In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [11]
“Come on over,” he said. “I have nothing on my plate this afternoon.”
When I showed up around 2 PM, the SEBC receptionist greeted me with a smile and asked me to take a seat. Unlike the décor of the US embassy, the SEBC’s waiting room was all about the future. Full-sized posters advertising books on such things as starting a business and quality-control measures dotted the room’s stuccoed walls. Business books and literature filled a corner cabinet behind the front door. In the right-hand corner was the center’s logo, complete with European Union (EU) and Syrian flags side by side in seeming harmony.
Five minutes later, the reception area came alive as the building’s staff, leather briefcases in hand, headed home for the day. Male staff sported dark, well-fitted suits; bright, wide cravats; and meticulously polished shoes. The women wore skirts, white blouses, and high heels. All spoke Arabic with a Levantine accent, which was far different from the Egyptian I had learned in Cairo. Their physical features looked hardly Arab at all, however. Most, if not all, had pearly white skin, mousy or blond hair, and piercing blue or dark-green eyes. I guessed that they were Alawites or other minorities.
Alf greeted me with a warm handshake in the lobby ten minutes later and escorted me up to his office. The top of his desk contained a penholder, nameplate, and a simple notebook. As I took a seat, I noticed the walls were covered with posters similar to the ones in the reception.
With his dark-blue silk suit and black lace-up shoes, Alf seemed the quintessential well-paid European bureaucrat. After only a few minutes into the conversation, however, I realized he took his job very seriously. He had spent a lot of time trying to come to grips with Syria’s festering economic problems and the critical decisions now facing the regime. Alf explained that the regime’s battle with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s had had a deep impact on the country’s demographics and economy. In the three decades following independence in 1946, the Syrian government encouraged couples to have large families, based on the idea that Syria had the resources to provide for a much larger population. By 1975, population growth rates reached 5 percent—one of the highest in the world at that time. The regime’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982 was so fearsome that many Syrians were forced to stay at home, causing a decade-long increase in birthrates. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Syria was among the top twenty fastest-growing populations in the world.
After the regime crushed the Brotherhood insurrection, Assad fell ill from exhaustion and was hospitalized. It was then that his brother, Rifaat, commander of the “special companies” brigades that had ruthlessly battled the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, attempted to stage a coup d’état. Eventually Rifaat lost and was forced into exile, but it was costly; around the same time, nearly all of Syria’s foreign currency reserves disappeared from the Central Bank, plunging the country into a crisis.9
As the smoke cleared and the regime consolidated its hold on power, the regime realized the scale of the population “time bomb” and quickly introduced measures to bring fertility rates down. To get more hard currency back into the country, Syria instituted a draconian foreign-exchange policy and banned nearly all imports, including even tissues and toilet paper. The regime also concentrated on boosting oil production, the revenues of which directly filled the state’s coffers. It invited energy giants Shell and Total to develop Syria’s light-oil production along the Euphrates River. By 1996, oil production topped six hundred thousand barrels per day, providing the state with more than enough money to fund the budget and accumulate billions of dollars in hard currency revenues. The state felt so confident of its economic position that between 1997 and 2000, parliament did not even bother to pass a state budget. As President Assad fell ill, however, and key decisions were deferred, the Syrian economy contracted