To have heard Hafez Assad tell it, the fate of Mideast peace rests with the Syrian tea boys.
Once, in one of Assad’s infamously endless meetings with a foreign dignitary, the visitor appealed to the Syrian president, insisting that after so many years of defiance, Assad had the credibility among Arabs to finally strike a compromise with Israel.
In reply, Assad pointed at a young man who had slipped into the room to serve them each a glass of steaming, super-sugared bronze-colored tea from a silver tray.
“I could do it,” Assad said, “but that tea boy would kill me, and he would be right.”
The anecdote explains why no one should expect Assad’s successor, his son Bashar, to make a surprise visit to Jerusalem with his hand extended, even if and when he does succeed in assuring his political survival.
Syria, after all, is the land of the Hashishiyya Shiite sect that gave assassination its name in the 12th Century. Like his now departed father, the younger Assad must gauge what turning his back on part of Syria’s identity would mean for his own sect, the Alawites. Not compromising, and especially not compromising on one grain of sand of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, has become far more in Syria than just the mantra of a stubborn old man trapped in a 1960s mindset of utopian Arab unity and Cold War anti-Zionist imperialism.
The tea boys in Damascus do feel the way Assad described them, as do the sidewalk soft-drink vendors here in the village of Assad’s birth, as does the Muslim imam who oversaw Assad’s funeral last week.
It is a stand that was trumpeted and reinforced for 30 years by Assad’s regime. But the passion behind it extends further back: to the initial loss of Arab land when Israel was created, back even to France’s carving up of Greater Syria in the 1920s and countless invasions over the centuries.
While in some ways, Assad may have painted himself into a corner by stroking with the same brush again and again, he was as much a product of that passion as he was its promoter.
For Bashar Assad to persuade his people to accept a compromise on even a small strip of the Golan might take a reverse propaganda campaign almost as long as Assad’s three decades in power.
Even then, many Syrians might never accept the notion of any leader giving up such an essential part of the Syrian psyche.
“He would be a traitor,” said Sheik Ghassan Hamdan, the imam of the Naisa Mosque in Qardaha, which is named after Assad’s mother. “I don’t think any Syrian leader would do this.”
U.S. and Israeli officials are hoping the new Syrian leader is much more pragmatic, especially because the London-trained eye doctor likely understands better than his father how peace might help a Syrian economy badly in need of reform.
“This won’t be the same Syria,” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told a group of retired Israeli defense officials in Tel Aviv last week.
Assad, Barak said, might have been an uncompromising enemy who sponsored “murderous terror groups,” but by beginning negotiations after the 1991 Madrid peace conference, he “bequeathed to his son and to Syria the legitimacy to talk peace with Israel. This fact holds hope for the future.”
What the Israelis don’t always understand is that the Syrians’ reluctance to compromise on the Golan is as sincere and deep-seated as the Israelis’ refusal to conceive of Syria controlling the northeast shore of the Sea of Galilee.
If they did, they likely would not have proposed a “compromise” on the Golan in which Israel would return most of the plateau captured in 1967 but would keep a buffer strip of several hundred yards east of the shore. It was that proposal that Assad rejected at a summit with President Clinton in Geneva in March, angering Clinton.
The Syrians have even said no to the internationally recognized 1923 border, which lies 32 feet east of the shore.
Rejecting that line as a colonial insult, Syria insists on controlling the shoreline and all other land it controlled on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War.
Were Israel ever to agree, the other concern Bashar Assad could not ignore is whether a peace deal would hurt the interests of his own people, the minority Alawite sect.
The Alawites make up about 12 percent of Syria’s population and traditionally were a rural people from the mountains near the northwest seacoast.
Historically persecuted, they found respect and social mobility in Syria’s armed forces and came to wield considerable influence after the Baath Party coup that brought Assad and fellow Alawite officers to power in 1963. Assad took the ultimate reins in another coup seven years later.
The Alawites originally were considered an extreme branch of Shiite Islam, condemned as heretics by majority Sunnis for revering Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. Today, they are considered more of an ethnic group, especially since Assad helped steer their official religion back toward Islam’s mainstream.
Assad’s regime is not exclusively Alawite. Loyalty was his ultimate test, and many of his closest advisers, such as Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa and Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas, are Sunnis.
But to assure loyalty throughout the army, up to 80 percent of the midlevel officers in the Republican Guard and 60 percent of other special units are Alawites.
The Alawites actually exercise power through what has been called Syria’s “military-merchant complex,” which is a coalition of Alawite army officers, who dominate the state-run command economy, and Sunni business interests.
Peace could threaten that arrangement in two ways:
To compete economically in the region, especially with the Israelis, Syria would need to drastically liberalize the state economy. That would help the Sunni merchants, but not the Alawites.
The second problem is that a detente with the archenemy could undermine the regime’s authority.
“Peace with Israel is not only ideologically difficult but raises questions about the regime’s own raison d’etre,” Glenn Robinson, a Mideast expert at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in California, wrote in Middle East Policy magazine.
“Baathist authoritarianism has always been justified by its defenders, in part, as a necessary response to Zionism. … No other issue has shaped modern Syria the way its conflict with Israel has.”
Robinson argues that some Alawites recognize their three-decade hold on power cannot last forever and would welcome a smooth transition to a protective majority government. Others, however, believe that peace would be akin to suicide for their people and would fight it at all costs.
So the question remains whether Bashar Assad will be free to embrace reforms that would help the country but threaten the Alawites.
A visit to Qardaha, where thousands of Syrians flocked to pay their respects to the Assad family for three days following Tuesday’s funeral, makes clear that the younger Assad’s following runs only so deep.
With 30,000 residents, the tidy village with a view of the Mediterranean is the informal capital of the Alawites, if only because their No. 1 son was born there, the son of a peasant. Virtually all the residents are Alawite.
Villagers say they receive no more privileges than people in other nearby towns. But they do boast of the impressive mosque Assad built for his mother 10 years ago, and of a special pride and status that brought visitors such as President Jimmy Carter over the years.
The injustices villagers faced under the Ottoman Turks and other conquerors, and why it means so much to the Alawites to have a regime that is friendly, are told in tales repeated from their grandparents’ time.
“They used to use our people in the army, to fight other countries,” said Hamdan, the imam. “If we died, it was OK [with them].”
Bashar Assad grew up in Damascus but he used to visit his family’s vacation home–with the huge pink bougainvillea over the gates–in Qardaha. The imam said Bashar Assad told him he thought of himself as a “son” of the village.
The walls tell a more complex story of how the villagers feel about him, though. While posters of Bashar Assad were everywhere last week, most were new, as if pasted up only days before.
Older, more permanent signs showed the face of Basel Assad, the older brother who would have been heir had he not been killed in a car accident in 1994. It was also Basel Assad’s face stenciled on walls and stickered to the bookshelves in the imam’s office.
Because he has been part of Syria’s political scene only for the last few years, even here it’s obvious that Bashar Assad needs to prove himself, and certainly not by compromising with the Israelis.
“Regardless of who is ruling Syria, I would never accept it,” said Suleiman Saima, 65, who grew up with Hafez Assad and had a poster of Basel Assad astride a horse inside the aluminum kiosk where he was selling Syrian-made Mandarin cola.
“I hope Bashar will fill the vacuum of his father, in terms of wisdom. Whatever his father did, that’s what we want him to do.”
