The First Arab on the Second Front

There was another round of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East last week, but for once Henry Kissinger was not involved. This time it was United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who flew back and forth between Jerusalem and Damascus in a last-ditch effort to extend the mandate of the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force on the Golan Heights. At week's end, after exhaustive deliberations in the U.N. Security Council, Syria reluctantly agreed to extend the mandate.

Complex questions were involved in Waldheim's effort to keep the 1,220-man force of Austrians, Iranians, Canadians and Poles on the Golan. Israel was willing to renew the mandate, but only on the same terms as the original mandate worked out by Kissinger in May 1974. Damascus made renewal of the mandate a cliffhanger by presenting some new -- and to Israel, unacceptable -- demands. Syria argued that any extension of the U.N. force should be tied to a Security Council decision on rights for the Palestinians and to a peace treaty, within six months, calling for Israeli withdrawal from all territory occupied during the Six-Day War of 1967. In fact, last week Syrian President Hafez Assad suggested that the Security Council rather than Geneva should be the forum for future negotiations (see box).

The finish to last week's mandate negotiations was a deliberate diplomatic ploy by the Syrian President. Assad has been described by Kissinger as "the most interesting man in the Middle East." He looks rather like an indulgent schoolteacher, but has been a crack jet pilot and commander of Syria's air force. In negotiations, he at first seems to waffle and waver, yet even Kissinger has come to respect his exquisite sense of timing and his decisiveness in the crunch. Outwardly modest and self-effacing, inwardly tough, Assad today appears to be consolidating his control of Syria, a country that underwent no fewer than 21 coups or coup attempts after the French mandate ended in 1946. Last month Assad celebrated the fifth anniversary of the "corrective movement" that brought him to power as head of Syria's Baathist regime.

Bitter Feud. Assad does not want another Middle East war so soon after 1973 (see box), and is testing diplomatic alternatives while keeping up his military guard. His brinkmanship act over the U.N. mandate last week was in part intended to show the world that Syria plans to regain all of the Golan Heights. Syria has refused to rebuild the ruined city of Quneitra, the ancient Golan capital given up by Israel in the 1974 disengagement agreement. Syrian officials delight in showing foreign visitors the remains of buildings bulldozed by the Israelis before they left.

Israel is willing to make a "cosmetic" adjustment -- unacceptable to Syria -- of the present disengagement line but will not discuss a larger surrender of territory except in terms of an overall peace settlement. And Damascus, which remains the foremost Arab champion of the Palestinian cause, wants a voice for the P.L.O. at any peace proceedings.

Some observers suspect that Assad has other motives in supporting the fedayeen, who are closely watched and restricted within Syria. The Syrians are also discreetly involved in trying to maintain peace in battered Lebanon (see following story) and they have renewed ties with King Hussein, whom Damascus has denounced at times as an "heir of treason" for his expulsion of the fedayeen from Jordan in the "Black September" of 1970. Jordan, Lebanon and parts of Palestine make up what was known as Greater Syria. Israelis, at least, wonder whether Assad, in his attempts to form an Eastern military front against Israel, is also eager to reconstitute Syria's old political hegemony.

Others argue that Assad is merely asserting Syria's role as the traditional defender of pan-Arab nationalism. As spokesman for this cause, Assad attacked Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for making the separate Sinai agreements with Israel that have, for the moment, shattered the Arab confrontation front. Since the second accord, Cairo and Damascus have been engaged in a bitter rhetorical feud. Egypt has taunted Syria for having sought a private agreement with Israel by begging for a cease-fire only 24 hours after the fighting commenced in 1973. Cairo newspapers have charged that Syrian "prisons and concentration camps are crammed with people whose only crime was a word of objection against the terrorist Baath Party." When Kissinger attempted to arrange a European meeting between Assad and Ford following the American President's trip to Rambouillet, Egyptians deliberately leaked the details while Assad was in Moscow. The premature Egyptian announcement forced Assad to deny the Ford talks in order to salvage his Moscow meeting.

Some important financial considerations underlie this rivalry for leadership of the Arab cause. Both Cairo and Damascus are anxious to hold and if possible increase the subsidies they receive as "confrontation countries" from Saudi Arabia and the oil states of the Persian Gulf. Fully one-quarter of Syria's record $4.5 billion national budget in 1976 will come from such payments.

New Freedoms. In the past, Damascus' uncertain rulers carried on their domestic and international politicking from behind the battlements of a "fortress Syria" that was often hostile to non-Arabs. One of Assad's major achievements has been to open up his country to outsiders as it has not been in 20 years. Moreover, he now feels secure enough in his power to grant new freedoms to his 7.3 million people even while preserving the essential socialist character of the country.

Politics in Syria is synonymous with the Baath Party. Baath -- Arabic for renaissance -- is a movement founded by two young Syrian schoolteachers, who sought to meld Marxist socialism with Arab nationalism. Much like early Communism, the movement is organized upward from haliah (cells) of three to seven people; above the cells is a network of companies, divisions, branches and regions. In Syria the regional command is composed of a 21-member elite, with Assad as Secretary-General.

Three years ago, Assad formed a National Progressive Front that allowed Communists and other leftist non-Baath factions a role in government. Pragmatically, Assad has allowed nonpolitical experts to hold high places in government, since Syria desperately needs their talents.

Syria's socialist regime even allows a touch of capitalism these days. Entrepreneurs who fled the country after the 1963 Baath coup, taking billions of Syrian pounds with them, are being wooed back. Syria is also permitting the importation of luxury consumer goods like Mercedes-Benz limousines (Damascus price: $25,000-550,000) for a new millionaire class that has grown rich on booming land prices and middleman business. Foreigners are now allowed to enter Syria freely and tourism is encouraged; two luxury hotels are being built in Damascus. The streets of the dusty capital, one of the world's oldest inhabited cities, are clogged with automobiles, many of them ten to 15 years old.

Assad has devoted more energy to compacting power and asserting Syria's diplomatic eminence in the Middle East than to solving his country's domestic problems. Although the President is regarded as scrupulously honest, the vast, bumbling Syrian bureaucracy is ridden with corruption.

Russian Advisers. "Sometimes." says one Damascus intellectual, "we feel we are behind the curtain." Despite new openings to foreigners, travel outside the country is difficult for Syrian citizens. Men cannot leave until they have completed military service. Women must be at least 30 years old; before that, they are expected to hold down jobs in place of men in the military. About 50 categories of professionals and technicians, including doctors, lawyers and engineers, are denied exit visas lest they refuse to return home. Also forbidden to emigrate are Syria's 4,000 Jews, the remnant of a community that once numbered more than 25,000. Jews may work for the government, but they cannot hold senior jobs. They must have written permission to travel within the country. Curiously, their identification cards, which all Syrians carry, list their religious affiliation as Musawi (follower of Moses) rather than Yahudi, the Arabic word for Jewish.

Under Assad, Syrians of late no longer worry about sudden, late-night visits by secret police. But the government is vigilant about dissent, and the occasional crackdowns can be both swift and harsh. Last April, for example, 200 people were rounded up and imprisoned on the eve of the Baath Party Congress, probably because they were not Assad men. Publicly, however, they were charged with aiding Iraq, which is governed by a rival wing of the Baath movement. Although relations between Baghdad and Damascus have improved, the two neighbors have frequently been at the brink of war -- sometimes over ideology, but sometimes over rights to the waters of the Euphrates River. Last fall both governments rushed troops to the border after Iraq complained that Syria's vast new Tabqa dam on the Euphrates, built with Soviet funds and assistance, was depriving Iraqi farmers downstream of necessary water.

On the diplomatic front, Syria's leverage increased notably after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat tossed Soviet advisers out of Egypt in July 1972. The Russians, who have been supplying arms directly to Syria since 1957, were forced to regroup, with Damascus as their Middle East focus. When Syria lost 1,200 tanks and suffered an estimated $1.8 billion in home-front damage in the October War, Moscow, studiously ignoring Cairo, lavished postwar aid on Damascus. The Soviets provided superior military replacements.

Foreign observers estimate that there are about 3,000 Russian advisers in Syria today. A third of them are civilian technicians involved in construction projects -- most notably the Euphrates dam, which will double Syria's arable land and provide 800 megawatts of electric power from eight giant turbines. Most of the others are military advisers to the Syrian army; some maintain or operate advanced equipment, such as MIG-25 reconnaissance planes and Scud missiles, which the Russians refuse to entrust to Syrians. The Soviets have the largest embassy in Damascus, headed by Ambassador Nouritdin Moukhidinov, a Moslem from Uzbekistan and something of an Islamic scholar. But the Russians, living apart in compounds with their own schools, clubs and commissaries, seldom mix with Syrians.

Despite his political and military debt to the Soviet Union, Assad seems eager to improve relations with the U.S. The Syrian President gets along well with Kissinger, but rejects the Secretary of State's approach to negotiations. "Step-by-step might be all right if the steps were giant steps," Assad complained at one point, "but they are tortoise steps." Yet, Assad, after the 1974 Golan disengagement accord, agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations with the U.S., which had been severed during the Six-Day War. Last week Assad conferred three times with Ambassador Richard Murphy, 46, an experienced State Department Arabist who heads the 34-man staff in Damascus.

Drilling for Oil. The main fallout so far from the Assad-Kissinger relationship is an increase in trade between the U.S. and Syria ($150 million expected this year). One recent order was for 18 General Electric locomotives that will go into service on new rail lines laid down by Soviet technicians. The Damascus government has also contracted with Tripco Petroleum to conduct exploratory offshore drilling for oil in the Mediterranean. When the Soviet commercial attache stormed into the Petroleum Ministry to demand an explanation for the American contract, he was coolly told why: the Syrians consider U.S. drilling technology more advanced than Moscow's.

Despite his heavy reliance on Russian arms and help, Assad, like Egypt's Sadat, is aware that Washington is the only power with the ability to nudge Israel toward the kind of settlement that the Arabs hope for. But Syria's faith in U.S. negotiating clout is considerably less than Egypt's. If Kissinger fails to keep the momentum going, the slowly warming relationship between Washington and Damascus could quickly turn to frost again.

Washington, for its part, fears that Assad could upset the delicate Middle East balance by pressing too hard for the Palestinians or by allowing the fedayeen to carry out more Golan raids, which would provoke Israeli retaliation against Syria, increasing the danger of renewed war. At least, however, Assad has effectively stifled all meaningful opposition at home. As one diplomat puts it, his "instincts for survival are impressive." To ensure the safety of his regime, the President has a Praetorian Guard, consisting of 25,000 men under the command of his brother Rifaat Assad, 34. In any case, Washington hopes the guard remains vigilant long enough for Assad to provide further proof that Syria, despite its trumpeting of the Palestinian cause, is genuinely willing to make peace with Israel at some point. In light of Syria's long history of hostility toward the Jerusalem government, chances are that any man who succeeded Assad in the near future would be even more of a pan-Arab militant.

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