Between Two Peoples
Can My Syrian Side Share Lebanese Hopes?

By Lynn Maalouf (lynnm@cyberia.net.lb)
Sunday, January 15, 2006; B02

BEIRUT On a brisk morning in late December, I squeezed into George Aslan's Chevrolet for the three-hour drive to Damascus. Usually, you have to book a seat in George's car several days in advance, but I didn't have any trouble getting a spot. Business for the Lebanese taxi driver has been slow lately.

Aslan has been running the Beirut-Damascus route every day for 43 years, and even the Lebanese civil war that raged between 1975 and 1990 didn't cut off the flow of travelers between the two capitals. But now, growing tension on the Lebanese-Syrian political front following the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri last February and a number of murders since has spilled over to the people.

As we headed out of the city past the National Museum, I saw a Lebanese army tank parked at a busy intersection, a sign of the state of emergency the government declared in October after a dozen or more bombs rocked the country. Usually at the end of the year, everyone starts gearing up for raging parties. Crowds from across the region, including Syria, converge on Beirut's sizzling nightclubs. But the latest assassination, of journalist and incoming member of parliament Gebran Tueni on Dec. 12, coupled with political divisions that have been paralyzing the government, had dampened the year-end party spirit.

Few in Lebanon doubt that the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad is behind the murderous attacks against Lebanon over the past year. That hunch was recently bolstered by Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor heading the United Nations investigation into Hariri's assassination, who said that he suspected that Syrian authorities were involved.

May, one of my fellow passengers, had moved to Lebanon three decades ago from Syria. "I never felt I had to draw a line between my Syrian and Lebanese identities," she told me, then lowered her voice. "But lately, they've started making me feel ashamed of being Syrian." "They" were the Syrian authorities.

I knew what she meant. I was born of a Lebanese father and a Syrian mother and raised in Lebanon. When my parents met in 1969, at a Lebanese mountain resort where my mother had spent all her summers with her family since childhood, both Syria and Lebanon were newly independent. Syrians and Lebanese felt close to each other; what mattered more than nationality was a shared religious community -- in my parents' case, Greek Orthodox. All my life, I've enjoyed visiting my mother's family in Damascus; ironically, it was also to Damascus that we would flee during the war whenever the fighting got too bad. But I hadn't been to the Syrian capital now in more than a year.

I had been too busy carrying my Lebanese flag and wearing my red-and-white scarf in downtown Beirut's Martyrs' Square -- renamed Freedom Square last March, after more than a million Lebanese rallied there to demand the end of the Syrian occupation. With my countrymen, I had shouted at the top of my lungs: "Syria out!" What I'd meant was the Syrian army and the Syrian-Lebanese political and security mafia that had run the country since 1990. I certainly didn't mean my mother.

But in the past few months, some fist-happy Lebanese had taken to beating up Syrian workers in Lebanon. Now I'd decided to take Aslan's taxi back across the border to find out how Syrians in Syria were viewing developments between our two countries. Did they, like so many here in Lebanon, also feel as though we were living through the end of an era? An era in which a dictatorship's legitimacy could never be questioned and human rights were just words on paper?

Under a frail winter sun, we reached the border. The last time I had been here was on April 26, 2005, to see off the last Syrian soldiers. That withdrawal had finally begun to crack the victim's state of mind that had reigned in Lebanon for so long. It was concrete evidence to the region, to the world and most importantly to us "that an Arab people can make spring happen," wrote Samir Kassir, a columnist for the leading Lebanese newspaper An Nahar, at the time. Two months later, he was killed by a bomb strapped under his car.

In Damascus, I met up with my uncle. I was taken aback by the Syrian flags peppering the public space in the Old City: hanging off balconies, in stores, on cars. I had definitely not been expecting this seemingly genuine and spontaneous outpouring of patriotism. Noting my surprise, my uncle explained: "Don't forget it's a young population. They're influenced by the regime's propaganda. And they really feel threatened, with the [talk of] sanctions and everything."

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Syria has come under international pressure to end its support for terrorism and to stop interfering in Lebanese affairs. Contrary to my hopes, it seems that this outside pressure has only pushed the Syrian people to rally around their leader, President Bashar Assad. But I couldn't understand it. Succeeding his father, Hafez Assad, five years ago, Bashar had sent waves of hope flowing among Syrians -- and Lebanese -- of a new era of restored freedoms and economic reforms. Syrian intellectuals had begun to debate openly, discussing formerly taboo issues such as martial law and political prisoners. A year later, the "Damascus Spring" was cut short as the regime shut down all the political salons that had sprung up across the country. The regime's erosion since then seemed so transparent to me, viewed from Beirut. I found it difficult to accept that the same was not the case on the Syrian street. I even felt a surge of anger. How could people still condone this government?

I met with Bashar Zarkan, a musician and actor who had signed a 2001 petition calling for Lebanon's political independence. "It's been very difficult on us lately," he told me, referring to the Syrian opposition. "There's no transparency, no credibility. We don't know what to believe anymore." Like many Syrians, he insisted that the Lebanese should wait for concrete evidence before accusing the Assad regime every time someone in Lebanon gets killed or maimed. "The fact is," replies Zarkan, "the president has never been so popular. He's become a national hero. Unfortunately."

There have, he told me, been some positive changes since 2001. "Private banks opening up, the morality police abolished. The security nightmare [of Hafez Assad's time] is over," he said. Funny, I thought to myself. Things in Lebanon were getting worse over the same five years.

In the quiet alleys of Taleh Fadda, where my mother would take me for walks as a child, we ran into another friend. I asked him if he'd been to Beirut lately. He used to visit Lebanon every month. But he shook his head. "I don't want to risk hearing any abuse," he said. "Nowadays, I feel like a stranger over there. It's sad, isn't it?" Yes, I agreed, it is.

A few streets down, I passed through a low wooden door and found myself standing in the courtyard of a beautiful Ottoman house, filled with the fragrance of citrus trees. This was the home of Hind Kabawat, a lawyer and political activist. Kabawat told me she was mostly concerned with the threat of sanctions. "The people need to be taken into consideration," she said. She makes a case for Syria's peaceful transition to democracy, arguing that Assad should commit to making deep-seated reforms for one more term and then step down. But with the regime coming under international fire, she said, it was becoming difficult to question its legitimacy. "The people feel threatened by the pressure," she said. "They show their discontent by supporting the regime."

That evening, I met my relatives for dinner. Over a delicious meal of lamb stew, they told me the latest joke making the rounds: "Why has Syria banned imports of shampoo? Because it makes hair silky (in Arabic, hariri, like the late prime minister ) and straight ( mehlis , like the German prosecutor looking into Hariri's death)."

Although we laughed together, I felt a distance between us that the past year had created. I listened to my cousin complaining of "external interference in [Syria's] affairs" and responded that this interference was necessary to restore Lebanon's freedom. My aunt told me she felt insulted when she heard demonstrators in Beirut insulting Syrians. I understood what she meant. But I also understood the Lebanese people's hatred.

On the way back to Beirut in George's taxi, I realized that the Syrian regime has been smart about one thing: For nearly two decades, it has done its dirtiest work in Lebanon. This at least partly explains the rift between the two peoples, the unshared resentment toward Assad's government.

In the lush Bekaa Valley, we drove past the quiet town of Majdal Anjar, and I thought of the mass grave uncovered there a few weeks ago. We Lebanese believe that many more such graves wait to be uncovered, as hundreds of families wait to learn the fate of their loved ones, some of whom were undoubtedly abducted or killed by the Syrian army. Right across the street was the Syrian occupation's official headquarters, where every Lebanese politician once had to pay obeisance.

So far, Syria has offered no public apology for its years of occupation, not even an admission of any wrongdoing. As we reached Beirut, I thought that the wall now separating the two nations can only be brought down if the mass movement that took place in Lebanon is paralleled by the Syrian street. Only through the fall of the Syrian government could Lebanon truly regain its freedom. But after my visit to Damascus, I didn't have much hope that this was imminent.

And yet -- upon my return, I was met by news that fell like a bombshell. The former Syrian vice president, Abdul Halim Khaddam, one of the officials most involved in the occupation, had defected from the regime, turning overnight into the chief witness for the international investigation into Hariri's assassination.

And suddenly, I felt hope stir.

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Lynn Maalouf is a special correspondent for The Washington Post in Beirut.

Original lnk: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/13/AR2006011302299_pf.html