Bashar Assad's Challenges

American Jewish Committee
Monday, 12 June 2000

Within the first 48 hours after the death of Syrian President Hafez Assad, there are signs of a smooth transition. Power is quickly flowing to the leader's son, Bashar. He is the unani-mous choice of the ruling Ba'ath Party to be the country's new president, and ratification is scheduled for June 25. The Syrian Parliament met immediately after Assad's death, and lowered the constitutional age requirement for the presidency from 40 years to 34 – paving the way for the 34-year-old Bashar.

Syrian Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam has already named Bashar as commander of Syria's armed forces, promoting him to the rank of Lt. General from his current status as Colonel. Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas has declared his fealty to the new leader. Undoubtedly, Arab and other foreign leaders will pay homage to Bashar at Tuesday's state funeral.

But a smooth and rapid transition of power for Bashar Assad should not be confused with a guarantee of long-term survivability in the position his father occupied for the last 30 years. Challenges face Bashar, a shy, British-educated ophthalmologist and a political neophyte, both at home and abroad. As much as Hafez Assad sought to pave the way for his son's succession, much of the hard work falls on Bashar.

Consolidating a domestic power base

The Kuwaiti newspaper al-Watan wrote yesterday of the Syrian succession, "the struggle for power between the Old Guard and the New will not be a picnic or a walk in the park. The price will be dear, very dear." Indeed, consolidating his authority is the first challenge facing the new Syrian leader, and it may be an ongoing one.

On one hand, Bashar seems to have been helped by his father's efforts to retire those in the old guard who would likely be immediate threats. Earlier this year, Assad sacked his government, and last month, deposed Prime Minister Mahmoud Zu'bi committed suicide after being informed he faced charges of corruption as part of Bashar's anti-corruption campaign. Assad also retired chief of staff Gen. Hikmet Shihabi (rumored to have left Syria last week to "visit" his son in Los Angeles amid reports in the leading Arabic daily Al-Hayat that he was about to be in-vestigated for corruption), and the second-ranking military official, Gen. Ali Duba. Vice President Khaddam, a long-time associate of Assad's, was also frozen out recently in order to make way for Bashar. Also working in Bashar's favor is the fact that his father developed more than a dozen intelligence services that reported directly to him, tipping him off to any stirrings within the upper echelons of power.

On the other hand, Bashar confronts the possibility that potential rivals may not fear him as they feared his father. Despite being a member of the minority Alawite group – an offshoot of Shiite Muslims – Hafez Assad was respected inside Syria for turning a backwater state into a re-gional power and for bringing stability to a country that suffered long bouts of governmental turmoil. However, Assad purchased stability with blood, ordering the killing of 20,000 Islamic dissidents in the Syrian town of Hama in 1982.

With the positioning of Bashar as his successor, Assad sought to perpetuate Alawite rule and turn it into a dynasty. (Interestingly, in other Arab non-monarchial states – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and to some extent even Egypt – there are indications that rulers are making cer-tain efforts to install sons in potential lines of succession. Dynastic succession occurred recently in Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain and Qatar – the last by a bloodless coup.) Some have argued that the perpetuation of Alawite rule will be sharply resisted by Syria's Sunni majority; others insist that the dividing line in Syria is not the traditional ethnic contest but rather a clash between Islamists and non-Islamists, with the government, military and business elites coalescing around any figure who will keep the Islamists at bay. (Political Islam is illegal in Syria, and therefore it is difficult to gauge its adherents' strength.)

However, the challenges are not just ethnic and religious; they could be familial as well. When Hafez Assad had a heart attack in 1984, it was his brother and then-Vice President Rifa'at Assad who started a coup in the streets of Damascus. Rifa'at was routed and exiled to Europe, where he has led an opulent life in such places as Paris and the Spanish resort of Marbella. In 1998, Assad stripped his brother of his title, another sign that he was preparing for Bashar to succeed him. Last fall, Syrian authorities suspected that Rifa'at – while in Europe – was plan-ning to enhance his power base in the Alawite port town of Latakia. Bashar led a Syrian special forces raid on the insurgents' stronghold, and dozens of Rifa'at's loyalists are believed to have been killed. Hundreds of suspected Rifa'at loyalists were subsequently rounded up across Syria, amid speculation that they had been receiving monthly payments from Rifa'at and were poised to thwart succession.

Interestingly, amid rumors that Rifa'at would be arrested if he attended the funeral, his spokesman told Reuters news agency today that the former Vice President considers current suc-cession developments a "farce" and views himself as the legitimate heir to the leadership of Syria. In a different interview, the spokesman said Rifa'at has his own ways of communicating with the Syrian people. The reference is a clear allusion to the satellite television station run by Rifa'at's son Sumer, the London-based satellite Arab News Network (ANN), which is beamed across the Arab world. But Rifa'at's political standing is clearly complicated by distance – from abroad, he cannot have his finger on the public pulse – and by what analysts say is the public's contempt for him as corrupt and linked to the Syrian drug trade in Lebanon. (Due to such drug trafficking, Syria was long included in the State Department's list of states uncooperative in the drive against illegal drugs; Syria remains on State's list of state sponsors of terrorism.)

The Lebanon factor

It is symbolic that Assad died while talking to Lebanon's President Emile Lahoud on the phone. While Assad's legacy is linked worldwide to political rejectionism abroad and authoritarianism and economic backwardness at home, Assad viewed his success in controlling Lebanon as one of the major accomplishments of his regime – a restoration of past glories.

Assad's uncontested march into Beirut in the fall of 1990 is seen by many as a reward by the United States for being part of the anti-Saddam Gulf coalition. Assad always justified the maintenance of 35,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon as needed to protect against Israel's security zone in southern Lebanon. However, Israel's unilateral pullback last month presents Bashar with a dual quandary: What will be the basis for Syrian domination in the future? And most immediately, will Bashar use violence in southern Lebanon as a lever to extract territorial concessions on the Golan as his father did for so many years?

The Israeli exit – which occurred a month and a half before the scheduled target date of July 7, thankfully unconnected to Syria's current political situation – has precipitated protests in Beirut calling for a Syrian withdrawal. In order to lower its profile and dampen protests, the Syrian military in recent weeks has moved its positions from the Lebanese capital to the country-side. It is hard to believe that as Bashar seeks to establish his tough credentials as leader, a Syrian decision to quit Lebanon will come anytime soon.

In terms of stirring up violence against Israel, Bashar's intentions are not yet known, although there are hopes that he will not utilize Hizbullah. In an interview with the London-based Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat, conducted days before his father's death and published this week, Bashar suggested that Hizbullah's role would be primarily political now that Israel was out. Israeli Arab Member of Knesset Azmi Bashara, a frequent visitor to Damascus, told Ha'aretz that Bashar was the most forthright among the Syrian leadership he met, suggesting that Syria's reaction to an Israeli pullback should be limited to a declaration of victory and no more. Yet, it should be pointed out that in the Asharq interview, Bashar said that Hizbullah should not disarm at present. Israeli Prime Minister Barak has warned Syria not to use Palestinian refugees as a means for attacking Israel across the Lebanese border. (Barak is also said to have passed mes-sages to Bashar via the U.S., Jordan, and Egypt, that Israel will not seek to exploit the Syrian transition.)

Peace process on hold

Photos showed President Bill Clinton grimacing as he read a note on stage at Carleton College informing him of Assad's death. Whatever his feelings for the Syrian leader, whom he met on three occasions and with whom he held countless phone conversations and exchanges of letters over the last seven and a half years, the body language suggested Clinton realized that his hopes for sealing a Syrian peace treaty during the remaining months of his tenure were now dashed. Indeed, it is hard to believe that Bashar would move on the peace front before cement-ing his authority as the new leader of Syria. Clinton had been hoping for a breakthrough during these final months despite the setback at the failed Geneva summit with Assad this past March; after that summit, the Clinton Administration turned for assistance to Saudi Ambassador to Washington Bandar bin Sultan, who traveled to Damascus four times in a bid to revive the track, according to Bashar's interview with Ashraq.

So there would be no misunderstanding that Bashar's views on the Golan are any different from those of his father, Defense Minister Tlas said Bashar would not settle for anything less than full Golan withdrawal, suggesting that such demands are a part of Hafez Assad's legacy that successors will find hard to erase. Bashar also insisted on full Israeli withdrawal in an interview with a Nasserite opposition newspaper last week.

Yet, Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin voiced hope that Bashar would seek peace with Israel since he does not carry the baggage of historic rejectionism. Bashar was less than two years old when Syria lost the Golan to Israel in 1967. Some analysts argue that just as nobody thought Anwar Sadat, an unknown successor to another pan-Arabist, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, would become a peacemaker, prudence suggests it is unwise to make predictions about Bashar. In any event, Assad could have made his son's life easier by making peace with Israel. It is emblematic of Assad's regime that the Syrian discovery of the need to make peace with Israel – after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the regional realignment occasioned by the Gulf War – was an epiphany that arrived too late and was embraced too grudgingly.

Opening up Syria

If there is one rationale that could drive Bashar in the coming years to make peace with Israel, it is the correlation with his evident desire to open up Syria to the outside world. There are also obvious fiscal and social benefits: peace would enable him to reduce defense expendi-tures and improve the lives of his people. How deeply Bashar's reformist instincts run remains to be tested. Yet, the ophthalmologist who lived in London for three years, and loves the Internet, British television, and Phil Collins music, certainly finds it popular to stress the cause of reform. Syria may be closed politically, but now virtually every Damascus resident has a satellite dish on his rooftop (thanks to rumors that such practice has Bashar's blessing) and is now more painfully aware than ever before of how economically backward his country is today.

To open up Syria, Bashar will have to overcome the hesitation of his father's generation, whose members wonder if such moves will set off centrifugal forces that may undermine the authoritarian tenets of the regime. An anecdote is told that when George Bush was visiting the Middle East after leaving office, he had a lunch with Assad. Bush praised Mikhail Gorbachev as one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century, and was astonished when Assad was scornful. Assad said that Gorbachev had failed the test of survival, since his reforms snowballed and brought down the Soviet Union.

That story underscores Assad's credo: survival above all. To survive, Assad was willing to torment foes abroad and at home, and relegate his country to a state of war and economic travail. By this minimal standard, it may be that Bashar can do no worse than his father; if he can apply a broader vision, and survive the challenges ahead, he may even improve on that record of national leadership.

David Makovsky, an American Jewish Committee consultant on political and strategic developments in Israel and the Middle East, is a former diplomatic correspondent of The Jeru-salem Post and Ha'aretz. He is a Senior Fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

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