In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [47]
But as the conference approached, things didn’t look good. In presummit working committees, those advocating substantial changes to the party—concerning democracy or socialism—were marginalized and their ideas shunned. This especially concerned those wanting to abolish Article 8 of the constitution. The buds of the Jasmine Revolution seemed to have withered before bloom.
When my mobile phone rang at 6:40 AM on June 6, I awoke with the realization that the day had finally arrived—the opening of the Tenth Party Conference of the Syrian Baath Party regional command.
“We are just waiting around outside the Ministry of Information for our badges,” Hugh told me in an exasperated voice. “There is no schedule, and no one knows if we will have access to the conference center. It’s chaos.”
I was hardly surprised. In fact, I had purposely ignored the Ministry of Information’s instructions to arrive in front of Dar al-Baath, the ministry building, before boarding buses out to the conference. It was not out of laziness but rather based on my experience covering official Syrian events. About a month before, for example, I attended the official visit of Turkish president Ahmet Necdet Sezer to Syria. Arriving at 8 AM as instructed and in a full suit, I waited with the rest of Syria’s press corps for two hours for Ministry of Information officials to show up. When they finally arrived, we were simply told a bus would take us to the presidential palace for the arrival ceremony. No schedule was available. We were also told we would be unable to leave the palace until the talks were over. I spent the next nine hours of my life sitting in the hot sun, getting a fabulous tan from the neck up. The wait was punctuated only by a brief press conference with the two leaders; they did not allow questions to be asked.
The wake-up call on June 6, and its message, would characterize my attempts to understand the Baath Party conference, its decisions, and the potential for an authoritarian party to reform itself under increasing foreign pressure.
Returning from my morning workout at the Unity Club, a Baathist sports complex in Damascus, I received another call from Hugh at 8:30 AM.
“There are no badges after all,” Hugh said. “We are now sitting on buses that are supposedly going to take us to the conference’s media center. The ministry people are not even sure we will have access to the center for Bashar’s opening speech. It’s a pretty grim scene.”
I knew from Hugh’s words and subsequent phone calls from a host of other foreign journalists who had turned up in Damascus for the conference that the regime did not want the conference and its proceedings to be understood by the Syrian or international community. It was an old trick that the regime had pulled time and time again: allow journalists to come into the country, greet them kindly at the Ministry of Information, and send them back to their five-star hotels without any clue about the basics—most notably anything resembling a schedule. That’s exactly what happened. Finishing my morning coffee, I began to receive more telephone calls from correspondents who had freshly arrived in the country. Like Hugh, they had made the journey out to the conference center with the hope of attending and listening in on President Assad’s remarks. Instead, they were herded into a “media center” about two kilometers away—the new Damascus Exhibition Center. The “center” was in fact a room with some chairs and three computers hooked up to a 128K ADSL Internet connection with stand-alone printers. A number of TVs broadcasting Syrian programs were blaring. No food, water, coffee, or tea was available. All this was somehow supposed to sustain about three hundred Arab and foreign correspondents for four days.
When word got out that only cameramen