In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [54]
In fact, just as the final conclusions of the conference were finally published in the state daily newspapers five days after the event, the president appointed lead reformer and state planning commission chief Abdullah Dardari as deputy prime minister for economic affairs. A day later, he quietly removed Bahjat Suleiman, head of the powerful general security department. While the Baath Party conference might have been a nonevent itself, something was happening in the darkness behind the scenes of Syrian politics. Perhaps “flexibility and steadfastness” was less a slogan for the conference and more a coded reference to the president’s quiet efforts to wrestle greater control of the regime from the old guard.
Disappointed that the Baath Party conference failed to produce any reforms, the Syrian opposition continued work on the Damascus Declaration. In the summer and early autumn of 2005, negotiations began with Syria’s eight Kurdish parties and the tribal-based Future Party led by Sheikh Nawaf al-Bashir, as well as some of Syria’s most prominent independent opposition figures, including the outspoken Riad Seif, who was in prison at that point.
“Hassan [Abdel-Azim] came to visit in September,” Seif told me in a March 2006 interview. “He is my lawyer, and it was easy for him to see me. We needed to unite the opposition, and he gave me a full picture of the Damascus Declaration. I accepted immediately.”
On October 5 and 6, negotiations with the last group that was holding out on signing the declaration—the ethnically based Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO)—foundered on the declaration’s references to Islam as the “religion and ideology of the majority” and its mention of the Kurds as the only ethnic “issue” in Syria.
“We were convinced that they mentioned Islam in the document simply to attract Islamists,” said Bashir Ishaq Saadi, secretary-general of the ADO, told me in a February 2006 interview. “Second, we said, ‘Hey, you mentioned Kurdish rights. What about Assyrians?’”
Time was running out, however. In neighboring Lebanon, Detlev Mehlis, the chief UN investigator into the Hariri assassination, was due to give his first report on October 19. Sources quoted in the Lebanese press said the investigation was pointing fingers of blame toward Damascus. “We wanted to announce the declaration before the Mehlis report,” Samir Nashar said. “We didn’t want people to say we were taking advantage.”
To avoid the same kind of leaks that were undermining Mehlis’s investigation, Abdel-Azim kept the only signed copy of the declaration in his pocket. In the end, five parties and eight opposition figures came onboard.13 On October 16, Abdel-Azim held a small press conference in his office to announce the declaration.
“Mukhabarat [intelligence services] showed up,” said Abdel-Azim. “I tried to call the Ministry of Information, but the minister was not in. We had invited the satellite TV channels to cover the event. So I went upstairs and announced it to the world.”
Two hours after the declaration’s announcement, the Muslim Brotherhood—which had been party to the negotiations from the beginning—became the first to sign on to the accord. While Abdel-Azim was unclear with me as to motive, a number of opposition figures told me that he had arranged the timing of the Muslim Brotherhood’s signature so that the Syrian authorities could not say the declaration was spawned by the Brotherhood and therefore subject to the state’s strict ban on the organization.
“Apparently the report [into Hariri’s murder] is going to name names,” my flatmate, Katherine Zoepf, said over coffee on the morning of October 20. Katherine was then in Damascus as a freelance