In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [71]
A week later, the Damascus Declaration’s leadership predictably, but kindly, turned Washington down. “The Damascus Declaration refuses foreign funding, including the $5 million from the US State Department for the Syrian opposition,” read the group’s statement a week later. In a follow-up report by Reuters, Abdel-Azim said that while “support by international powers for democratic change in Syria is welcome,” financing was out of the question. “It means subordination to the funding country,” Abdel-Azim said. “Our project is [for] nationalist, independent democratic change in Syria, not through occupation or economic pressure, as we see the United States doing.”
Making things more complicated, former vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Bayanouni announced in Brussels on March 17 the formation of a National Salvation Front, a group of seventeen exiled opposition parties that called for “democracy” to replace the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Another opposition meeting, sponsored by the Aspen Institute (officially dubbed a “small and informal meeting with oppositionists from Syria” on the sidelines of a conference called Civil Society and Democracy in the Greater Middle East), was held in Doha, Qatar, on March 22. A few days later, as Khaddam reportedly met with the virulently anti-Assad Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt, Bayanouni announced that his organization had in fact had contact with Khaddam since 2003—some two years before the former vice president left office.
“The Damascus Declaration has no value without the Muslim Brotherhood. I am a liberal, and I am responsible for my words,” said Nashar, who was arrested and then released three weeks after my interview. “I saw them in Washington. They have a democratic awareness—perhaps more than the Syrian intelligentsia.” While Abdel-Azim said that the new front had “nothing to do with the Damascus Declaration,” Riad al-Turk, a member of the Syrian Democratic People’s Party, one of the five parties included in Abdel-Azim’s National Democratic Rally, blamed him for dividing the opposition.
“The formation of the [National Salvation] Front is because of the backwardness, slowness, and hesitation of the Damascus Declaration’s leadership,” Turk said in an interview with the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat on March 20. “The basic conflict is now between external opposition representing America and the domestic opposition representing the regime. The hope is that there is a liberation front that will support a general political line calling for democratic change and preserving national independence while not falling into a severe crisis like in Iraq.”
To try and understand where the Damascus Declaration was heading, I visited the home of Michel Kilo for a long interview.4 Greeting me at the door in a brown corduroy suit and slippers, he escorted me into his office: a small desk in the corner of a guest bedroom. Despite the ongoing crackdown on dissidents, Kilo seemed eager to talk.
“The Syrian opposition didn’t leave the country—especially true democrats,” Kilo said. “In the past we had only one block: the regime. Now we have two blocks: the regime and its parties, and the opposition and its parties.”
When I asked Kilo why he was picking a time when the regime was under pressure to launch the declaration, his answers were surprisingly nationalistic.
“We are not calling for changing the regime or a revolution—we are calling on reform,” Kilo said. “It’s not right to ask for foreign assistance. We are not part of the American pressures. We are not toys in the West’s hands. We will make a democratic state in this country no matter the cost.”
I then asked Kilo if the regime had asked the opposition what they would like to see in a political parties law.
“For five and a half years, Abdel Halim Khaddam said that the parties law was coming after one month. Nothing happened,” Kilo