Syria-1 (and Lebanon)

(Written Sunday) This morning we visited the
1,300-year-old Omayyad Mosque. We saw a 1,000-year-old Islamic madrasa
(school) and a stunning 250-year-old palace and nearby khan (a
merchant’s lodging- and meeting-house). We walked along the Street
Called Straight. I shopped a little in the broad, cavernous Souq al-Hamidieh,
and Bill took some photos… Having thus reimmersed ourselves in the busy rhythms
of Damascus’s Old City, a couple of taxi rides and a quick change of clothes
later we were sitting with Syria’s Minister of Expatriate Affairs, the feminist
former litterateuse Bouthaina Shaaban.

It was a short, informal discussion. Dr. Shaaban is going to Geneva
tomorrow to take part in a meeting on “women and peace”, but she slotted
us into her schedule at the last minute. I last saw her– even more
briefly– when I was in Damascus in December 2002. This time, I asked how
the atmosphere had been in Damascus back in May or June of last year when
the Americans, fresh from having vanquished Saddam’s regime in Iraq, was
making very belligerent noises about Syria. “We were never afraid,”
she said. “What could we do? We are are here, and we’ll stay
here.”

She said she thought Foreign Minister Farouq Shara would be going to the
“summit” on Iraqi reconstruction that starts tomorrow in Sharm al-Shaikh,
Egypt. She said she hoped the summit could help to find a way to make
elections happen in Iraq, and that Iraq’s neighboring states– all of whom
will be represented at the meeting– could play a role in that…

Moving briefly to a consideration of the Palestinian-Israeli issue, she said
that the Arab states are all still quite committed to the “Beirut Declaration”
of March 2002, in which they promised that they would all make a full peace
with Israel and normalize their relations with it, in return for a full Israeli
withdrawal to the lines of before the 1967 Mideast war. However, all
three of us in the room knew full well, I think, that the League of Arab
States has never mounted any effective campaign to implement this plan, whether
by persuading Israel and its supporters of its benefits or by using any other
means…

Dr. Shaaban is a friendly, engaging woman, in maybe her late forties, who
talked with us in an informal and low-key way amongst the brocaded formality
of her ministry’s nearly brand-new building. Getting to the building had
been an interesting, fairly eye-opening experience in itself…

Yesterday, as we drove into Damascus from the border we took a road that
was new to me, since I hadn’t made the trip here from Beirut by car since
1981. Shortly before the new highway swooped over the last set of hills
into the city, we suddenly saw huge vistas of new and almost-new high-rises
clumped on a ring of hillsides to our left. I think her ministry building
was probably one of those buildings. Today, when we got a taxi from
the hotel and asked the driver to take us to the Expatriates’ Ministry, he
took us south and west over one of the shoulders of Mount Kassioun, and we
saw the new areas of high-rises from, effectively, the opposite direction…
And they went on and on and on: some looking like decent middle-class
housing, and some like much fancier condos for upper-middle-class families.
Huge, huge amounts of investment there over the past 10-12 years.

Last night, when we sat in the restaurant up near the top of Kassioun and
looked down at the (main part of the) city, our host told us that after the
Gulf War of 1991– to which Syria contributed a few troops that fought on
the same side as the Saudis, the other Gulf Arab states, and the Americans–
relations between Syria and most Gulf states improved very markedly. One
result of that was that large numbers of Syrians were able to work in Saudi
Arabia and the other Gulf countries. Some combnation of those expats’
remittances and investment in Syria by Gulf nationals no doubt accounts for
a significant part of the economic growth the country has experienced over
the past decade.

Right down the road from our hotel, Prince Al-Waleed ibn Talal, the Saudi
prince whose donation of $10 million to New York City after 9/11/2001 Rudy
Giuliani notably (and, I would say, in an unbelievably racist way) turned
down, is building a gargantuan great complex that will be the Four Seasons
Hotel. He’s also building another one, on prime seaside real estate,
in the heart of the Beirut downtown.

* * *

Riding in the car from Beirut yesterday, I was reading the Beirut daily An-Nahar,
which had a glaring, page-one lead reporting on an anti-Syrian demonstration
held in Beirut on Friday, in connection with the Independence Day celebrations
there. I know I haven’t written much (or perhaps, even, anything) here
yet about the whole tangled question of Syrian-Lebanese relations, which
have become something of an international cause célèbre
since the US and France– acting together!– pushed a resolution through
the Security Council calling on Syria to withdraw the troops it still has
in Lebanon and to cease intervening in Lebanon’s internal affairs.

Well, coming from the US, a power that has massively “intervened” in the
internal affairs of scores of countries around the globe, including of course
Iraq, I always thought that resolution, number 1559, was the absolute height
of hypocrisy… But it’s become a big factor in Lebanese internal affairs
since it was passed at, I think, the beginning of September. Some Lebanese
Christians became empowered by it to step up their long-simmering campaign
to get Syria out of their country completely.

Actually, the large influence that Syria has over Lebanon’s internal affairs
is resented within Lebanon by many other Lebanese people, in addition to
some– though not all– the Christians there. The kinds of grievances
Lebanese people mention include accusations that Syria, and especially, well-connected
Syrian government officials, have been profiting from their involvement with
key Lebanese economic institutions including Beirut’s port, and that poorly
paid Syrian workers have been flooding the labor market in Lebanon. (“One
million Syrian laborers,” is the figure most commonly heard, though some
Lebanese say that it’s probably an exaggeration.)

For some Christian Lebanese, these quite understandable grievances are overlaid
with a thick coating of pure, unadulterated hate-talk of a kind that they’re
only too happy to spout whenever they’re speaking with a westerner. This
hate-talk is directed almost equally against “Muslims”, and against “Arabs”.
(The kind of “Christian” Lebanese who engage in this hate-talk definitely
don’t think of themselves as Arabs, though to any outsider and by just about
any objective ethnographic consideration they would seem to be so.)

I have to say, when I hear people engaging in such hate-talk– and especially
under circumstances where they assume that, simply because you’re a westerner
you’re going to agree with all their diatribes against the “dirty”, “uneducated”,
etc etc Arabs and Muslims– something inside me curls up and just wants to
die. Why do they assume I share their racist inclinations? How
can I even start to challenge some of their grotesque and hate-filled accusations?

I have a deeper, underlying fear as well. Back in the 1970s, when I
was covering the civil war in Lebanon, the areas held by the extremist “Christian”
militias were completely open to, indeed dominated by, direct genocidal
incitement. Throughout East Beirut, the walls had the stenciled-on
slogan “It’s the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian”. Ala kul
lubnani in yuqtil filastiniyan. I never saw anyone trying to cover
those slogans over or otherwise erase them: they loomed over the public streets
there for years.

And I saw, counted, smelled, and examined the putrifying phsyical remains
of a good number of the thousands of Palestinians– women, children, men,
old people– who were killed in the enactment of that openly genocidal campaign.

I should say that for the 7 years I lived in Beirut back then, I never saw
any signs of a genocidal incitement being mounted against the Christians
by the Palestinians or Muslims. In predominantly Muslim West Beirut,
where I lived, fully one-third of the residents including my husband at the
time were Christian. Several of the leaders of the Palestinian and
leftist organizations involved in the civil war were themselves Christian.
One entire Lebanese party in their coalition, the Syrian Social National
Party, was made up almost entirely of (Orthodox) Christians… Yes,
“excesses” were committed by the Muslim-leftist-Palestinian side in that
phase of the civil war. As in any civil war. But there were never
any open, mass campaigns of anti-Christian incitement. How could there
be when George Habash, Naef Hawatmeh, George Hawi, Abdullah Saadeh, and any
number of other prominent leaders on that side were openly identified as
Christians? As a result, the number of Christian civilians killed in inter-communal
massacres during the war was far, far lower than the number of Palestinian
or Lebanese Muslims killed in that dreadful way.

… So this time, coming back to Beirut, every time I heard the hate-talk
coming from so-called “Christians”. I was on my guard. I have seen
where that kind of talk can lead in Lebanon.

But still, it’s necessary to disaggregate my fears about potentially genocidal
hate-talk from the fact that lots of people inside Lebanon (and not just
the hate-talkers) are strongly opposed to Syria’s role inside the country.
One is my old friend Walid Jumblatt, hereditary head of the country’s
Druze community. Walid’s father, Kamal Bey Jumblatt, was killed by
the Syrians in 1977. In late September this year, Walid’s close political
ally Marwan Hamadeh was almost killed by a car-bomb near the Beirut corniche
that just about everyone in Lebanon thought had been planted by the Syrians.

We spent a great evening with Walid early on in our time in Beirut… I’ll
write more about that later, probably. But just let me say here that
he spoke articulately and with great passion about his opposition both
to the Syrian role inside Lebanon and to the US role in Iraq.
Unlike many of the other Lebanese who are opposed to Syria’s role inside
their country– but who also cheer on the US role in Iraq.

Yes, Lebanon was always a very complicated country, and teasing apart people’s
different threads of interest and ideology there is always a fine, and ultimately
still very imprecise, art.

* * *

Well, that was Lebanon. Now I’m in Syria. Where, guess what,
the most commonly heard evaluation of the Syrian role in Lebanon is very
different from what you hear in many parts of Beirut,…

Syria’s official discourse and apparently many of its people see their country’s
lengthy presence in Lebanon as playing a stabilizing role there. The
Syrians were perhaps the original authors of the argument that, “If we pull
out our troops from that othetr country, then only civil war will ensue.”
In addition, they see resolution 1559 as an unfair attack on them on
behalf of the members of the UN Security Council– and as part of a concerted
US campaign to weaken and destabilize Syria from every direction and with
whatever means possible. I think what they’ve been particularly upset
about has been France’s role in spearheading the push for the resolution.
France! Which they had seen as ready to play a counter-US “balancing
role” in world affairs, and which had played that role in Lebanon and Syria
throughout much of the 1990s… How could France as well as the US
so suddenly turn against them?

Actually, I don’t think the Syrians have too, too much to worry about in
terms of a robust, anti-Syrian movement gaining ground inside Lebanon within
the near future. I told you that An-Nahar (which is owned by
Marwan Hamadeh’s brother-in-law Ghassan Toueini) featured Friday’s long-planned
anti-Syrian demonstrations very prominently on its front page yesterday…
They published a screeching headline and a huge photo of it. But the photo
honestly didn’t seem to have more than about 1,200 people in it. Hizbullah,
a Lebanese party that is an ally of Syria’s inside Lebanon, could pull 10
times that number of people onto the streets in less than half an hour if
they wanted to. Plus, Hizbullah has a broad and hugely disciplined
cadre of experienced fighters backed up by an even larger cadre of very well-organized
political operatives.

There is nothing else like Hizbullah’s raw, mass-based political power anywhere
else in Lebanon. Certainly not on the Christian-extremist side, where
factionalism and internecine blood feuds have pulled apart most of the once-feared
“Lebanese Forces” coalition.

In addition, several of the experienced Lebanon-watchers with whom I’ve talked
over the past 6 weeks judged that, though intercommunal and anti-Syrian tensions
might run high in the country, basically nearly everyone in Lebanon now understands
the unbearable costs that civil war imposes on a society, so it would
be hard for anyone to mobilize a sufficient number of his neighbors into
going down that road again.

I think this is good news. (If true, it means that my worries that
the kind of open hate-talk I heard from some “Christian” Lebanon might
get the “chance” to be enacted might not,
actually, be fulfilled in the near future. It also means that the Syrians’
argument that they have to stay in Lebanon to prevent such an outburst has
much less force… )

* * *

Anyway, enough for now about Lebanon. What about Syria? I’ll
write more about that later…