In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [27]
After Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000, and the state openly recognized its development problems (which it hadn’t under Hafez al-Assad), NGOs remained politically sensitive. During the Damascus Spring, a number of “discussion forums” tried to register under the associations law as “advocacy NGOs” and were rejected. Operational NGOs, which are associations dedicated to addressing societal problems, were kept in limbo by the state’s unwillingness to reform the associations law—modern NGOs simply didn’t exist when the law was passed in the 1950s, so their applications could not even be accepted. Some operated illegally but were tolerated by the government because they were run by known regime figures.
It was in this legal limbo that Asma al-Assad began building a network of NGOs under official patronage. Because they were under regime control, they were permitted to register as charities under the associations law, even though their activities transcended the boundaries of what traditional charities do. Perhaps the best example was FIRDOS’s rural microfinance project. In villages in which FIRDOS operated, Syrians applied for loans to buy anything to start a business. Some bought cows to produce milk and cheese; others bought computers to open Internet cafés. However, there was a catch: because establishing a microbusiness is risky, and many are therefore bound to fail, microfinance institutions in other countries were forced to charge a small rate of interest to ensure their program’s sustainability. Since FIRDOS was registered as a charity, however, it could not charge interest on the loans.
When I inquired about this to the FIRDOS administration, I was told that it wasn’t an issue, because not a single Syrian borrower had defaulted on a loan. In times of crisis—if the cow died or a power surge knocked out a computer—other program beneficiaries would take up a collection to repay the loan. The FIRDOS administrators chalked this up to the integrity of rural Syrians. Others said that 100-percent repayment rates were only ever seen in the realm of loan-sharking.
After returning to Damascus, I edited FIRDOS’s quarterly newsletter. The first to work on the newsletter was Ammar Abdulhamid—the same writer I had contracted to write the politics section of OBG’s Syria reports. With his wife, Ammar also set up another business, Dar Emar, in the MAWRED incubator. To meet the incubator’s requirements, Dar Emar was established in his wife’s name. Ammar’s project—Tharwa, the Arabic word for “wealth”—sought to talk about diversity in the Arab world. After a bit of editing, I sent the final version of the newsletter, using the FIRDOS mailbag, to the palace for final approval, along with a letter outlining my work and a few ideas I had about how to improve the way FIRDOS communicated with the outside world.
With things moving ahead at FIRDOS, the Israeli strike and looming US sanctions were increasingly an afterthought. The first lady seemed committed to reform in Syria, and her NGOs, which were just getting off the ground, were everything the West wanted to see in Syria. Nevertheless, a lingering sense of stasis, which I couldn’t explain, permeated FIRDOS’s operations. Everyone seemed to be waiting on approval from the palace for whatever project they were working on—but the word was not coming. So, as things slowed down, I turned my attention to Syria Today.
As I worked for the first lady, and MAWRED and its business incubator would soon be officially opened, we had all the political cover we needed to produce