In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [69]
“It’s OK,” he said, smiling at me. “Please, this way.”
He made a single motion with his hand, like Moses parting the Red Sea, and the crowd quickly obeyed. We were escorted to the side, and the mob turned its attention toward its next victim.
We decided to visit the nearby office of Damascus Declaration spokesman Hassan Abdel-Azim. It was bustling with activity, packed full of Damascus Declaration members, whom I had interviewed over the last two months; they were all sipping cups of strong tea to calm their nerves. I hardly recognized Abdel-Azim, despite the fact that I had interviewed him recently.
“I can’t see you very well. They smashed my glasses,” Abdel-Azim said, shaking my hand. “They weren’t students who beat us; they were just parrots. They don’t even know what our declaration stands for.”
After the declaration’s announcement the previous October, members of the Syrian opposition slowly came onboard as the Assad regime weathered the heavy political storm of the Hariri investigation. External international pressure, combined with the regime’s lack of a political-reform plan, had old foes putting differences aside and overcoming deep-rooted suspicions.
“If you look at the names who signed the Damascus Declaration, all but one is a Sunni Muslim,” said Fateh Jammous, leader of the Communist Labor Party and an Alawite—the same sect from which the Syrian leadership hails—who signed in the days following the declaration’s announcement. “We don’t accuse them of being sectarian, but we objected at first to the declaration’s references to Islam…. The Syrian bureaucracy is corrupted and cannot be reformed. We don’t need slow reform—we need a rescue operation.”
It was the declaration’s appeal to moderate Islamists in an increasingly Islamized environment that seemed to be giving it staying power. “We have liberal Islamists, political Islamists, and fundamentalist Islamists in Syria,” said Samir Nashar, the spokesperson for the Syrian Free National Party and a member of Syria’s Committee for the Revival of Civil Society. “The difference between them is difficult to distinguish. We need to gather the first two together, as the fundamentalists cannot live with others. They see only in terms of black and white, believers and apostates.”
And with bloodshed in neighboring Iraq filling TV news reports every day, a more liberal-based opposition lacked major appeal. “We tried to organize a parallel liberal rally alongside the Damascus Declaration in November and December,” said the Assyrian Democratic Organization’s Bashir Ishaq Saadi, who finally signed the declaration in February 2006. “Liberal parties in Syria are now very weak. Some of the Kurdish parties were demanding ‘self-determination’ as well. We couldn’t support that.”
After lying low for a few months as the Hariri investigation blew over and the Assad regime vented its fury over former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam’s dramatic “defection” to the opposition on December 30, the declaration’s leadership began to organize. On January 18, a twenty-member transitional committee was formed, including thirteen domestic and seven exiled opposition groups. On January 29 and 30, Samir Nashar and other members of the transitional committee attended a Syrian opposition conference in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Syrian National Council in the United States and the Syrian Democratic Assembly of Canada. Farid Ghadry, the head of the Bush-administration-supported Reform Party of Syria (RPS), was not invited. Receiving foreign funding emerged as a fault line in the opposition. The day following the conference, the Damascus Declaration issued its first follow-up statement, which rejected foreign pressure on Syria, declared Syria to be part of the Arab nation, and clarified that the declaration’s references to Islam were not limited to Sunni interpretation.
“More people signed after that,” Abdel-Azim said. “The demands came from declaration signatories. They said to be silent