In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [43]
After Hezbollah’s massive March 8 demonstration in Beirut, the Syrian authorities organized a demonstration the following day. Thousands of students and public-sector workers left work early and were gathered along the Mezze autostrade, part of Damascus’s largest modern suburb, for a two-kilometer walk to nearby Malki—the site of President Assad’s personal residence, the US embassy, and the diplomatic headquarters of many other Western countries. The area is named after Colonel Adnan Malki, the deputy chief of staff and Baath Party member who was assassinated in 1955 by a sergeant loyal to the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP)—a fascistlike party advocating the creation of “Greater Syria,” a political and cultural union of what is today Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Cyprus. Following Malki’s murder, SSNP leaders were subsequently either imprisoned or had to flee the country, but the party’s political influence in the state continued.
This was not the first rally that I had ever witnessed in Syria, but it certainly was the largest. As I walked to the rally, I could hear music and drums up to half a kilometer away. Rounding the first corner onto the Mezze autostrade, I immediately ran into a middle-class Syrian family in modern dress with signs reading no usa in English dangling around their necks. As I approached the family, their eyes widened in shock. I stopped two feet in front of them and, with an expressionless face, blurted out, “I’m American. I’m angry!”
The father instantly extended me his hand as his children looked clearly frightened. “We don’t have anything against the American people, only against the government. Please, don’t take it personally!” he said, quite nervously.
I couldn’t hold a straight face for more than a second, and I laughed a little as I shook his hand. “But your sign makes it look like you are against the whole United States. What are you protesting against?”
“Bush meddling in our affairs,” he said. He shook my hand and walked off.
Until that moment, I’d thought the march was to support pro-Syrian Lebanese “loyalists” such as president Émile Lahoud, prime minister Omar Karami, parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri, and, last but not least, Hezbollah. After all, I thought, this was all about Hariri’s assassination, and the Lebanese opposition’s attacks on Syria’s role in Lebanon.
Instead, the March 9 rally was a march against “foreign interference.” As far as the eye could see, protestors marched with signs in English reading NO FOREIGN INTERFERENCE, BOSH [sic]; LEAVE US ALONE; and MR. BUSH, WE DON’T NEED YOUR BLOOD DEMOCRACY. Other Syrian youths carried posters of Bashar al-Assad.
But even to a casual observer, the protests screamed of farce. Most protestors seemed to be just enjoying an afternoon off from work or school. Adding flare to the mob were hundreds of employees of the duty-free company Ramak and the mobile-phone operator Syriatel, both of which are owned by the president’s cousin Rami Makhlouf, all dressed in T-shirts with the companies’ respective logos. TV cameramen standing in the buckets of boom trucks had to focus on small parts of the crowd to make it seem as if the autostrade was filled with people. When I asked one of the protestors carrying a poster denouncing Bush what his sign said, he looked at me blankly and said, “By God, I don’t even know.”
Unexpectedly, there wasn’t a Baathist flag in sight. Those of us covering the rally thought it was in response to the rallies in neighboring Lebanon, where protesters left their