Assad Is Dead: Will Assad Live Long?

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2000 by Charles Foster

PROBABLY Basher al-Assad, until recently an ophthalmologist, would rather be doing something other than governing Syria. Looking into diseased eyes, for instance, or tinkering with his computers. But it would be a mistake to assume that power reluctantly assumed will be power tentatively exercised. Genes, national and international expectation and the imperative of survival may prove a lot more important than temperamental tendencies. Running a Middle Eastern state is like riding a bicycle: You have to have a certain minimum speed to keep upright, and if you have that speed, and a bit of weight, you have a lot of momentum and can do a lot of damage.

Probably Bashar will face few immediate domestic challenges. His father, under cover of an anti-corruption campaign, did a very thorough job of knocking out most of the possible pretenders to the throne. Bashar's uncle Rifaat, though he makes loud and aggressive noises from Paris, Marbella and London, and though he enjoys some support amongst some wings of the security services and amongst some of the more nervously nepotistic Alawis, is disliked by the army and distrusted by the average Syrian in the street.

But Bashar is being watched hard by everyone. His main strength, of course, is that he is his father's son. It would be fatal for him to divert too soon from the course his father set Syria on. And probably he would not want to change much that his father started, except possibly the planned pace. Hafez al-Assad was legendarily cautious. But he had acknowledged that it was necessary to talk to and compromise with Israel, to give Lebanon a slightly longer leash, to increase the economic contribution of the private sector, and to oil the wheels of public administration by ungreasing the palms of the bureaucrats. He was a genuine pan-Arabist, but realised that the Baath party had had its day. His Arab nationalism was ideological and also pragmatic: the demise of Syria's principal sponsor and underwriter, the Soviet Union, made getting on with the Gulf States an economic necessity. Yes, Alawis were over-represented in his institutions, but he was far less of an incestuous Alawi nepotist than he has been painted as being. Many of his real internal difficulties came from Alawi in-fighting, and Al-Assad was always more sympathetic to the non-Alawi majority in Syria than many of his Alawi henchmen thought he should be. Bashar will have no difficulty in agreeing with most of this. His priorities will be, in this order: The economy, Lebanon, and talks with Israel.

The economy is in a dreadful state. Syria has been in serious recession since the mid 1990s. Its oil revenues have been squandered. So have the huge sums Syria got for joining the West against Iraq. A huge proportion of its income goes to finance an increasingly lame army, crippled by the cessation of Soviet support. There is a grotesquely over-staffed, corrupt bureaucracy, which makes it difficult for the private sector to make a start. The corruption is in high places. Since many of those high places are occupied by Alawis, Bashar will have to be careful how he roots it out. But his crusade against corruption (which seems to be a personal passion rather than an excuse for a pragmatic purge) will be popular with the people and, more importantly, with a number of long-sighted, power-broking would-be entrepreneurs who believe that free enterprise will feather their nests more cosily than the statutory back-handers of the present system. Bashar is less neurotically xenophobic than his father. He knows the refo rming power of a few Australian backpackers, and an expansion of tourism will be one of his first objectives.

Bashar has had charge of Lebanon for the last two years. He has made a good job of it and is liked and trusted there. Lebanon was Hafez al-Assad's main concern in the weeks before his death, but the details of his long-term plan are not clear. Lebanese troops were to be allowed into the southern security zone, vacated by Israel, but only to keep the locals from getting over-excited. The UNIFIL force was to be allowed to increase its presence, but no-one thought it could achieve much anyway. What Hafez al-Assad intended to do, and what Bashar will do about Hizbollah, is unclear. Hizbollah has been fairly quiet since the death of Assad, but it may well test Bashar's mettle and intentions by some unauthorized action against Israel's northern border soon. That will not worry Bashar much. He is quite capable of using Hizbollah as a way of controlling the temperature of the Israel-Syria talks. In some ways he will be quite happy to have Hizbollah tucked away there in south Lebanon. More worrying will be the much m ore metropolitan Christian Maronite leaders,. whose jubilation at Hafez al-Assad's death has been barely contained. They have chafed visibly and sometimes audibly under the yoke of Syria's rule, and will be wondering if an opportunity for deliverance has come. Syria's military presence in Lebanon is colossal, and even the more dreamy Maronites do not believe that Syria can be driven out. But an armed demonstration or the threat of an armed demonstration will be being discussed now by some of the Maronite factions, and they are strong enough to cause Bashar to think that it may be better to buy them off with a few concessions than to shell them out with the loss of a fair few Syrian lives. Compromise with Lebanon is wholly palatable to most Syrians.