In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [4]
Bashar’s coming to power was a story that I had followed from afar. After Assad’s acceptance speech, scores of “discussion groups” formed throughout the country to address a whole host of Syria’s political and social problems. At first, the state tolerated the forums—after all, many forum organizers believed that they were carrying out the discussions in Bashar’s name. But as the discussions got increasingly critical of the regime, it struck back. A group of officials who had been close to Bashar’s father—known as the “old guard” and led by vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam—were said to have advised the president to close the groups. Forum participants who were critical of regime corruption were imprisoned. While some discussion groups continued to function, Leila said that most, if not all, Syrians had no idea what was going on.
As we finished our appetizers, Leila turned the subject of the conversation to her family. By her style of dress, I thought Leila was Christian, as followers in the Arab world were not subject to Islam’s conservative dress codes. In fact, Leila was Sunni—the daughter of Hassan Hourani, an agricultural engineer from the Houran region, which is south of Damascus. After joining the Baath Party in the late 1950s, Hassan was sent on a United Nations (UN) scholarship to France to study desertification—the loss of arable land to the desert, which was damaging Syria’s agricultural production. After returning to the Houran in the mid-1960s, Hassan married Samia, an English teacher from a nearby village. The couple moved to Damascus in 1970, where Leila was born six years later.
The Baath Party was something I had only really read about. Based on the Arabic word for “renaissance,” Baathism was a secular ideology that called for the unification of the Arab world into one country as the quickest way to solve its problems—most notably liberation from Israel, created from the former British Mandate of Palestine, whose flag the party even adopted as its own. Baathism functioned in another way on Syria’s domestic scene: as a vehicle for minority rule over Syria’s majority Sunni Muslim population. In the 1950s, Alawites—members of an obscure offshoot of Shiite Islam—filled the ranks of Syria’s Baath Party and the army’s officer corps. When the Baath seized power in a military coup in March 1963, Syria’s Christian, Circassian, Druze, Ismaili and Shiite minorities, amongst others, saw the Baath as a path to freedom and a means to power. Under four hundred years of Ottoman rule, Syria’s majority Sunni population had set the rules of the game, keeping minorities under the yoke. The Baath’s secularism provided an ideological bulwark against traditional Islam.
The “Renaissance Party” was vulnerable to Syria’s most virulent political disease, however: its penchant for military coups. Between independence in 1946 and 1970, various juntas and factions had overthrown or changed the government no less than seventeen times—making it one of the world’s most unstable political entities.
One man figured out how to stop it. In November 1970, defense minister Hafez al-Assad seized power in a bloodless coup—much like his predecessors. But instead of relying on the Baath’s minority base, Leila said, Assad reached out to two key constituencies of Syria’s Sunni population that didn’t like each other. The first was Damascus’s historically powerful trading families. As merchants on the Western terminus of the Silk Road,