The Great War for Civilisation (165 page)

It was certainly true that the cult of presidential adoration with which Saddam Hussein had surrounded himself in Iraq—a Saddam City, Saddam International Airport, Saddam hospital and a Saddam art gallery—was quite absent in Syria. While Basil's name had been given to hospitals and provincial airports, there is only one Syrian institution which is dedicated in the name of the father. In Damascus, he sits today on a mighty iron chair—open book in his right hand—outside the Assad Library, a vast institution whose 22,000 square metres of pre-stressed concrete galleries contain the very continuity of Syrian history: 19,300 original manuscripts dating back to the eleventh century, 300,000 volumes, an audio-visual and computer centre, a series of state-of-the-art halls for ancient manuscript repairs and preservation. When I meet Dr. Mazin Arafi, director of the library's “cultural activities,” he speaks in near-reverence, in a whisper, of the mass of information now being placed on computer, including every Syrian law enacted since 1918— when the Syrians briefly enjoyed freedom from the Ottoman empire before French colonial rule was clamped upon them. Every Syrian-produced film, including Palestinian documentaries of the 1948 war with Israel, has been videotaped. Even those books banned by the regime are available for student research, including the later works of Michel Aflaq, who co-founded the secular, socialist Baath party in 1940, but who subsequently exiled himself to Iraq when the party divided between Syrian and Iraqi factions.

Dr. Nihad Jord opens the cabinet at the entrance to the manuscripts department and there, six inches from my face without a sheet of glass to separate us, lie pages of gold-and-blue Farsi script, a work of Islamic philosophy by Bin al-Marzouban al-Azerbaijani, handwritten in western Iran in 1066. As Harold of England was preparing to fight William of Normandy at Hastings, al-Azerbaijani was completing a text that would, nine centuries later, be photographed and placed on a database at the Assad Library. Dr. Jord walks through a narrow passageway. Lying beside us are a 1649 French translation of the Koran, a 1671 Bible in Latin and Arabic, a 500-year-old Arabic dictionary, the collected speeches of the Caliph Ali—dated 1308—and a 1466 study of how an Arab warrior should ride his horse while fighting with sword and spear. All have been transferred to the computer where Syria's modern history is also carefully recorded for posterity.

It is like a brain, this library; I understand this when Hasna Askihita takes me into the computer room. “Here we have put on our database every speech made by our president since 1970,” she says. And how many speeches has the president made since he came to power? I ask. Quick as a flash, she replies: “He has made 544 speeches. Would you like to call for one?” And she trawls through the computer memory. Up on the screen comes an angry denunciation of fundamentalist violence in 1982, a presidential meeting with British journalists on 30 January 1992, a conversation between Assad and
Time
magazine editors the same year, a 1994 press conference with President Clinton. Here is immortality indeed—and, I reflected, a demonstration of just how formidable must be the capacity of Syria's other computerised institutions; its intelligence services, for example. But it has greater relevance than this.

For the Assad Library is clearly intended to provide a continuity that connects the caliphate with the Baath, the ancient Islamic philosophers with Hafez Assad, as carefully as the women in the archive repair rooms bind together the torn pages of fifteenth-century books. Indeed, the president's latest speech is that very day being entered into the database, Assad's address to mark the twenty-sixth anniversary of the “correctionist movement.” “With adamant resolve,” it begins, “we continue our march for victory, working with all strength for increased immunity of the homeland.” Which, come to think of it, must have been what Harold of England was telling his troops on his way to do battle with William of Normandy in 1066.

What Syria tells its soldiers today is inscribed in a Koranic quotation around the top of the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier opposite Assad's hilltop palace above Damascus. “Don't think that those who have been killed for the cause of God are dead now. They are alive and are now enjoying the gifts of God.” In the crypt, a flurry of Syrian officers walk over to me, small moustaches above grey and brown uniforms. “Do you know what this is?” one of them asks, pointing to an oil painting of a brown-walled building with smoke pouring from its windows. Like all Syrians, he wants to test the foreigner's knowledge of history, to see where he should start his narrative. I know that the building is the Syrian parliament in 1946, under fire from troops of a French government that refused to abandon its old League of Nations mandate after the Second World War—twenty-five Syrian MPs and soldiers died in the bombardment. In showcases in the wall, there are three-dimensional tableaux depicting a similar continuity to that established at the library. In one large showcase, Saladin is depicted slaying Crusader occupation forces at the battle of Hittin north of Jerusalem. Another shows Syrian Special Forces retaking the hilltop Al-Shaikh observatory from the Israelis in 1973 before the Israelis stormed back onto the heights of Golan. A third display shows Syrian infantry destroying Israeli tanks at the battle of Sultan Yacoub in southern Lebanon after Israel's invasion of 1982.

A fourth tableau displays a struggle about which every Syrian learns at school but about which almost every Westerner is ignorant: the 1920 battle of Maysaloun. In the aftermath of the 1914–18 war, France was given the League of Nations mandate for Syria, an obligation that it honoured by chopping part of the Mediterranean coast off from Syria—to create the Christian-dominated Lebanon which was to collapse in civil war fifty-five years later—and destroying the Syrian army which had trusted the British promise of Arab independence in return for its help against the Turks. The Syrian minister of defence, Youssef Azmi, led his cavalry against French tanks in the narrow valley at Maysaloun, on the border between present-day Lebanon and Syria—there was, of course, no border then because “Lebanon” was part of Syria—on 24 July 1920. General Henri Gouraud's mechanised armour—in a largely unrecorded historical precedent to the German tank attack on Polish cavalry nineteen years later—annihilated the warrior horsemen from Damascus and left them to rot in the summer heat.

The road to Maysaloun today is a six-lane motorway; Azmi's tomb lies almost hidden in a grove of trees to the south. When I arrived there on a cold evening, I found only his grave and a group of broken houses on the main road that appeared to have been destroyed by shells. Up on the hillside, however, was an old man who had vague memories of the battle: Hamzi Abdullah could not remember his own age but he had a clear recollection of a boyhood in which he spent weeks picking up the cartridge cases and shell fragments after the hopeless, doomed Arab cavalry charge of 1920. Hamzi was unshaven but wore an old kuffiah headdress. “The French came down from Wadi Nemsi with their Algerian and Senegalese troops,” he said. “There were aircraft too and we didn't have any chance.”

Hamzi held his right hand and wobbled it from side to side like a biplane caught in an updraught of air. “It was all over in hours and the French killed almost everyone they found. My mother was taken prisoner and put in a house just over there. Youssef Azmi and another of our leaders were tied up and the French decided to execute them. My mother has been dead twenty-seven years but I remember her telling me how she saw Azmi led to a telegraph pole to be executed. He threw his kuffiah at her and the other women and said: ‘This is for you to remember me.' My mother said the women were crying but they threw it back to him, saying: ‘You are the hero and you are the only one worthy of wearing these clothes.' He was tied to a post over there and the French told the French Algerians to shoot him. But they refused. They were good Muslims. So the French told their Senegalese colonial troops to do it. And the Senegalese shot him as he was tied to the telegraph pole.”

Hamzi Abdullah's family produced the obligatory hot, sticky coffee, and a younger man joined us, a soldier who had fought in Lebanon. “I'll show you the place where they kept the women and Youssef Azmi,” he said, and led me down the dirt hillside to one of the smashed Ottoman houses by the road. “This is where the French imprisoned them. But the house was mostly destroyed in 1967 when the Israelis shelled this area.” So what the French had left undone, it seemed, the Israelis had finished. But not quite. For the ex-soldier's story was not complete. “This has always been my home. In 1982, I fought across the border in the battle of Sultan Yacoub—we captured the Israeli tanks there—and the next year, when I was at home here, the American navy shelled us right across Lebanon and the shells of the battleship
New Jersey
fell on the hills up here.” There was a silence while I scribbled this powerful example of historical continuity into my notebook. In 1920, the French had destroyed the Arab army at Maysaloun. In 1967, at the end of the Six Day War, the Israelis had shelled Maysaloun. Another sixteen years later, the U.S. 6th Fleet, supporting President Ronald Reagan's collapsing NATO force in Beirut, had shelled the Syrian army's supply route through this very same valley of Maysaloun. And the man who was telling me this had himself fought in the tank battle commemorated in the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier. France, Israel, America. If the Syrians were xenophobic, it was easy—here in this valley where the bodies of men and horses were once left to decay—to see why.

Syria's soldiers would fight to oppose the nascent Israeli state in 1948, and then to confront Israel in 1967, in 1973, in Lebanon in 1982. And they fought, also in 1982, at a city in central Syria called Hama—a name that is remembered with as much fear as it is left unspoken. When I began the long drive up the international highway, the cold, grey anti-Lebanon mountain range scudded with snow to my left, I found the very name of Hama oppressive. I had driven this same road many times as a reporter during the “Muslim Brotherhood” uprising of 1982, as the rebels of Hama assaulted the city's Baath party officials. They had cut the throats of the families of government workers, murdered policemen, beheaded schoolteachers who insisted on secular education—as the GIA had done in Algeria, just as the Afghan rebels had hanged the schoolteacher and his wife outside Jalalabad in 1980; I still remembered the piece of blackened meat on the tree, twisting in the wind. Back in 1982 I had, for an extraordinary—and, I now realise, dangerous— eighteen minutes, succeeded in entering Hama as the army's special forces under Hafez Assad's brother Rifaat crushed the uprising with great savagery. I stood by the river Orontes as Syrian battle-tanks shelled the ancient city; I saw the wounded, covered in blood, lying beside their armoured vehicles, the starving civilians scavenging for old bread. Up to 20,000, it was said, died in the underground tunnels and detonated buildings. The real figure may have been nearer 10,000, but most of the old city was destroyed.
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Now I was going back and I had some uneasy thoughts. Only a week earlier, I had been to Algeria, reporting the massacre of civilians by the armed Islamic opposition, the throat-cuttings and beheadings, the death squads and torture rooms of the government. Back in 1982, the world condemned Syria for the cruelty of its suppression of Hama; now it was largely silent as the Algerian government bloodily eradicated its own “Islamist” enemies. Was there not, I asked myself as my car hissed up the rain-soaked highway, an awful parallel here? We demand respect for human rights in the Middle East—rather more loudly among the Arab states than in Israel, to be sure—but we also warn of the dangers of fundamentalism, of “Islamic terror.”

The roadblocks of plain-clothes intelligence men who had stopped me in and around Hama in 1982 had gone, but their presence could still be felt in a society in which any opposition to Assad's rule was regarded by the authorities as treachery. There is no doubt about who rules Hama today—nor about the need to erase its past. Over the wreckage of much of the old Hama now stand gardens, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a luxury hotel and a magnificent new mosque under construction. The latest British guidebook to Syria made not a single mention of the events of 1982, save for acknowledging the mysterious—and unexplained—absence of the original Great Mosque. Only when I walked across a small bridge in the Keylani suburb did I find reminders of the past: eighteenth-century buildings scarred by bullets, a palace of black-and-white stone lying gutted behind one of the city's famous noria water-wheels, a modern villa with a shell-hole where the window should have been. A few local painters were keeping alive what had been lost, in fragile watercolours that can be bought as postcards in the market.

And a few bold souls were prepared to recall what happened. Mohamed—it was the name he chose—stood in a narrow street in Keylani, speaking slowly and with great circumspection. “I lived here throughout the battle,” he said. “My home was on the front line between the army and the rebels. I lived in the basement with my family of six for eighteen days. You cannot imagine how we felt when we ran out of food. I crawled out and found some old bread by an oil drum—it had been soaked in oil but we ate it. At the end, on the last day of the battle, we were able to leave.”

The fact that Mohamed spoke at all to me was almost as extraordinary as his story. Was the climate of fear evaporating in Syria—or was the bloodbath at Hama now seen in a new perspective? A junior government employee—necessarily anonymous but genuinely loyal to Assad—tried to explain this to me as we lunched at the Sahara restaurant in Damascus. It is an expensive café of white linen tablecloths and bow-tied waiters, owned—ironically—by the man who oversaw the suppression of the Hama rebellion, the president's brother Rifaat. “I know you disapprove of what happened at Hama, Robert, the killings and the executions,” he said. “But you must also realise that if our president had not crushed that uprising, Syria would have been like Algeria today. We tried to talk to the Brothers at first, to negotiate with them. We didn't want this bloodbath. We asked them: ‘What do you want?' They said: ‘The head of the president.' And, of course, that was the end. We were not going to have an Islamic fundamentalist state in Syria. You in the West should be grateful to us. We crushed Islamic fanaticism here. We are the only country in the Middle East to have totally suppressed fundamentalism.” And over our plates of chickpeas and tomatoes and garlic-pressed yoghurt, the local arak burning our mouths, one could only reflect upon the devastating truth of the man's last statement.