Hafez Assad 1930-2000: After The Lion

There always seems to be the music. Whenever dictators pass away, it seems, state-controlled TV takes to the airwaves not with news reports but with music–as if a mellifluous melody could somehow soothe the anxieties of a leaderless populace, a commanderless army and a watching world. And so it was when Hafez Assad died last week. Syrian state media trumpeted classical music and koranic verses–a TV prayer vigil for the 69-year-old dictator. The cameras captured weeping members of the Syrian parliament mourning the onetime air force pilot who had taken a poor nation of 17 million and made it, well, still poor but nevertheless a pivotal player in the Middle East.

For three decades, Hafez Assad ruled Syria–and confounded the world. Six American Presidents found him frustrating, remote. The Egyptian pyramids lay to the southwest, but it was Assad who was dubbed the Sphinx. Assad remained a riddle. Austere, he neither smoked nor drank. He would summon aides at all hours to discuss an issue, then closet himself for days before abruptly announcing a decision. He never came to America; from Nixon to Clinton, they either traveled the road to Damascus or met him in neutral Geneva. They worried about elections and deadlines; a dictator, he never worried about the clock ticking. He was legendary for his marathon negotiating sessions and infuriating intransigence. But it was his actions that so befuddled American leaders. Syria helped lead the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel; in 1976, it marched into Lebanon and never left. Assad’s Syria has been a stalwart of the State Department’s terrorism list since its inception in 1979–but it was also part of the anti-Iraq coalition that fought in the Gulf War.

His death comes at another one of those precarious moments in the precarious Middle East. Eight months ago there were hopes–in both Washington and Jerusalem–that the end of the Clinton Administration would provide an incentive for a two-track peace deal, one that included the Palestinians and Syrians. This week Israeli and Palestinian leaders jet to Washington to resuscitate their settlement negotiations. But Assad’s death seems likely to kill hopes for a fast Syrian-Israeli pact. President Clinton praised Assad for his “commitment to the path of peace.” But that was an oversimplification. Assad was committed to peace–but only on his inflexible terms. He was intent on doing it his way, at his pace. White House insiders spent much of this past year privately speculating that Assad wouldn’t pass up the chance to pull off a deal before Clinton left office. But in recent months he seemed willing to do just that, most notably snubbing the President during a hastily convened Geneva meeting in March. Clinton arrived at the meeting full of hope. He left–as so many negotiators have over the years–reminded that Assad’s 30 years in power had made him one of the world’s sharpest and most patient negotiators. Besides, American diplomats offered by way of excuse, the Syrian President was busy preparing his son Bashar to succeed him. Nobody suspected that would happen so abruptly.

The Israeli government expressed its sorrow, but behind the scenes a more sober view reigned. Assad was, in some ways, a good foe to have: smart, reliable in his intransigence. Though in 1973 he sent hundreds of tanks swarming toward Israel on the Jewish Day of Atonement in a concerted effort with Egypt to regain Arab territory, once he’d lost the war, he kept to the truce with utmost scrupulousness.

In the Arab world, there was sadness–not on the order of the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the great Egyptian leader and pan-Arabist–but melancholy. Coming soon after the death of Jordan’s King Hussein, Assad’s passing marked a changing of the guard–and, perhaps, new volatility–in the region as leaders like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak (71), Yasser Arafat (71) and Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd (79) grow old.

From Washington to Jerusalem there is hope that Assad’s all-but-certain successor, his son Bashar, might display at least a tad more flexibility than his father. But it seems likely that Bashar’s first task will be to consolidate his power. The same weeping parliamentarians who mourned Assad pere found time on Saturday to lower the minimum age for the country’s ruler from 40 to 34, not coincidentally Bashar’s age. But now that he’s legal to rule, Bashar will still face a blistering few months of on-the-job training. Among his key tasks will be reaching out to the Syrian military, intelligence agencies and other pillars of his father’s power–including the nation’s 15 internal security forces. His father had begun to prepare a hand-off, in what Martha Kessler, a recently retired CIA analyst, said was “one of the most carefully orchestrated transitions ever.” But Assad wasn’t finished. Are there anti-Bashar elements still squirreled away in Damascus’ complex power structure? Will they strike? It was a legacy of Assad’s opaque rule that even his son probably doesn’t know if every threat has been eliminated.

Bashar’s view will have to extend outside Damascus as well. He’ll focus not only on the Golan Heights but also on Lebanon, a land that was a playpen for his father’s power politics. With Israel gone from Lebanon, many Lebanese, particularly Christians, are eager to see Syria go too. Damascus has 30,000 soldiers in the nation, and it controls much of the political discourse. It can try to steer Hizballah, the anti-Israeli guerrilla force, but it cannot control it. Israel has vowed to hold Damascus accountable for any Hizballah attacks on northern Israel. Bashar will have to keep the guerrillas in check.

Israeli and American officials had known for some time that Assad was ill. But the suddenness with which he died surprised nearly everyone, including Israeli intelligence. In northern Virginia, the reports of Assad’s death came into CIA headquarters early Saturday morning. The agency’s operatives in Damascus were reporting that top Syrian and Baath Party officials were spotted rushing to the presidential palace on a hilltop overlooking the capital city. By early morning Washington time, officials at the U.S. embassy in Damascus, who were working their own sources, had what they believed was solid confirmation that Assad was dead. President Clinton got word as he sat on the dais at Carleton College in Minneapolis, Minn., preparing to deliver a commencement speech.

Hafez Assad was born in a mountain farming village in 1930, not far from the Mediterranean. He grew up poor–and acutely aware of the limits of his birth. He was an Alawite, a member of an Islamic sect that blends Christian and Islamic doctrine, and thus a part of Syria’s smallest ethnic group. It’s often said in the Middle East that “faith is destiny,” and though Assad’s Alawite faith could have destined him to obscurity, he seemed to have a higher belief–in himself. Though he was the first in his family to attend secondary school, he was elected president of the Union of Syrian Students. At 16, swept by a tide of Arab pride, he joined the Baath Party, a political initiative that had as its triple agenda the spread of socialism, the unification of Arab states and freedom. (There is another Baath leader in the Arab world–Saddam Hussein.) Even as Assad aged, he never abandoned hope that Arabs could put aside rivalries and unite. With few career paths open to an ambitious non-Sunni, Assad entered the air force academy in his early 20s. His “stick” was sharp enough to win him the best-aviator trophy upon graduation.

His trajectory after the academy, a pilot’s flight path, was ever upward. After the Baathists seized power in 1963, Assad became head of the air force, then Minister of Defense. Alarmed when Syrian leaders ordered the country’s armed forces to intervene in the 1970 Jordanian civil war, Assad staged his own coup, eerily dubbed “the corrective movement.” He brought stability by crushing dissent–and also a resurgence of national pride after Syria joined Egypt in launching an attack on Israel in 1973. In the mid-1970s, aided by handouts from the oil-rich gulf states, Syria enjoyed its palmiest years ever.

But then the troubles began. Assad’s firmest internal enemy was fundamentalism. He treated it with characteristic force. During an Islamic rebellion in the town of Hama in 1982, fundamentalists executed local Baathist leaders. Assad had his troops surround the town and level part of it with artillery. An estimated 10,000 may have died. He ruled by fear: Assad’s security forces perfected the art of torture in punishing foes of the regime.

He was only slightly kinder to his own family. After his brother Rifaat took advantage of a presidential heart attack to make a power grab in 1983, Assad exiled him to Europe. Hafez had groomed his son Basil to take his place, but a car accident took the young man’s life in 1994, and Hafez quickly turned to preparing Bashar.

It is hard to know what Assad envisioned for his life when he was young, gazing up at the stars in the mountain town where he was raised. His vision for Syria remained equally unclear, even after 30 years of rule. As the world changed around him–shifting from the chilliest of cold wars to the hottest of capitalist expansions–he stood alone, more worried about how to hold on to his power than what to do with it. Says Richard Haass, a Brookings Institution foreign policy expert: “He missed out on globalization, missed out on democratization. And he missed out on peace.” They said the Lion of Damascus would never blink. He never did.

–Reported by Lisa Beyer/Jerusalem, Christopher Hack and Azadeh Moaveni/Beirut, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Michael Duffy and Douglas Waller/Washington