This year it seemed that, finally, Hafez Assad’s time had come. As the clock ticked over into the new millennium, the gaunt, wily Arab leader looked ready to reap the rewards of his inexhaustible patience. At long last, the Israelis withdrew from southern Lebanon–after years of futilely fighting the Syrian-backed Hizbullah guerrillas–and seemed ready to give him the Golan. Assad had all but established his Western-educated son, Bashar, as his successor. And like Arafat, he had passed over that invisible threshold from roguehood to respect in U.S. eyes. Assad’s reign was often brutal: in 1982 his army slaughtered at least 10,000 people in Hama, a stronghold of Sunni Muslim fundamentalism. But by this year–despite a fruitless summit in Geneva in late March–Bill Clinton was treating him as a statesman who, the president said Saturday, had “made the strategic decision for peace.”
Yet Assad ultimately fell short. Only “an inch from an agreement,” as his old interlocutor, Henry Kissinger, put it over the weekend, the ailing Syrian autocrat died Saturday at the age of 69, apparently from heart failure. Now his death has left prospects for a comprehensive Middle East peace utterly “frozen,” says ex-Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres. While the Palestinians may yet cut a deal with the Israelis by the end of Clinton’s second term–an informal deadline for all parties–the emerging conventional wisdom is that the long-stalled Syrian “track” is shut down until at least next year. Indeed, Assad’s most lasting legacy may be that he held out for one demand too many. The main obstacle in Israeli-Syrian peace talks is but a few hundred disputed yards on the Sea of Galilee at the foot of the Golan Heights. “Assad was always short of a finger or two in reaching out to touch peace,” says Peres. His sudden death “opens the way for a period of real instability,” a top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told NEWSWEEK. “The leadership of Bashar is not naturally accepted. There’s no consensus on him.”
Perhaps. But Assad may confound doubters with his durability even in death. Brutal he may have been, but few Syrians could remember a better leader. Shortly after he died, the streets of Damascus quickly filled with hordes of grievers. Near Assad’s home a crowd also grew to several hundred people. Their chants rose above the Qur’anic laments broadcast from every mosque until late at night. The loss was felt particularly among the young. “It is like losing somebody very close,” said Mohammed Khiyami, a 22-year-old laborer. “I was one of his sons. The first thing I saw when I was born was President Assad.”
In other words Assad, who came to power in a 1970 coup, earned legitimacy simply by surviving. And he may well succeed–from the grave, as it were–in transferring that to his son. To the surprise of some, Damascus showed few signs of the power struggle long expected after his death. The Syrian Parliament, rather than waiting the allotted 60 days before naming a successor, quickly settled on Bashar by lowering the minimum age for the presidency from 40 to 34. That’s about Bashar’s age. “We paved the way for him to be president,” Farouk Souraya, a powerful Assembly member, said bluntly.
Participants in the peace process talk Bashar up as a savvy info-age reformer who, like Jordan’s new King Abdullah, is eager to bring Syria into the 21st century. Educated like Abdullah in England (as an ophthalmologist), Bashar fought and beat Syria’s old guard over bringing the Internet and mobile phones into the country. “He’s very liberal in his attitudes,” says Assad biographer Patrick Seale. “He’s aware that Syria has to open up and reform.” The Israelis were quick to put pressure on him. “If the new Syrian leadership wants to prevent Syria from becoming the North Korea of the Middle East, now’s the time to strike a deal,” Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh told NEWSWEEK.
Even in the best case, that’s not likely to happen for many months. Bashar may have the OK of the rubber-stamp Parliament, but he still holds the rank of a mere colonel in the Syrian Army. And he may have to fend off potential family rivals like his uncle Rifaat.
Bashar also must worry about Syria’s toxic ethnic stew. His family’s small Alawite sect has tenuous control over the nation’s majority Sunni Muslims, who dominate business and have long felt slighted. “Obviously the first thing Bashar has to do is establish legitimacy,” says another Barak aide. “You don’t do that by signing a peace accord with Israel.”
Still, Bashar, who is tall and thin like his father, will be less lonely in his power struggles than Hafez was. Clinton, for one, is breathless to back him up to get the Syrian peace track moving again. He ordered Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to lead the high-level U.S. delegation to Assad’s funeral on Tuesday. But one senior U.S. official conceded that Assad’s death “will take Syria out of the peace process for an indefinite period”–probably, he said, for the duration of the Clinton administration. For most Syrians, after 30 years of Hafez Assad’s painstaking moves toward peace, that’s not a very long wait at all.
Part of the Mideast Landscape
