In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [102]
While most coverage focused on Assad meeting Sarkozy in front of the cameras, other shots included his wife at the Pompidou Center and the Louvre, looking glamorous and very much relieved to be back in the limelight.21 Sarkozy was launching his new “Union for the Mediterranean,” which nominally included the countries of the European Union and both Israel and Syria. Following the military parade on the Champs-Élysées, the paparazzi focused on Assad and Olmert as they weaved through the crowd on the VIP grandstand, each trying to avoid publicly shaking the hand of the other. At times, they were a mere five feet apart. At one point, after a brief conversation with the Emir of Qatar, while Olmert spoke with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Assad was left awkwardly standing alone in the grandstand.22
While Assad’s isolation was effectively over, not everyone was happy about his presence in Paris. A group of French veterans accused Syria of supporting the 1983 bombing of the French paratrooper barracks in Beirut—which occurred simultaneously with the attack on the US marine barracks near Beirut’s airport—and said that Assad should not have been invited to France’s national festival celebrating human rights. An opposition Socialist Party leader, François Hollande, said that Assad “tainted” the ceremony, citing Syria as one of the most repressive regimes in the Arab world.23
In Damascus, the mood ironically turned suddenly more authoritarian. No journalism visas were issued for foreigners during the last two weeks of June, which delayed my first post–Syria Today visit to Damascus. From June 22 to 25, Syria allowed IAEA inspectors to visit the site bombed by Israel in September 2007 at Al Kibar.24 While no details were known about the site, satellite photographs showed that the regime had cleared the rubble and constructed a square-shaped building in its place. The inspectors visited the site to take samples, then visited the country’s research reactor outside Damascus, a facility that had been declared to the IAEA in keeping with the country’s safeguards agreement.
The regime intensified its crackdown on the Damascus Declaration as well. Syria’s state security services arrested more than forty activists following a meeting held by the Damascus Declaration on December 1, 2007. The meeting, which attracted more than one hundred sixty Syrians, resulted in the creation of the Damascus Declaration’s “National Council”—the body of opposition and pro-democracy groups that activists had attempted to set up in the spring of 2006, shortly before the outbreak of the Lebanon War. Those elected to the National Council were detained and charged in January 2008 with breaking provisions of Syria’s Civil Code, including “weakening national sentiments,” “spreading false information,” and actions “encouraging conflict among sects.” Included in the group was Dr. Fida al-Hourani, a gynecologist and the woman elected as the National Council’s first president. All were transferred to Syrian prisons, where their lawyers claimed they were tortured. In October 2008, the National Council was collectively sentenced to two and a half years in prison.25
With Assad in Paris and Syria talking to Israel in Ankara, the way now seemed open for Syrian contact with the United States. In the last two weeks of July, the US-based organization Search for Common Ground hosted a group of Syrian pundits and academics in Washington. Tom Dine, a former head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), had formed what he called the US-Syria Working