Category: Syria

Last November, Mr.
Mouallem headed a small Syrian delegation that, at the invitation of
the Iraqi government, made a short visit to Baghdad.  Then in
January, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani made a multi-day state visit to
Damascus– the first time an Iraqi leader had visited Syria for nearly
30 years.  (So long as there was a Baath Party government in Iraq
the two Baath Party leaderships, there and in Syria, pursued a very
harsh competition with each other, which seemed to be exacerbated by
the fact that each claimed to be the ‘authentic’ successor to the
mantle of the Baathist version of pan-Arabism.  During that
period, Mr. Talabani and many, many other members of what were then
opposition movements much hunted and oppressed by the Saddam Hussein
regime, had made their homes in Damascus.)

In Damascus on Wednesday, Mouallem expressed his concern about the
medical crisis that two days earlier had sent Talabani rushing to Amman
for urgent medical treatment.  “I certainly wish him a speedy and
full recovery,” Mouallem said, describing Talabani as “an important
leader.”

Mouallem made a number of other significant statements about Iraq, in
addition to the ones reported here on JWN
earlier.  As noted there, he did decline to specify the total
length of the timetable for the total US withdrawal from Iraq that he
said Syria sought.  He said instead that that timetable should be
determined primarily by the length of time it would take to rebuild the
Iraqi national forces on a truly nationalist basis– “and we should
make this the timetable.”

He said that the challenge of social and political reconstruction in
Iraq could not be compared with any other cases–

I asked Mouallem how he saw the continuing political crisis in another
key neighboring country, Lebanon.  He said,

The special investigation team charged with investigating the February
2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri has
been continuing its work.  Earlier reports from the team have
indicated– though not conclusively– some official Syrian role in the
killing. How did Mouallem see the prospects regarding this team’s upcoming
reports?

I asked him about the role the French government has played since the
summer of 2004 regarding the Lebanese issue, and Syria’s involvement in
Lebanon.  “It is not France’s role as such, but President Chirac’s
policy that concerns us,” he said.  “That policy seems negative to
us in Syria.  Maybe it stemmed from his personal friendship with
Hariri or from other causes.  We don’t understand why Chirac
adopted that policy.”

In the 1990s, Mouallem had played a key role in the diplomacy on the
Syrian-Israeli “track” of the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, first of
all by virtue of his position as Syria’s ambassador in Washington, and
later when he stepped in to lead the Syrian team that negotiated with
Israel until the spring of 1996.  (The course of those
negotiations between 1991 and 1996 were the topic of a book I published
with the U.S. Institute of Peace Press in 2000– you can find further
details of this book, including ordering information, through this page on my home
website.  Mouallem was one key source for that work, having
allowed me to conduct numerous, on-the-record interviews with him on
the topic between 1996 and 1998.)

That diplomacy was interrupted by Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s
withdrawal from the peace talks in 1996, and was later briefly resumed
by Ehud Barak after he became Israel’s Prime Minister in 1999. 
But after a summit meeting held in Geneva in 2000 it all fell apart
again, largely because Barak retracted the offer that PM Rabin had held
out in almost authoritative way back in 1994-95, that in the context of
a full peace with Syria, including wideranging economic and security
provisions, Israel would withdraw from the whole of the territory in
Syrian Golan that it has held under military occupation since 1967…

In Damascus on Wednesday, I asked Mouallem about his current hopes for
the resumption of the peace diplomacy with Israel.

He said,

I asked about the obstacle posed to hopes for peace by the increasingly
large presence of Israeli settlers who have been implanted into the
occupied Syrian and Palestinian territories with the support of
successive Israeli governments.  How could the settlers be dealt with?

He replied,

Given the particularly heavy presence of Israeli settlers within the
Palestinian West Bank, I asked if he still saw the possibility for the
Palestinians to be able to establish a viable national state there.

(Regrettably I need to go to another meeting, so I’ll break off the
interview here and get back to it when I can.  More, later. 
~HC)

“The day after any military attack against Iran would be a
disaster– not just for the Middle East region, but for international
stability.”  This was the clear warning I heard voiced by Syria’s
Foreign Minister, Walid al-Mouallem, during a 70-minute interview I
conducted with him in Damascus on February 28.

I had asked Mr. Mouallem whether he had any fears of an imminent
military attack against either his country, or Iran.  “About
Syria, I don’t have any such fear,” he said. 

I asked his view of the meeting planned for Baghdad March 10, where a
representative of the U.S. administration will sit down for the first time with
representatives of both Syria and Iran. (The Iraqi
government has invited all of its neighbors and all five members
of the Security Council to this conference.)

Mouallem confirmed that his deputy would
be attending the meeting. He added,

He explained that because Syria hopes that these displaced persons
can speedily return to their homes in Iraq, his government is reluctant
to refer to them as refugees, calling them instead “displaced perople.”

Mouallem described the Bush administration’s decision to attend the
Baghdad conference as,

Had he seen any signs yet that this was happening?

I asked what policies Syria supported in order to
de-escalate the tensions in Iraq.

He later declined an invitation to be more precise about the total
length of the timetable for the US withdrawal.

Syria’s views on all these matters are of course extremely significant,
given the country’s pivotal position in the Middle East and given the
fact that it enjoys good relations with not only the present government
of Iraq but also many strands of the Iraqi opposition including many
trends inside Iraq’s Sunni-Arab society.

(Mouallem talked about a number of other important topics, too, including Lebanon and the Palestinian issue.
I’ll post more material from the interview on JWN as soon as I get the
time. Now, I’m afraid I need to run to something else. By the way, I’m now back in Jordan.)

Syria does not fear any imminent US military escalation against itself, though
it fears the Bush administration may yet launch a strike against Iran…
 Syria sees itself as the only power that has good relations with all
the parties inside Iraq, and is very willing to use this position to help
mediate and moderate intra-Iraqi disputes…  It calls for a reconciliation
process in Iraq in which “all parties should be involved, without exception,
but in which none would dominate the others”; and for a regional peace process
involving Iraq, all of its neighbors, and the US…  Syria’s relations
with many portions of US society, including the US Congress, have improved
considerably in the last 18 months, “But the only ‘fortress’ resisting engagement
with us is the administration”….

These were some of the main points in an informal, one-hour interview I held
January 26 with Ambassador Imad Moustapha, in his embassy in Washington DC’s
Kalorama district.

Moustapha drew a strong contrast between the standoff-ish and sullen
attitude the Bush administration presents towards Syria today and the behavior of an earlier US administration, during a period
of much greater substantive tension between the two parties, back in 1983:

Back then, US Navy vessels were directly shelling Syrian military
positions in Lebanon, and the US Air Force was attacking our positions in
the Bekaa valley.  You remember, we shot down a  US flyer on that
occasion…  But despite the continuation of that direct military engagement
between us, the Reagan administration still engaged with us diplomatically,
with the mission of Ambassador Philip Habib, who came to Damascus a number
of times.  But now, they won’t even talk to us?

Regarding his embassy’s relations with other sections of US society, he said
he feels he has had some real success reaching out to people in Congress,
the media, and civil society “including Jewish-American groups.”  He
recalled that several members of Congress visited Syria over the recent winter
break, and noted in particular that the meeting that ISG co-chair James Baker
held in Damascus with Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem last September had
been very successful.  

Mouallem was very clear with Baker.  He told him that
Syria wants to cooperate on resolving the differences inside Iraq– for its
own reasons.  We are not seeking any ‘deal’ to link that issue to Lebanon…

And then, see the strong degree to which we’ve restored our relations with
the government in Iraq.  We have just been having this long and very
productive visit to Syria by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, in the course
of which he signed a large number of interior and security agreements with
Damascus.  And this was at exactly the same time that Secretary Rice
was criticising us so strongly on Capitol Hill for our allegedly unhelpful
interference inside Iraq?  Her criticisms don’t seem to make much sense.

… No, I am not concerned about a possible American imminent escalation
against Syria.  But I do worry that the administration might do something
against Iran-– to try to save face and to reawaken patriotic feelings
among the Americans.

This would be disastrous.

Moustapha expressed significant concern about the eruption of Sunni-Shiite
sectarianism in the Arab world.  “Many Arabs see this as a direct result
of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq .  What happened there was
the dismantling of the state… and then religious, sectarian, and tribal
leaders were the only ones able to provide the most needed sense of some
security in the neighborhoods.”

He said the number of Iraqi refugees in Syria had now reached “nearly one
million”.  He described a visit he had made to one of the numerous,
completely new private universities that have been springing up in Syria
in recent years.  “But this one was different.  This was a completely
Iraqi institution, totally run by Iraqi professors and administrators…
 And there’s another one in Jordan,. too.”

I suggested that these institutions must be bringing great benefits to their
host countries.  But he said, “No,  the main thing is that it’s
a disaster for Iraq!  Iraq was always such a great center of Arab higher
edication!  My father got his degree there… so many other Arabs did.
 And now, it is all becoming destroyed.”

We had a short discussion about the recent reports on a possibly productive
Syrian-Israeli “back-channel” negotiation that occurred between 2004 and
July 2006.  Moustapha said the contacts in question never had any authorization
or standing with the government he represents.  “Syria’s position is
well-known and consistent,” he said.  “I have to tell you we have people
coming to us all the time and offering to conduct some such  private
negotiation.  But we don’t need it.  Our offer to resume the negotiations
at the open, official level with Israel is clear, and it’s on the table.”

He talked a little about his government’s relations with many of the different
parties and groups inside today’s Iraq.  He started by recalling how
many of the politicians who emerged in the immediate post-Saddam era had
had long ties with Syria, having spent a good portion of their previous years
of exile in Damascus.  “Seventeen of the 25 members of the Interim Governing
Council established by Paul Bremer once carried Syrian diplomatic passports!” 
After the US invasion of Iraq, many of those Iraqi politicians had turned
their back on Damascus to some degree– “But now, even those who disdained
us for a while are coming back into a relationship with us.”

Moustapha noted that Moqtada al-Sadr had a very good visit to Syria in early
2005, “and later, he became a kingmaker in the political system in Baghdad.”
 He stressed that in his view, Sadr was very far from being any kind
of an Iranian puppet.

He concluded by laying out his proposal for an all-party reconciliation process
inside Iraq, to be parallelled by a regional process involving all Iraq’s
neighbors and the United States.  “This wouldn’t solve all the
problems,” he conceded.  “But it would certainly change the reginal
dynamics.”

I asked whether he saw a role for the UN in convening such a process.  “The
UN can’t act unless the US allows it to,” he said.

…  The above account has been written in great haste.  I’ve had
a lot of work to do in the past few days, and I’ve also been packing and
preparing for a three-month trip away from home that will take me to Cairo,
various other Middle Eastern places, London, and France.  We leave on that
trip less than two hours from now.  But I did want to get this account
of the discussion with Amb. Moustapha posted onto the blog before I leave.

He is a smart and engaging man.  (Heck, he even has his own blog, which
makes some interesting reading.)  He shows a good understanding of the
different trends in the US policymaking elite, and seems to represent his
government’s positions accurately and persuasively.  From talking to
him, I got the sense that he– and most likely also the government he represents–
has a degree of quiet self-confidence about the government’s own survival
and prospects, but considerable concern for the possibility of further, more
damaging deteriorations in Iraq, or a US attack on Iran.  I have to
say he was pretty scathing about the prospects for the US occupation force
in Iraq, and the prospects of President Bush’s latest “surge” plan in particular.
 At one point he noted wryly: “Look , they don’t even seem to be able
to control Haifa Street, which is just a kilometer or so away from the Green
Zone.  How on earth do they hope to control the whole country?”

Akiva Eldar does, as I had hoped, have a follow-up piece in Wednesday’s HaAretz to the article he had today about the existence and negotiating “achievements” of an unofficial Syrian-Israeli back-channel between 2004 and July 2006.
The notable additions in the follow-up piece included a report, attributed to “senior officials in Washington” that “U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was kept in the picture about these indirect talks between Syria and Israel.”
Eldar also wrote:

Ibrahim (Ayeb) Suleiman, the Syrian representative, also said this at his meetings with former Foreign Ministry director general Alon Liel, adding that Cheney had made no move to stop him from participating in the talks. Suleiman is a Washington resident.

Eldar also reported this:

Meretz-Yahad Chairman Yossi Beilin said in media interviews Tuesday that the European mediator in the secret talks was Nicholas Lang, head of the Middle East desk at the Swiss Foreign Ministry.
Lang also played a key role in organizing the Israeli-Palestinian meetings at which Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo drafted the Geneva Initiative, their proposal for a final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Liel, who was the driving force behind the secret meetings with Suleiman, is one of the people closest to Beilin.

So, the Swiss. Interesting.
But I find even more interesting the way that Eldar refers to Dick Cheney in that casual, matter-of-fact way, as being the US official whom one would really most seek or expect to see taking an interest in any serious back-channel talks of this nature.
Yeah, why bother with the “President” or his portion of the White House, at all these days? Go to the real source of the power, instead.

There are many interesting aspects of the story that HaAretz’s Akiva Eldar published today, telling about some back-channel negotiations pursued– somewhat indirectly– between Syria and Israel, from September 2004 through July 2006.
First, of course, is the content of the not-officially-endorsed “draft agreement” the participants had reportedly arrived at.
Second is the story of who the participants were and how they pursued their contacts.
Third is the reported reason why the initiative became blocked last summer. (Eldar writes: “the Syrian … called for a secret meeting at the level of deputy minister, on the Syrian side, with an Israeli official at the rank of a ministry’s director general, including the participation of a senior American official. Israel did not agree to this Syrian request.” So the contacts ended.)
Fourth is the question of the timing of having this news leaked now, in January 2007, five months after the contacts in question ended. Is this part of an attempt by Israeli or American officials to embarrass Syria while at the same time trying to indicate– especially to other, more fearful Arab governments– that in the event of a big confrontation between the US and Iran even the Syrian regime may secretly be happy not to side with Teheran?
As you may imagine, since Syrian-Israeli relations is something I’ve published two books about, I have quite a lot of thoughts on this topic. Indeed, if I have time this evening I might try to make one of my annotated-table thingies based on Eldar’s reporting and published documents, as a way of organizing these thoughts.
However, I want to dwell a little first on this question of the timing of the leak.
Eldar is far, far coyer than most US journalists would be about the circumstances of his acquisition of the documents and reports in question, and he does nothing whatever to speculate on the motivations of the person or persons who provided them to him.
Maybe in tomorrow’s paper?
You can find HaAretz’s summary of the talks, and the descriptions of the main dramatis personae in this timeline article.
Regardless of who it was who first tipped Eldar off to this story and slipped him the “draft agreement” produced through this channel, he (then or later) succeeded in getting a terse confirmation from lead Israeli participant Alon Liel, a former director-general of the country’s Foreign Ministry, that the contacts in question had taken place… But he got few further comments from Liel.
He wrote that Liel,

refused to divulge details about the meetings but … [said] that meetings on an unofficial level have been a fairly common phenomenon during the past decade.
“We insisted on making the existence of meetings known to the relevant parties,” Liel said. “Nonetheless, there was no official Israeli connection to the content of the talks and to the ideas that were raised during the meetings.”

Eldar got a lot more information from Geoff Aronson, who is Director of Research and Publications at the Washington DC-based Foundation for Middle East Peace:

According to Geoffrey Aronson… who was involved in the talks, an agreement under American auspices would call for Syria to ensure that Hezbollah would limit itself to being solely a political party.
He also told Haaretz that Khaled Meshal, Hamas’ political bureau chief, based in Damascus, would have to leave the Syrian capital.
Syria would also exercise its influence for a solution to the conflict in Iraq, through an agreement between Shi’a leader Muqtada Sadr and the Sunni leadership, and in addition, it would contribute to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the refugee problem.
Aronson said the idea of a park on the Golan Heights allows for the Syrian demand that Israel pull back to the June 4 border, on the one hand, while on the other hand, the park eliminates Israeli concerns that Syrians will have access to the water sources of Lake Kinneret.
“This was a serious and honest effort to find creative solutions to practical problems that prevented an agreement from being reached during Barak’s [tenure as prime minister] and to create an atmosphere of building confidence between the two sides,” he said.

Eldar then has another para there, unattributed, in which he writes:

It also emerged that one of the Syrian messages to Israel had to do with the ties between Damascus and Tehran. In the message, the Alawi regime – the Assad family being members of the Alawi minority – asserts that it considers itself to be an integral part of the Sunni world and that it objects to the Shi’a theocratic regime, and is particularly opposed to Iran’s policy in Iraq. A senior Syrian official stressed that a peace agreement with Israel will enable Syria to distance itself from Iran.

Well, obviously Eldar’s not telling us who he got that from, precisely…
This is all very reminiscent of what I was writing about back in my 2000 book on the Syrian-Israeli negotiations of the 1990s, where I wrote “The general effect of the Syrian-Iranian link on the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of the mid-1990s can be viewed in a number of different (and not mutually incompatible) ways… ” Buy the book and go to pp. 179-80 to see how I characterized those ways… Or if I have time I’ll look for my old floppy disks of the text and see if I can retrieve that chunk.
So okay, Eldar is telling us that he has talked to Liel and to Aronson. It’s not certain if he has talked to the unnamed “senior official” of an unnnamed “European country” who also– along with Aronson– played a mediating role during these contacts, and whose government provided, apparently, all the logistics for at least one phase of them. I would say, from reading Eldar’s articles there, probably not. Things he reports that are attributed, in a general way, to “the European mediator” could as easily have come from the detailed reporting that this mediator presumably gave to Liel and his two other (unnamed) Israeli colleagues in the venture.
You ask about the attitude toward these contacts of official Washington? Well according to Eldar, back near the beginning of this channel, in 2004, the key Syrian-American “Mr. Fix-it” involved, Abe Soleiman, told a Turkish diplomat who had helped to open up the channel that year, that,

the Syrians were prepared to begin negotiations with Israel immediately: formal negotiations, certainly not “academic talks.” The Prime Minister’s Bureau in Jerusalem didn’t care whether Liel and his friends sat down with the Syrians to hear what they had to say − but no negotiations. The Israeli reason (or excuse): The Americans are not prepared to hear about contact with Syria.

In my judgment, if the Sharon government at that time had really wanted to sit down and negotiate with Syria, it would not have been deterred by any signs of displeasure from Washington. However, I don’t doubt that there were signs of such displeasure from the Bushites– then, as there would be now if any official, authorittative peace talks with Syria were being proposed by Olmert. (Which they aren’t– though his FM, Tzipi Livni, has made some remarks expressing interest in the idea.)
But anyway, back to Eldar, and the circumstances of, and possible motivations for, this latest “leak”.
Firstly, it seemed to come much more evidently from the Israeli side than from the Syrian side.
Secondly, in that paragraph full of “unattributed” material, in particular, it looks as though there’s a manipulative and quite possibly intentionally mendacious political hand at work. In “one of the Syrian messages to Israel… the Alawi regime [asserted] that it considers itself to be an integral part of the Sunni world and that it objects to the Shi’a theocratic regime, and is particularly opposed to Iran’s policy in Iraq”?? This is crass and barely believable stuff. Is it just Eldar’s unfamiliarity with the details and context of what he is writing about there? Or did somebody else give him explicitly this message that he should try to get into his article?
What is not credible in that report is that anyone representing the Syrian regime would use that particular kind of sectarian discourse (“part of the Sunni world”) rather than continuing the use of the secular Arab-nationalist discourse with which it has always sought to disguise its minoritarian sectarian status. Also, I don’t find it believable that any Syrian official would say straight out to someone communicating with an Israeli interlocutor that Syria “is particularly opposed to Iran’s policy in Iraq”.
There are a number of possibilities here. The possibility of sloppy “reporting” of Damascus’s position or words by Abe Suleiman can’t be ruled out. (On the other hand, his reporting was also being paralleled by the European mediator for most of the relevant time.)
Well, I’m not close enough to that whole story any more to do any independent digging into it of my own. (Though h’mmm, maybe I should go to Damascus sometime next month, when I’ll be in Cauiro, anyway? In 1998, when I was working on my 2000 book, I did some really interesting interviews with officials there and with former officials in Israel who’d participated in the relevant diplomacy…)
Maybe Eldar will give us more of the details we need, in follow-up articles.
Next up, if I have the time: just a few further questions into the status of the quite amazing map that Eldar published with his piece. It quite clearly conveys that the whole of the area of Syrian Golan that is now occupied by Israel will be included in the “Peace Park” that is a key device used by those unofficial negotiators to try to resolve some outstanding issues of borders and water access.
However, the text of the (still completely unoffical) “Draft Agreement” that the “negotiators” had come up with states clearly (Art. VI-1) that “The park will extend from the agreed upon border [that is, the long-agreed June 4, 1967 line between the two countries] eastward to a line to be determined by mutual agreement.”
It notably does not say it will extend from the June 4 line eastward to the present disengagement line, which is the picture that Eldar’s map there clearly conveys. The half-million-plus Syrian citizens who are the people displaced/”cleansed” from this occupied area in 1967-8, and their offspring, will no doubt look at Eldar’s map with its park-like tree icons dotted all over their former towns, villages, hamlets, and farms with some dismay. (As always, you can read about the human dimensions of the Golan question here.)
Anyway, now I truly need to run.

I wanted to put in a link to Anthony Shadid’s informative recent interview with Syrian MB head Ali Sadreddine al-Bayanouni (also here).
Shadid wrote:

“Syrian society today is destroyed,” [Bayanouni] said. “The primary aim right now is to transform society into a new era where political and democratic life will be rebuilt.”

About the MB’s political plans, Shadid wrote:

“The organization is not going to be an alternative to this regime,” [Bayanouni] said. “The alternative will be a broad-based national government to which the Muslim Brotherhood will contribute, as does any other political force.”
Among the various Syrian political factions — Islamic activists, Arab nationalists, Syrian nationalists, communists and other leftists — nearly every party has abandoned the revolutionary, generation-old notion that it alone can serve as the agent of change. The Baath Party has not; the constitution still declares it “the leading party of both the society and the state.” In Bayanouni’s words, and in a spate of declarations, the Brotherhood has forsworn that role, mirroring reforms of the group in other countries including Egypt and Jordan.
In 2002, Bayanouni published a national charter that called for a democratic state and rejected violence. In 2004, the Brotherhood disavowed the idea that “we consider ourselves to be the movement that represents all Muslims.” In the same document, it endorsed women’s rights and said it would seek only the gradual introduction of Islamic law, leaving the actual legislation to elected representatives. (Requiring women to wear the veil, segregating education or banning alcohol “are not a priority at this point,” Bayanouni said in the interview.) A year later, in a National Call for Salvation, the Brotherhood disavowed revenge for past crimes and called for political parties and free elections.
Last month, it joined secular and minority opposition groups in endorsing what was called the Damascus Declaration, a four-page manifesto hailed by a still-feeble Syrian opposition as a blueprint for an alternative to Assad’s government and a first for cooperation between secular and religious activists.
“The Muslim Brotherhood,” Bayanouni said, “is ready to accept others and to deal with them. We believe that Syria is for all its people, regardless of sect, ethnicity or religion. No one has the right to exclude anyone else.”
…
At his home in London, Bayanouni talks about returning to the alleys of Jubaila, the quarter of Old Aleppo where he grew up. His father died while in prison in 1975, his mother after he went into exile in 1979. But, he said smiling, he will visit the rest of his family. “There are relatives I don’t even know,” he said.
For some Islamic activists, years in the West radicalize them, reinforcing their alienation in a culture that’s not their own. Not Bayanouni. He said his time in exile helped him reconsider his beliefs.
“One of the things I learned,” he said, “was to accept the other.”
And in that is perhaps one of the greatest ironies of Arab politics today. To a remarkable degree, albeit with different inflections and still untested, some secular and religious activists are speaking a common language of citizenship and individual rights in the face of authoritarian governments. Bayanouni … said he wanted to see “a civil state based on democratic institutions.”
“The religion of the majority is Islam, and the ethnicity of the majority is Arab,” he said. “Those are facts on the ground, but citizenship is the base on which people should interact. Whatever is the result of the democratic process should be accepted.”

Here is the Wikipedia’s entry on the MB in Syria.
Here is a very informative mid-August interview with Bayanouni, on the Jamestown Foundation website. Nearly all the articles linked to at the top of that page are also informative.

I got a sad email this morning, from a staff assistant at a reform-oriented organization in Damascus called the Tharwa Project. Just ten days ago, Dr. Samer al-Ladkany, the assistant director of Tharwa, had invited me to participate in a big conference Tharwa was organizing in Damascus under the title “”Recognizing the Multicultural Society for Successful Democratic Transitions.” Ladkany was inviting me to speak about some aspects of South Africa’s historic transition from minority-based rule to full democracy, and naturally I was pretty excited at the prospect of doing so. After all, in Syria power has for many decades now been quite disproportionately concentrated in the hands of the Alawite community that makes up roughly 11% of the national population– and it desperately needs to find a peaceful way to transition to a fully inclusive, accountable, and rights-respecting form of national rule…
In today’s email, the staff assistant wrote:

I must ask you to put everything on hold for right now. I am very sorry, but we are having some problems here in Damascus. I am not completely sure what is going on, but I went to work today, just to find out that we have been closed down…permanently. The worst part is, I have not been able to contact the director here in Damascus.

I guess that would be Ladkany. The “big boss” at Tharwa– the organization’s founder, Ammar Abdel-Hamid– left Syria for the US around a month ago, after being warned by the security services that he should do so.
I am still hoping that ways can be found to urge Bashar al-Asad’s regime to– as I put it in this JWN post a couple of weeks ago–

“do a Frederik De Klerk” — that is, to find ways to repair the broken fabric within his own country by opening up serious political negotiations with his political opponents from the country’s majority population.

Obviously, right now, the prospects for that happening look significantly bleaker.
The latest move against the Tharwa Project in Damascus was, sadly, fairly predictable. Last Thursday, Pres. Asad made a strongly nationalist speech in which he came out swinging against Washington, and against the Washington-pushed activities of UN investigator detlev Mehlis. Al-Hayat’s Ibrahim Hamidi interpreted what was happening as Asad “preparing Syria for the probable imposition of international sanctions.” (As reported here.)
Then on Saturday, the mukhabarat (security services) arrested Kamal Labwani, a Syrian democracy activist who had just returned to his country from the US. While in the US, Labwani met in the White House with with U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor J. D. Crouch. He also did an interview for the (US government-operated) al-Hurra TV and other media outlets.
So it definitely looks as if the regime is in a defiant, hunkering-down mode. I think that’s a great pity. The well-connected and Damascus-based Syria expert Josh Landis has written on his blog, “Syrians will put up with sanctions lite if the government moves ahead purposefully with internal reform designed to free the economy.” I largely agree with that assessment. I also think that– like the international isolation that South Africa’s apartheid regime faced in the late 1980s– Syria’s growing international isolation today might well act to help persuade people at the heart of the regime that wide-ranging internal political reform is not only a good tactic, but also, a necessary policy if the interests of their nation and their sub-national community are to be preserved.
Josh does add, it is true, “Of course, it is hard to do this when being isolated.” I would add to that, that it would be extremely hard for the Syrian regime to open up the political space that is needed for reform when it is not only the subject of very hostile intent from the USA, but also in an actual and unresolved state of war with Israel.
Well, I have a lot of other thoughts about this whole subject. I should also, probably, take the opportunity of either writing something here on JWN, or writing something new in al-Hayat, to set down some of the things I would have said at the conference in damascus, if it were held.
Yes, there is much that is parallel between the experiences of the voteless majority in South Africa under apartheid and the powerless majority in Syria under the Asads. But there are also several signal differences. One is the seeming absence of any inclusive and highly disciplined opposition party on the model of the ANC. Actually, I’m not sure if the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood might reach some of the necessary criteria (though a problem there regarding “inclusivity”.) As for the secular-liberalizing opposition networks, they all seem to me to be dominated by prima donnas and individualists. In the latter category, I’m afraid I would probably have to include the Syrian liberalizer who’s best known in Washington DC– Ammar Abdel-Hamid, the founder of the Tharwa Project…. In his blog, Abdel-Hamid has called for the opposition to build “networks, networks, networks”. (Calling for the creation of single, disciplined party or front organization would, I think, be more effective.) But even regarding “networks” he doesn’t actually seem to be very respectful of the other people who might be in such a network. In this recent post he summarily dismissed “the Syrian opposition” as being “weak and idiotic.”
Altogether, a story that is tragic at many, many levels.
Most important, now, though: What can we do to try to ensure the safety of Samer Ladkany?