Syria's ruling party solidifies its power: "They say they have a fixed time period to finish off the opposition"
By Michael Slackman
NYT
5\4\2006
Just months ago, under intense international pressure to ease its stranglehold on neighboring Lebanon, the Syrian government was talking about diluting the ruling Baath party's grip on power at home and opening the way for a multiparty system.Things have moved in the opposite direction.Syrian officials are aggressively silencing domestic political opposition while accommodating religious conservatives to shore up support across the country.The security forces have detained human rights workers and opposition leaders, and in some cases their families.They have barred travel abroad for political conferences and shut down a human rights center financed by the European Union.And the government has delivered a stern message to the national media, demanding that it promote - not challenge - the official agenda.The leadership's aggressive actions reflect a sense of confidence spawned by seismic shifts in the region in recent months, especially the Hamas victory in Palestinian elections, political paralysis in Lebanon and the intense difficulties facing the United States in trying to stabilize Iraq and derail Iran's drive toward nuclear power.The detentions, press crackdowns, restrictions on travel and the overall effort to crush dissent also are a response to a fragile domestic political climate and concern over a growing opposition movement abroad."I may not be keen on early morning arrests, but this regime was being threatened," Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Dardari, a London-educated technocrat charged with steering Syria's economic overhaul, said in an interview. "The survival of this regime and the stability of this country were threatened out loud and openly. There were invitations for foreign armies to come and invade Syria. So you could expect sometimes an overreaction, or a reaction, to something that is really happening."On Tuesday, Amnesty International issued a statement that condemned the Syrian crackdown and called on Damascus to release "all of those arrested due to their beliefs."The government has also sought to fortify its position with a nod to a reality sweeping many nations: A surge in people's religious identification and a growing desire to empower religious political movements, such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood recently won 88 seats in the Egyptian Parliament, despite often- violent government efforts to block its supporters from voting.The Syrian government has gone further to accommodate religious conservatives than in the past, officials and religious scholars said. It has appointed a sheik - not a secular Baathist - to head the Ministry of Religious Affairs; has allowed, for the first time, religious activities to take place in the stadium at Damascus University; and has permitted a speech emphasizing religious practices and identity to be given to a military audience.President Bashar al-Assad also has inserted references to religious identity and culture into his recent speeches.Most striking was the government's decision to reverse itself a month after trying to limit activities at mosques. The Ministry of Religious Affairs had effectively closed mosques to all activities but prayer."Before, religion for the regime was like a ball of fire. Now they deal with it like it could be a ball of light," said Abdul Qader al-Kittani, a professor of Islamic studies at Fattah Islamic University here.He added: "Two factors pushed the regime toward this direction. The first is the beat of the street. The second is external pressures on the regime."The United Nation's Security Council suggested in a report a few months ago that the state security apparatus was behind the February 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, and that the Syrians had defied the Security Council by refusing to cooperate with its investigation.But the pressure on Syria has eased and detentions have been stacking up since January, asserted human rights organizations and people who said they were arrested.Ammar Qurabi, former spokesman for the Arab Organization for Human Rights-Syria, was held in Damascus for four days after returning from political conferences in Washington and Paris. Samir Nashar, a businessman and opposition leader, was detained in Aleppo for three days after returning from conferences abroad.The security forces' aim was to deliver a message, some of those arrested said: The government will not tolerate any contact between internal opposition figures and a growing opposition movement abroad, a movement that is being encouraged by a former vice president, Abdel Halim Khaddam, who recently forged an alliance with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.Hussein al-Odat, an opposition leader in Damascus who said he was detained last week for two hours, said: "This time they wanted to relay a message or a warning: the Muslim Brotherhood, Khaddam and street protests are prohibited. They said it is clear and we will not be merciful."Ibrahim Hamidi, the Damascus bureau chief for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat, said the government was cracking down because of the changing regional situation. "Now they believe they can get away with it," he said.Ayman Abdul Nour, a Baath Party member who has promoted changing the party from the inside, said he has become so disillusioned he planned to move his business - a pro-reform Web site - from Damascus to the United Arab Emirates.He said he had been told that the party planned to expel many members under the pretext of failing to pay dues or failing to participate. In so doing, he said, the party would purge all those with reform agendas."They say they have a fixed time period to crack down and finish off the opposition," Abdel Nour said.Analysts at Human Rights Watch and several Syrian-based rights groups said that at least 30 people involved in politics or human rights work had been arrested since January, and that several of them have not been heard from since.Human rights leaders in Damascus asserted that the numbers were probably higher because most families were too afraid to report the arrests to their organizations.The novelist Sami al-Abbas and the poet Farouk Hamad were arrested on Monday for meeting with opposition leaders, said Razan Zaytouneh of the Syrian Human Rights Information Link, a local organization."In these last couple of months, people are much more afraid than before," Zaytouneh said. "The court officials are telling the families of the prisoners to be silent and not talk to activists because that will have very bad consequences for the prisoner."But Muhammad al-Habash, a member of Parliament and general manager of the Islamic Studies Center in Damascus, said that despite the restrictions, Syria is a far more relaxed place than it was five years ago, when, he said, he would not even have been allowed to meet with a foreign reporter.He praised the government's recent accommodations to religion saying, "They realize we need Islamic power, especially at this time," and endorsed the ban on travel to political conferences abroad."It is not a suitable time to allow people to travel abroad to participate in opposition conferences," he said. "We have to be real."