interference in many affairs in the country, this is definitely not productive at all; this is destructive. But when you talk about Syrian labor, why don’t you talk about the 100,000 Sri Lankan housemaids? Are you against 300,000 Syrians but not against the 100,000 from Sri Lanka?

How about taxation and work permits for the foreign workers?

If you go to Switzerland, they get labor from France, from Italy, from Spain, or from Portugal and all of them are illegal. Why would you impose taxes on Syrian labor? We can impose taxes, but who is going to eventually pay the taxes – the Lebanese will.

So from the fiscal perspective, would you impose taxation and collecting fees for work permits or would you personally favor a totally open labor environment?

If you want to organize it in terms of simple paperwork, then fine, why not. Nobody is questioning that. But why don’t you ask the same thing between Mexico and the United States? Let’s not concentrate on the side issues instead of the main issues. What we are really complaining about is the interference in political affairs and administrative affairs and everything pertaining to the functioning of the operations in the country. Here, the [Syrian] intelligence is interfering and this is counterproductive and damaging to the economy. Would this be a good time for devaluation of the Lebanese pound, given that the rate of dollarization is high?

It would be counterproductive. You are not gaining anything in terms of reducing your liabilities. You could reduce the debt by a trickle. The benefits, however, are very limited and the costs are very high. I don’t think this is helpful.

Could there be a Paris III and who would be the person to bring the international institutions and donors to the table, now that Mr. Hariri is gone?

I don’t know. It depends on who is going to be the prime minister then. If we wanted to really have a Paris III, we would have to prove to the world that we are serious and are ready to do what is really required so that we can carry on the reforms. We have committed ourselves with the world that we are going to do the reforms and what happened to the contrary was that we did nothing to carry out these reforms. It is high time to realize that the world is not going to do anything for us if we cannot do anything for ourselves. God helps those who help themselves. [Paris II] was an opportunity that was given to us and we abused it and did not take advantage of it.

Baath Will Disolve its National Leadership and Drop the word "Socialism"

For those who are optimistic about coming changes during the Regional Baath Party Congress, the following article should be on interest. The Minister of Planning, Dardari, has also been giving interviews trying to drum up support and optimism about the coming changes. Much of the work of his office depends on altering the Baath constitution where socialism is concerned. He also needs to clear away some of the dead wood around him and keep his avenue to the President open.

"The Baath Will Dissolve its National Leadership and Drop the word "Socialism" from the Party Name." That is what al-Sharq al-Awsat claims (article in Arabic) is going to happen at the 10th meeting of the Regional Leadership due to be held next month. Ayman Abdulnour is the main source for the article. As a party member and one of the best informed Syrians around, he should know.

Deborah Amos of NPR has a good story on Syria which nicely catches the quandary Syrians are in. On the one hand they are fed up with the corruption of the party and regime and despair that it can change itself. On the other hand, everyone keeps praying that Bashar, whom most people like, will be able to "pull a rabbit out of a hat." They look at Iraq and Lebanon and don't want to risk civil war or major instability to get their change. As one Syrian reporter told me the other day, "The problem is that we are not willing to sacrifice like the Lebanese or Iraqis to get change. I am the first one to admit to being a coward."

Needless to say, he had a good job. On my recent trip around Syria, I had a chance to look up many old friends and makes some new ones. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many old friends were doing quite well and had prospered over the last 15 years since I last saw them. Most, however, felt that they had not had the opportunities they could have because of economic stagnation and government obstruction. I will write about this at length in my upcoming travelogue.

Elisabeth Eaves of Slate was recently in town and has written an excellent series of articles that don't just trawl over the same material. She has a nice eye for detail.

From: Elisabeth Eaves
Subject: Going Home
Updated Tuesday, April 19, 2005, at 8:22 AM PT
Today's slide show: Images from Sayyida Zeinab, Damascus

On the fringes of Sayyida Zeinab, an outlying suburb of Damascus, there are signs of transience. Buses are lined up pointing eastward, facing desert for hundreds of miles. There are families loading large square packages and plastic-wrapped children's bicycles into the cargo holds. There are cheap hotels and signs on boxy concrete buildings that advertise furnished rooms for rent.

Dominated by the spectacular golden dome of the Sayyida Zeinab mosque, this neighborhood draws Shiite pilgrims from Iran, Saudi Arabia, and farther afield. For more than a decade now it has also been a magnet for Iraqi Shiite migrants who have come and stayed, in numbers that probably peaked in the hundreds of thousands. They came during the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran that ended in 1988, then during the Persian Gulf War of 1990 and 1991, and then they came as refugees from Saddam Hussein's regime. Most recently, in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2003, they came again.

"I came to feel like I'm a human being," said Ali Raouf Abdul Amir, a patron of the Restaurant of the Youth of Iraq. He arrived on May 25, 2000, before the most recent war. "I had to serve twice in the Iraqi army, and so I couldn't grow at all financially," he said. "Imagine a person my age not married yet." Amir, 30, is an artisan who inlays precious stones into metal in his shop one alley over from the restaurant. His sister and two brothers followed him here and sat out the postwar chaos, but they left six months ago. Amir is now thinking of going home too.

Newspapers, citing the United Nations and Syrian officials, have suggested that between 500,000 and 700,000 Iraqis—Muslim and Christian and of various ethnicities—have arrived in Syria since the war ended, joining some 100,000 Iraqis who were already here. An official at the International Organization for Migration in Damascus suggested to me that the number of new Iraqi arrivals was 400,000. If somewhat disparate, these figures are better than the statistics on how many Iraqis are leaving Syria, which don't exist.

There are anecdotes, though. Two-thirds of Iraqis in Sayyida Zeinab have returned to their homeland since last autumn, according to an estimate by Bassim Suleikhi, an Iraqi trucker and trader who travels the road between Damascus and Najaf. He splits his time between the two cities when he is not on the road, and he, too, takes tea at the Restaurant of the Youth of Iraq.
Two-thirds sounds like a lot, especially since Sayyida Zeinab still feels Iraqi in many ways, as well as overwhelmingly Shiite. (Shiite Muslims make up only a small minority in Syria.) The streets and alleys around the mosque, where you can buy assorted nuts, a whole goat carcass, or a polyester dress, were thronged with shoppers on the two occasions I visited. Nearly every woman wore an all-erasing black cloak of the kind typical in Iran and southern Iraq but unusual in downtown Damascus, where European dress is common. Campaign posters from Iraq's Jan. 30 election were still pasted to the walls, all of them for the United Iraqi Alliance, or 169 list, the Shiite party endorsed by the influential Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. (Ibrahim Jaafari, a 169 candidate, is Iraq's new prime minister.) There is an Imam Sadr Hospital on Sayyida Zeinab's busiest thoroughfare, named for the late Iraqi cleric Mohammed Sadiq Sadr. As well as founding a network of Shiite charities, he fathered the young firebrand Muqtada Sadr.

Even President Bashar Assad appears to have pragmatically franchised himself in Sayyida Zeinab. Throughout most of Syria his face appears alone, hanging on government ministries, buses, and barbershops. Often his image appears near a picture of his late father, Hafez, the former president, or his deceased brother Basil, the would-be president who was killed in a car crash. Occasionally, Bashar appears in a pastoral setting with his wife and kids. In Sayyida Zeinab, though, the photo on the walls is one of him sitting as an equal beside Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite militia group. Perhaps, in fact, it is the residents of Sayyida Zeinab who have done the co-opting. Bowing to the unspoken national demand to display the president, they have chosen this particular depiction.

Still, as the election posters fade in the bright sun, the 10- to 14-hour road trip to Najaf is beginning to look more attractive for Iraqis who, after all, can never obtain Syrian citizenship.
"I'm homesick, and I expect the Iraqi government to stabilize things soon," Amir said. He told me that government jobs in Najaf now pay $200 a month, compared to $3 a month under Saddam Hussein. "If the government employees are getting good salaries, they go out and buy televisions and other things," he reasoned. Suleikhi, the trucker, told me government jobs back home now paid $300-$400 a month. In any case, the reports are good. "The standard of living is 100 percent better," Suleikhi said. I have met few men more openly pleased than these two with both Syria and the United States.

"We will never forget about Syria, which hosted us all these years," Amir said, adding that he has had the freedom to do as he pleases here. Syria has allowed Iraqi migrants to send their children to public schools, get medical treatment at public clinics, and obtain drivers' licenses. Suleikhi, for his part, said that he prefers traveling to Syria than to Jordan, because of the psychological bond between Iraqis and Syrians. As for the United States, "the invasion was a good thing," said Suleikhi. Thirty-eight and single, he has been traveling between Syria and Iraq since 1997. He buys parts for cars and trucks in Syria and sells them in Iraq, and he has noticed a major upturn in business since the end of the war.

Amir says he is grateful to the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but he is more circumspect than Suleikhi. He noted that Najaf, while much improved over recent months, suffers from the lingering blight of occasional terrorist attacks, which he blames on Sunni fundamentalists. He is not entirely sure about the U.S. government's intentions and said that it may have lied about being a liberator rather than an occupier. I asked him what he would do if that was the case. With enviable peace of mind, he said, "We will await Sistani's word and do what he says."

From: Elisabeth Eaves
Subject: A Roaring Absence of Failure
Posted Wednesday, April 20, 2005, at 3:23 AM PT
Today's slide show: Images from the Golan

Peacekeepers get a bad rap, and it's not hard to see why. Time after time, warring parties have slaughtered one another in their presence, sometimes on a massive scale. U.N. troops were present when Rwandans butchered Rwandans in 1994 and when Bosnian-Serb forces overwhelmed Srebrenica in 1995. When peacekeeping troops are present and peace prevails, we still don't give them much credit, assuming instead that the warring parties don't really want to kill each other anyway. Peacekeeping is one of those jobs in which success is hard to measure because it's mainly visible in the absence of failure.

I recently visited the front line between Syria and Israel, two countries technically at war, although calm has mostly prevailed on their border since 1974. If either country chose to launch an all-out invasion, the U.N. forces in the middle couldn't do much to stop it. Nevertheless, I see UNDOF, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force stationed here, as a success.
The Golan certainly didn't look like a war zone as I traveled south from Damascus. The villages were busy with people and traffic and surrounded by lush, green fields. Here and there, though, sprouting like poisonous mushrooms in the grass, I saw metal signs marked with crudely drawn skulls, denoting the presence of mines.

UNDOF's Camp Faouar looked like summer camp for grown-ups. The cabins were set among pine and cypress trees and decorated with national flags—Canadian, Polish, Japanese. There were tennis players on the court and men jogging along gravel paths that cut through patches of wood. The sky was blue and the snow-covered peak of Mount Hermon glinted in the sunlight above.

This was headquarters for the 1,185 soldiers tasked with enforcing the Syrian-Israeli cease-fire that followed the October (or Yom Kippur) War of 1973. Inside the command center, Maj. Siegfried Perr, who is Austrian and wore a blue beret, gave me a slide show briefing. He showed me lines upon lines upon lines: borders at various dates, lines of advance in various wars, lines of withdrawal. Two of the lines marked the so-called Area of Separation, a narrow, 45-mile-long strip of land that runs from the heights of Mount Hermon in the north to Wadi al-Raqid, which is below sea level, in the south. Neither country may have military equipment or personnel in this area. On its side, Israel has built a six-and-a-half-foot-high "technical fence," Maj. Perr said, which sets off an alarm if it is touched. From the Syrian side, though, other than a checkpoint on the road, there is no obvious sign that you have entered the zone. The area is home to more than 50,000 Syrian civilians, up from 5,000 in 1974, and benefits from new roadways and government-funded construction.

Other than patrolling the Area of Separation, the things UNDOF does may seem small. They are the sorts of things development experts call "confidence-building measures," which would be easy to dismiss as so much U.N. jargon. But they make daily life more palatable for ordinary people, which is not something that should be dismissed.

UNDOF provides medical assistance to local civilians who come asking for it. It also does demining work, ridding the landscape of the bitter crop sown by both sides in 1967 and 1973. Mines still sometimes kill local villagers and their livestock and have been responsible for some of the 49 UNDOF deaths since 1974.

UNDOF also helps people cross the border. When Israel captured the Golan in 1967, Syrian villagers came with the territory. They number some 20,000 today and are mostly of the Druse sect. Young men from these communities sometimes travel to study in Damascus. Brides may also cross to join their new husbands, a choice that usually means they will never see their own families again. And, as of the last few months, apple trucks have been allowed to cross, bringing produce from the Golan to market in Syria. In a rare show of cooperation between the two countries, Syria is importing about 7,000 tons of apples grown by Golan Druses.

So, what is UNDOF up against? I'll give two examples. One is the town of Quneitra. Unlike the rest of the Area of Separation, Syria has preserved Quneitra as a ghost town. It had suffered damage in 1967, when Israel first seized it along with the rest of the Golan Heights. Syrian forces shelled it in subsequent years, and it was the site of fierce fighting during the October War, changing hands several times. The subsequent cease-fire required Israel to hand Quneitra back to Syria. What happened next remains the subject of a propaganda war. Syria says that all the houses in the town were systematically destroyed by Israel, while Israel says the destruction was the result of the preceding battles. In his briefing, Maj. Perr said that "as a provocative act it was flattened and destroyed by the IDF before it was returned to Syria," but asked about this later, his force commander told me merely that there were competing claims: that Quneitra was destroyed during the wars, that the Israelis did it just before their withdrawal, and even that the Syrians did it after the withdrawal to burnish their monument to Israeli perfidy.

I couldn't read any tales from Quneitra itself. Aside from a church, a mosque, and a heavily damaged hospital, the town is a field of rubble heaps. Hundreds of homes rest in eerily similar piles. A large slab, once a flat roof, juts up from almost every one.

Whatever the source of the destruction, Quneitra has been frozen in this state for clearly political aims. Lest there be any doubt, the sign in broken English on the hospital makes it clear: "Destructed by Zionists and changed it to firing target!" This preservation of defeat represents feelings about history and loss that I find difficult to understand. Isn't the enshrining of destroyed Quneitra a case of cutting off the nose to spite the face? What kind of society shows off its failures this way? Can anyone imagine Americans preserving the destroyed World Trade Towers as ruins? The citizens of an industrious, optimistic, successful civilization would find the very idea ridiculous. Whatever else it is, this preserving of wounds is a weapon of the weak, a last resort of the defeated. But it also suggests a profound unwillingness to move on from war to peace.

My second example occurred last week, following the first violent border incident in two years. (The last took place in early 2003, when Israeli soldiers killed a Syrian civilian down in Wadi al-Raqid, where the Area of Separation is only 220 yards wide.) This time, a Palestinian from a refugee camp inside Syria managed to cross the border and fire on Israeli soldiers, who captured him. Afterward, according to a wire service report, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman blamed Syria for "allowing" the infiltration, although Israel's alarmed fence and vastly superior defense forces apparently didn't detect him either. The spokesman called the incident a "grave violation" of the security arrangements in place and said, "The Syrians should not be allowing armed terrorists to cross the border."

This verbal transformation of lone gunman into proto-invasion shows another leadership with a taste for escalation. We may give U.N. peacekeepers a hard time, but their daily work on this border goes a long way toward keeping the war in the realm of words.

From: Elisabeth Eaves
Subject: Are We Free Yet?
Posted Thursday, April 21, 2005, at 6:26 AM PT
Today's slide show: Fighters for freedom.

When you are sitting in a bar after midnight, sipping arrack and listening to a violin and synthesizer duo, and the bar is built into a 500-year-old stone home in the walled city of Damascus, and the duo takes a break and the speakers blast the Scorpions ballad—I'm not kidding—"Winds of Change," it would be easy, in spite of oneself, to get sentimental about a Syrian glasnost. Especially after discovering that the night life in Damascus is rather good, and not just good in the debauched way of a tomorrow-we-may-die sort of crowd, or the aggressive way of behind-closed-doors elites, but actually relaxing and fun. Outside on Thursday nights, droves of young men and women, Christian and Muslim, stroll the streets late into the night, moving from shwarma stand to art gallery to DVD store on al-Qaimariyya Street, or bar-hopping near Bab Touma, the Gate of Thomas.

Even when not under the influence of arrack and the Scorpions, it was tempting to be optimistic when the thing I kept hearing from Syrians was that things would change for the better because they simply had to. Mounzer Alkubeh, who is a guitarist, composer, and nightclub owner, told
me simply: "It will happen. There is no other choice." This had an alluring logic. But then Alkubeh was about as apolitical as a Syrian can be, with concerns ranging from intellectual property rights to the schlocky music on Arab satellite TV.

The city's many Internet cafes also lent to an illusion of openness. At the Aural Internet Service in gritty central Damascus, I accessed the most recent report on Syria from Human Rights Watch, opening it in both English and Arabic. I brought up Syria Comment, the English-language blog of American professor Joshua Landis, who lives in Damascus and speaks freely about the regime. I opened a handful of critical news stories about Syria and printed a story supporting an expatriate dissident, which the manager handed over to me without batting an eyelid.

But the experience of those criticizing the regime tells a different story. All4Syria, an electronic newsletter run by Ayman Abdalnour, sends out daily independent commentary in Arabic and has become highly influential. It reaches, by Abdalnour's estimate, some 75,000 readers once the 15,200 subscribers pass it on, and, according to Landis, it "is a leading venue for reformers to complain, air grievances, and spin." Specific proposals it has published have come about more than once since it was founded in 2003. For instance, it had urged the release of 312 Kurds detained in April 2004; on March 30 of this year the president pardoned them. All4Syria has also called for the granting of citizenship to the country's so-called stateless Kurds. Damascus tea-leaf readers now believe this will happen when the Regional Baath Party Congress convenes later this spring.

In other words, All4Syria makes too much of an impact. The government began to block it in April of last year, shortly after it criticized the Baath Party directly. This points to the element missing from the apparent openness: legal protections. In 2000, Bashar Assad inherited the presidency from his father, Hafez Assad, an admirer of the former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Bashar initiated a thaw, releasing political prisoners from jail, allowing independent newspapers to publish, and letting reformists hold public meetings. This "spring" lasted one year, after which the meetings were called off and government critics thrown in jail. Of 10 high-level arrests made in 2001—among them two members of parliament, an economics professor at Aleppo University, and a human rights lawyer—all remain jailed, said human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bounni.

What is going on now is a lot of testing of "red lines," as everyone in Damascus seems to call them. People are saying things and publishing things. But many of them, like al-Bounni and Ammar Abdulhamid, who heads the minority-rights Tharwa Project, are engaged in a harrowing pas de deux with the government. Al-Bounni and Abdulhamid are both barred from leaving the country. Intelligence officials have interrogated Abdulhamid three times since January. Al-Bounni has seen his siblings and friends thrown in jail for peaceful political speech. No one testing the limits knows when the next crackdown might come or what will provoke it.

I met al-Bounni in a low-ceilinged office crowded with boxes. Demanding human rights is not very lucrative, and he is not a popular lawyer in ordinary court cases because he refuses to pay off judges, so he was giving up the space to save money. Over thick Arabic coffee, he laid out a few of the things he is fighting for: an end to political arrests (Human Rights Watch estimates that thousands of Syrian prisoners of conscience remain in jail); an end to torture in jail; an end to the law that says security officials may not be prosecuted. And he wants Syria to have an independent judiciary and free elections.

He has little patience with the debate over whether the president has enough control to make changes. "Legally, technically, he has the power to change. Militarily, he could do it. If he wants to, he could do it in 24 hours," al-Bounni said. He still holds out hope that the Assad regime will see that change is the only option and undertake it peacefully. "We hope it understands that what has happened in the world means it must change. It's not just the United States saying so, it's the whole world," he said. "But up until now, they have given no signs that they understand."
International pressure on Syria has increased dramatically in recent months, for example with France and the United States teaming up to pass U.N. Resolution 1559, calling for Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon, and with the European Union threatening economic sanctions.
Asked how he and others like him survive their tango, al-Bounni was quick to credit international attention. "The regime is waiting for the world to close its eyes, and then it might put us in jail." Right now he said, "We can speak illegally. We are safe because of the international community."

Abdulhamid, who often despairs of the government on his eloquent English-language blog, is not entirely sure how he stays out of jail, though extensive media coverage of him outside Syria has certainly helped. Also, his mother is a Syrian movie star. Recently, though, she too was interrogated about his activities. "It may be the fact that we are focusing on a regional issue [minority rights] rather than a specifically Syrian one," he speculated. "It may be the fact that we have European funding or that we're blatantly breaking the law."

He is not entirely without hope. "We're seeing the makings of a velvet revolution," he said. But not in a Gorky Park sort of way. "The end is not going to be as grand and eye-catching as in Eastern Europe. We have too much baggage. We have Islamicism as a complicating factor." Nevertheless, he said, "This is the beginning of the end. The Internet and satellite TV have launched it."

Lebanon News

Tony Badran at Across the Bay has an interesting post on the new Shiite political gathering ("The Lebanese Shiite Gathering") which has emerged as an alternative voice in the Shi'a community, clearly distinguishing itself from the two main Shitie parties, Hizbullah and Amal.

Naharnet gives a summary of President Bush's 10 minute LBCI interview.

From a Syrian point of view, the interesting parts are that Bush reiterates his enmity toward Hizbullah as an armed militia, which he called a "dangerous organization."

More importantly though, he seems to be offering a peace dividend, not only to the Lebanese in the form of generous financial support if the opposition continues to push out pro-Syrian deputies, but also to Syrians.

For Syria to improve relations with Washington Damascus must leave Lebanon and stop supporting Baathists in Iraq -- "stop those people in Syria who are funneling money and helping smuggle people and arms into Iraq," Bush said.

He expressed hope that diplomatic pressure on Syria would make Damascus change course, apparently ruling out military action.

Here is the transcript of the Syria part of the interview:

Q: Mr. President, we all know that Syrian-American relations are at their lowest now. Is there a road map for Syria to improve its relationship with the United States?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, Syria has heard from us before. We have made it very clear that -- what we expect, in order to be able to have relations with us. First on the agenda, right now, there's two things immediately that come to mind. One is to stop supporting Baathists in Iraq -- stop those people in Syria who are funneling money and helping smuggle people and arms into Iraq. They've heard that message directly from me. And secondly, of course, is to completely withdraw from Lebanon. Syria must shut down Hezbollah offices. Hezbollah not only is trying to destabilize the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, but Hezbollah, as you know, is a dangerous organization.

Q: But those offices are in Lebanon, they're not in Syria.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, they're in Syria, too. And Syria has got to do its part about making sure that Hezbollah doesn't receive support from Syria.

Q: What if the diplomatic effort and the sanctions fail in changing Syrian attitudes? Is there another option?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think the government will feel the international pressure. We're just beginning. And, obviously, diplomacy is the first course of action. And we hope -- I think diplomacy will work.

Q: Mr. President, for the last four or five decades, Israel was seen as a country trying hard to be accepted by its Arab neighbors, and signing peace agreements with them. Nowadays we hear someone like President Bashir of Syria complaining that all Syria's attempts to relaunch peace talks with Israel were not taken seriously. Are you doing something to intervene and maybe to put the two parties together?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, Syria and Israel have got current obligations. Syria has got a current obligation to get out of Lebanon. And again I'll repeat this, because I want it very clear what I mean by "get out of Lebanon." I mean not only troops, but intelligence services, as well. And we expect that to happen. Syria has also got to stop inciting or providing -- allowing people in their country to incite violence against Iraqi citizens and our coalition troops.

Israel has got obligations under the current road map to help the Palestinians. Israel is getting ready to withdraw from Gaza, and we expect the government of Israel -- and want to work with the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to make this withdraw successful. And so there's a lot of obligations that these two countries have right now in order to affect world peace.

'Elections on Schedule, Hizbullah Disarmed, Syria out Completely'

President Bush has insisted anew that Syria should "get out completely" from Lebanon and let the Lebanese people decide their own future in internationally monitored elections on schedule and free from external influence or intimidation.

Bush pledged, then, to drum up global monetary assistance to help "this country back on its feet."

In a rare direct address to the Arab world, Bush also said in an interview broadcast by Beirut's LBCI television network from the White House he wanted the Assad regime to shut down Hizbullah's office in Syria, asserting the Party of God should disarm in Lebanon.

"The United States can join with the rest of the world, like we've done, and say to
Syria, get out -- not only get out with your military forces, but get out with your intelligence services, too; get completely out of Lebanon, so Lebanon can be free and the people can be free," Bush said in the 10-minute interview.

The Syrian withdrawal should include people who "have been embedded in parts of government" to allow Lebanese -- "not another government, not agents of another government" --to decide the country's fate, he said.

Bush's interview, with Arabic subtitles, was aired late Tuesday. A transcript was provided by the White House press office. It grabbed page-one banner-lines in the Beirut.

Naharnet also has an article explaining that:

Jumblat has expressed disenchantment over the small share of the opposition in Mikati's cabinet, saying it should have taken one half, or even more, of the 14 portfolios and complaining that President Lahoud took the lion's portion of the new government.

"The loyalists have won a round," Jumblat said, lamenting the opposition's rejection of his campaign to take part in Mikati's government.

Michael Young of the Daily Star lays out some very sensible suggestions for how Lebanon can move forward in his article "What's next?".

He argues that Lebanon must "arrive at a political system that can simultaneously satisfy demographically majoritarian communities while reassuring communal minorities."

In this context, one can readily dismiss the scheme that proposes imposing simple majority democracy on Lebanon, on the grounds that this is the "fairest" system. It may be, but in a sectarian society like Lebanon's it also tends to be a source of deep divisions, particularly as there are no clear-cut majorities or minorities. That is precisely why most of the sects are willing to pursue the consociational system existing today, where Christians and Muslims are represented evenly in Parliament despite their demographic differences. But it is also worth questioning whether such a system can provide long-term political stability if demographics shift further, whether in favor of Muslims or Christians.

One idea that might be discussed is to have Parliament better reflect communal demographics (which would involve a new census, though on what grounds should be agreed to), but only after setting up a new body where the religious communities are represented evenly. Taif, for example, outlines the election of a Parliament on a nonconfessional basis in parallel to the setting up of a Senate "in which all the religious communities shall be represented," with the task of deciding on "major national issues." A Senate would provide continuity where Parliament could be set up in such a way as to adapt to the social transformations in the society...

Critics will complain that sectarianism and a weak state are what is wrong with Lebanon; in fact they are the only things making it democratic in a region awash with despotism, though a more supple system would allow the Lebanese to move beyond sectarianism if they so desire. With Syria gone, the country must move ahead of the wave of change if it wants to avert the wipeout that will come in the event political rigidity and dogmatism again become the order of the day.

A number of Syrians have also suggested that a bicameral legislative body would work for Syria as well. They argue that having a senate or upper body that would protect minority rights through sectarian apportionment and a lower body elected by Muhafaza or districts with no regard to sectarian representation would be a way to maintain a clear national agenda while still guaranteeing a voice for the different religious communities.

As Young argues for Lebanon, such a solution would also shift power away from the capital city and allow the provinces to look after their own interests in a more equitable fashion.

The Oxford Business Group reports on the Lebanese economy claiming that "there has been a bullish financial response to both the announcement of Mikati's cabinet and to the central bank's issuing of dollar certificates of deposit (CDs)."

The long-term prognosis for the economy is more uncertain, however. Without wanting to come to any rash conclusions, many economists are still in a wait and see mood. The Economist Intelligence Union (EIU) has recently revised its real GDP growth prediction for 2005 from 4.5 to 2%, but has also noted that with the establishment of prolonged political stability there would be a strong potential for growth in 2006.

On a more local level, several sectors that depend on Syrian workers for cheap labour have begun to feel a pinching effect, as there has been an exodus of Syrian nationals over the past two months.

Loss of revenue in Lebanon's growing tourism industry, which brought in around $700m last year, is obviously a continuing concern as the summer season draws nearer. There was only an 18.5% drop in tourists to Lebanon in February, year-on-year, with this figure still above 2003 levels, according to ITP Business Magazine.

News Round Up

Up Date (April 21): A well informed Washington-based Syria-analyst wrote me the following about the "Assad has been Written Off" article quoted below.

About your column of today, I can tell you, privately, that the view of Syria expressed in the news article you cite is not widely shared among US analysts of the ME. It may reflect a political decision by the administration to marginalize Bashar, but the idea that he is viewed as living on borrowed time is not held at the level of working analysts.

US: ASSAD HAS BEEN WRITTEN OFF
Ma'ariv by Ben Caspit
(Thanks to Timur Goksel of AUB for sending this to me. Anyone who thinks the Syrian regime is on the verge of collapse hasn't been in Syria for some time. Interesting for the spin though. There is no organized opposition in Syria. Notions that President Asad is not in the loop seem silly to me. Certainly, he is not the only power in Syria, to which he alludes when he claims not to be a dictator, but that is far from suggesting that he is not the principal power.)