The Great War for Civilisation (164 page)

And so we had to listen to more public adulation. Arafat claimed that Hussein had been a Saladin, the warrior knight who had driven the Crusaders from Palestine. In truth, it was the Israelis who drove the Hashemites from Palestine. But Hussein was a courtly man. What king would ever have turned up at his own state security jail to drive his most vociferous political opponent home? Leith Shubeilath had infuriated the monarch and was slapped into prison for asking why Queen Noor wept at the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin when the widow of a Palestinian radical leader murdered by the Israelis in Malta “did not receive any official condolences, nor was a single teardrop shed by a princess or the wife of any official.” When the king arrived at the jail, Shubeilath delayed him for ten minutes while he said goodbye to his fellow inmates. Hussein waited patiently for him. Would Saddam have done that? Or King Fahd? Or President Mubarak? Or would Benjamin Netanyahu?

Perhaps it is this which distinguished the king: among the monsters of the Middle East, he appeared such a reasonable man. He believed that if he trusted enough in another person, his good faith would be returned; he was cruelly rewarded. He believed in Benjamin Netanyahu until the Israeli prime minister refused him permission to fly Arafat from Amman to Gaza in his private aircraft. “My distress is genuine and deep over the accumulating tragic actions which you have initiated at the head of the government of Israel, making peace—the worthiest objective of my life—appear more and more like a distant elusive mirage,” he wrote to the Israeli premier in March 1997. Netanyahu announced that he was “baffled by the personal attacks against me.” This was the same Netanyahu who turned up, bareheaded and black-coated, to mourn the king's passing.

What is it about dictators—kings or “strongmen” if they're on our side—that somehow infantilises all the people who live under them? Across the Middle East I would watch this process of dictator–people love, its extreme form made manifest in Iraq, but present in the Gulf states and in that brew of Arab nationalism and Soviet friendship which produced the Baathist regime of Syria. Always derided and scorned and often hated by America's right-wing friends of Israel, President Hafez Assad's Syria was throughout the Eighties and Nineties an unusual mixture of paternalism and ruthlessness, a mixture of childish “adoration” for the Baathist president and fear of the state security police, an understandable and cringing respect for authority made partly genuine by the fear of all those Arab states set up by the colonial powers: of chaos, anarchy and civil destruction should the whole architecture of the one-party state suddenly fall to bits. In Assad's case, his crown prince was his son Basil. The problem was that Basil was dead.

Syria was the only country I could reach by car from Beirut, and I travelled there when I could, always allowed a visa, my barbs and my condemnation and my occasional cynicism permitted, so a Syrian minister of information once explained to me with cloying
politesse
, because I wrote from “a good heart” and was not a foreign agent and because the government was prepared to forgive my “mistakes”—a charitable policy that was not extended to Arab journalists. This created inevitably missing heartbeats among the middle-aged men who worked for the minister, who knew very well that they would have to smooth my way for interviews that could—and sometimes did—go terribly wrong. “Oh God, Fisk is back again!” one of them would always shout when I put my head into his office in Damascus.

You could see his point. Under the door of every foreign guest in the three big hotels in Damascus would arrive each morning a symbol of the regime: the
Syria
Times
. This was no flagship of new Arab democracy, no investigative organ trying to open up Baathism to the world as a free society. It was a paper with which ministers and civil servants could feel safe, at home, even bored—because life in a dictatorship is essentially boring. That is the nature of dictatorial power. Nothing ever changes. Assad's ministers would outlast those of any other country—especially Iraq—and their loyalty was rewarded by Assad's loyalty.

So page 1 of the
Syria Times
would invariably contain a large photograph of President Assad, often seen reading a newspaper—though never, I noticed, the
Syria Times—
and even more frequently pictured as he addressed crowds of supporters or denigrated “Zionist expansionism.” The
Syria Times
was one of those papers—brave in a perverse way, I suppose—that risked sending its few readers to sleep with front-page stories of five-year industrial plans, agricultural overproduction and long telegrams from flour-mill workers in northern Syria congratulating President Assad on the anniversary of his “correctionist movement.” Its inside pages would be filled with dull poetry, anti-Israeli tracts of inordinate length and, occasionally, articles by me which the paper had cribbed—without permission— from
The Independent
. I took the charitable view that this was obviously a mistake made with a “good heart.” It was surprising how easy it was to adopt Syria's policies for oneself.

The Syrian ministry man who always greeted me with an invocation was the same luckless official who would sit by my side one day when I asked the editor of the
Syria Times
if I could buy his newspaper, printing press and all. Why would I want to do that? the editor asked me. Because, I replied, I could close it down and would never have to read it again. The editor looked at me down his nose and said he didn't understand my reply. I smiled. He smiled. That's how it was done in Syria. Another “mistake” by me. The Syrian ministry official remains anonymous in this book because he still works for the present minister. That is the nature of Syria: obedience, faithfulness and continuity, the qualities every father-figure desires from his family. But Syria was a “middle” dictatorship. If you flew in from London—or drove from Beirut—Damascus was the capital of a police state. If you arrived from Baghdad, it felt like a liberal democracy.

Every journalist would seek to find out something new about Syria. Was there any hope of political reform, a new purge on corruption perhaps? A new banking system that would ease the economy out of the hands of the old Baathists that surrounded the president? But Syria was not a country that lived on its future. It was in many ways devoted to its past, and its people—however much they might freeze politically in the sparse Baathist drawing rooms of Damascus—understood their country's history in a way that few Westerners did, or even tried to do.

One cold day in November 1996, I set out for the village from which President Assad came, high in the Alawi Mountains of western Syria, to Qardaha where his son lay in a mosque of grey concrete under an equally leaden sky. They were still building the shrine over Basil Assad,
chevalier
of Syria, leader of men, enemy of corruption, favourite son of Hafez, the president of Syria. At the gates of the unfinished mosque at Qardaha, a paratrooper in a red beret and a young man greeted me.

The civilian was dressed in black and I noticed at once that he was wearing a black tie bearing the image of Basil, in which the president's dead son wears black sunglasses. Another young man approached me, the guardian of the shrine, unwilling to give his name because “Basil outshone all of us who remain alive.” I gesture towards the monument to my right, a tall concrete spire upon which an artist's impression of Basil, in the uniform of the Syrian army, is riding his show-jumping horse upwards towards the stars of heaven while his father Hafez, in presidential blue suit, holds out his arms in farewell, his face a mask of sorrow and pride. Tell me about Basil, I ask the anonymous guardian. Is Basil not now more present in death—in all his portraits—than he ever was in life?

The guardian of the shrine smells of musk. He smiles and clutches my hand. “The late Basil had no peers—as a leader, no one could match him,” he says. “He won a gold medal as a horse-rider in the tenth Mediterranean games. He had no rival in sportsmanship. As a free-fall paratrooper, he was one of our heroes.” I try to ask another question but the guardian politely raises his hands in protest. “Thanks to the late Basil, the government has computers—he was the founder of the Syrian Data Processing Society. He was a staff major in the army, winning all his military courses, and he graduated with a Ph.D. in military science from the Khrushchev University in Russia as well as a civil engineering degree at Damascus University.” I wanted to talk about the monument but the admonishing hand rose again. “The late Basil spoke French and English fluently. He was modest. He talked to all the people in an ordinary way. He embodied the modesty of our president but you would never think the late Basil was the son of so important a man. He was against corruption and encouraged the youth to turn to sports in order to avoid the evils of drugs. He symbolised the morality of the younger generation.”

There was here, I thought, the faintest ghost of Tom Graham, V.C., the fictional British soldier who went to fight in Afghanistan and whose “life” appeared to inspire young Bill Fisk. The man was perfect. It was as simple as that. Basil could do no wrong. He was the
sans pareil
. It was an oral version of the words carved on the shrines of great Arab nobles, but unstoppable—at least until I ask the dates of Basil's birth and death. “He was born on 23 April 1962. He died on 21 January 1994.” Died, it should be added, on a foggy morning on the Damascus airport highway when his car overturned as he rushed to catch a flight to Germany.

The guardian invited me to enter the shrine. A cloud of incense funnelled towards the roof and, beyond a glass door, there stood the catafalque of Basil Assad, draped in green silk and embroidered with gold Koranic script: “God is Great and his Prophet is Mohamed.” The tomb is that of a nobleman, faintly modelled on that of the horseback warrior who drove the Crusaders from the Holy Land and who rests today under an equally green canopy scarcely 135 miles away in Damascus, the same Saladin whom General Gouraud had mocked in 1921. Behind the catafalque, two bright sodium lamps illuminated a startling oil painting of Basil: unsmiling, bearded, handsome, hair tossed carelessly over his forehead, a look of grim determination on his face, a man—like his father—not to be crossed, in life or in death. The young mourners in black were there to ensure respect and watched me carefully for a minute, but then—with a sudden flourish of open arms—told me I could take photographs. “Because it is darker here, I suppose you'll be using 800 film,” the guardian said softly. It was like the end of a religious service, that moment when the priest warns his congregation that it is raining outside, that they will most certainly need their umbrellas. Yes, I needed 800 film.

Assad means “lion,” and the roadside outside Qardaha greeted me with the words: “Welcome to Qardaha, the Lion's Den.” The lion's den turned out to be an unremarkable village—save for its luxury hotel and modern highway—buried in a fold of hills below the mountains east of Lattakia in north-west Syria where the minority Alawite people, to whom President Assad belongs, form a majority of the population. The Lion of Qardaha became the Lion of Damascus on 16 November 1970, when, as minister of defence in the Baath socialist government, Hafez Assad toppled his rivals in a bloodless coup—this was the “correctionist movement” of which the
Syria Times
so often wrote—opening up his country to economic and political liberalisation but ensuring that his rule remained—with the help of an efficient secret police apparatus—unchallenged.

But now that his favourite son was gone, could Assad's regime survive his own death? It was a question that every Syrian asked. Assad gave his country stability and unity, crushed his internal “Islamist” enemies and fought the Israelis, in a vain attempt to recapture the Golan Heights in 1973 and in a successful battle to prevent Israel from subduing Lebanon in 1982. He had wanted to bequeath to his favourite son a Syria that had regained its lost lands, that stood unchallenged as the vanguard of the Arab world. The son had now died; but Assad's Syria was still demanding the return of the Golan Heights from Israel. There could thus be no Middle East peace without Syria—this became Baathist shorthand for many months of negotiations—but it was Basil's ghost that now stood sentinel over Syria's future. “He is with us still,” the guardian of the shrine tells me in the frozen wind outside the mosque. “He will always inspire us.” And he holds my hands in both of his, looking into my face.

As I drive out of Qardaha, the smell of musk comes from my hands—it will remain with me all day. On the right of the road, towering over the trees and embankment, a massive statue of Basil and his horse stares down at me. Basil will follow me all over Syria, on banners and flags and posters, in the camouflage uniform of the Syrian army, in khaki dress on horseback or, in bronze, striding towards me beside the international highway north of Damascus. And so will his father, the sixty-six-year-old man whose giant statues and busts appeared at the gates of Syria's great cities. From some of his plinths, he holds out his arms towards me. From others, he stares at my passing car, eyes fixed, presidential sash over his shoulders. At the village of Deir Attiah, the home of Assad's
chef de cabinet
and close personal friend, Abu Selim Daabul, his statue dominates a cliff-face, waving down at me cheerfully through the winter rains. “We cannot stop the people from erecting his statues out of gratitude,” a Damascus newspaper editor insisted when I raised with him what could easily be mistaken for a personality cult. “The president did not ask for these statues. They were not his doing.” And the editor watched me for a long time after saying this, to see if I believed him.