In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [30]
The mid-January deadline came and went without a single writer’s achieving it. After a few more days of haranguing Ammar, he presented me with an Arabic text by a Syrian writer on civil society and NGOs in Syria. It had no discernable argument, covered none of the NGOs under the first lady, and gave no references or quotes to support its points. The only article that I had in hand was my own on Syrian banking and a few news notes.
So I began work on the NGO article myself from scratch, interviewing people from FIRDOS and some of the other NGOs under the first lady’s patronage. Getting information was like pulling teeth, but what I found was interesting and helped me understand the layout of the “limbo land” in which I was working.
Since marrying Bashar, the first lady had quietly built a network of what are internationally referred to as operational NGOs: bodies dedicated to the design and implementation of development projects. These NGOs mirrored the Baath Party’s “popular unions,” organizations formed in the 1960s when Syria’s civil-society associations and other clubs were consolidated under the Baathists’ control. Legally, Asma’s charities were the same as the hundreds of charities that had sprung up since Hafez al-Assad passed a law in 1974 that gave these organizations tax-exempt status. They were dedicated to specific causes: FIRDOS addressed rural poverty; MAWRED, women; the Syrian Young Entrepreneurs Association (SYEA), entrepreneurialism; Qawz Qaza (“rainbow” in Arabic), abused children; and AMAL, the disabled. As charities, they officially steered clear of advocacy activities such as the defense or promotion of a specific cause in order to influence public policy, which is the very activity many of the discussion forums sought to do when they tried to register under the associations law during the Damascus Spring. However, because these NGOs were “from the first lady,” all those that I interviewed actively lobbied the Syrian government on their field of expertise. As a result, Syrians and the international community now had two ways to lobby the Syrian government to reform: through the state or through Asma’s NGOs.
After a month of writing, working with external copyeditors in Beirut, and traveling to Turkey for design-layout discussions, we printed our sample edition (legally in Syria called “zero edition”) in Beirut in the first week of March 2004. I illegally smuggled a hundred or so copies in my suitcases over the Lebanese frontier to our office in Syria, where I passed them out to everyone at MAWRED and FIRDOS. I sent thirty copies to the palace through the FIRDOS mail system; I included a letter from Leila and me to Mrs. Assad, which thanked her for her quiet support for our project. I also asked her if the NGO would like to import the magazine from Lebanon.
A few days passed, and I didn’t hear back from the palace. So I called the first lady’s secretary, Lina Kinaye, to see if she had received the copies I had sent. She confirmed that they had arrived and said that I should send thirty more, which I immediately did. When three days passed and I didn’t hear from the palace, I called Rola. I had been in touch with her about once a week during her absence to give her updates on the magazine’s progress. Each time she was encouraging and asked lots of questions on the publication date and marketing plan. During this call, however, I asked most of the questions. She broke it to me a few minutes into the conversation: the first lady didn’t want to help to import the publication into the country. In an instant, I reviewed the magazine’s contents in my mind. I had read and reread the text countless times with an eye to avoid the only red lines I knew: criticism of the president and his family or anything that promoted sectarianism. Nothing came to mind, but we had been very critical of the Syrian government’s population policy as well as the government’s unwillingness to reform. I then asked Rola if there was something specific we could remove and gain the first lady’s support. “No, it’s not