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An unceasing sound, like the creaking of a bullock cart, rises from the river banks to permeate the narrow streets and pervade the whole town—it is audible even as far away as the citadel. This is the noise made by the waterwheels of Hama—a “cry” almost, like the muezzin’s call to prayer, harsh, plangent and timeless.
—From the chapter on the town of Hama in the 1977 guidebook SYRIA TODAY, by Jean Hureau
I found plenty of silence to contemplate in Hama, because by the time I got there the waterwheels were broken. The muezzin’s voice was deathly still, and the only cries anyone heard permeating the narrow streets came from the widows and orphans who had survived the massacre.
Even when I arrived, some two months after the mass killings, all the blood had not been washed away into the Orontes River, which snaked through the town, forming a distinct signature that once made Hama Syria’s most beautiful city. Walking through the nearly deserted streets, my notepad hidden in my back pocket so no one would know I was a journalist, I was too shocked at first to talk to anyone. I did not need to, though, since I found whole neighborhoods of crushed apartment buildings bearing silent witness to the remarkable events that transpired here in the first weeks of February 1982. The whole town looked as though a tornado had swept back and forth over it for a week—but this was not the work of Mother Nature.
To this day, no one knows for sure how many bodies were buried under the sea of broken homes and layers of concrete, but Amnesty International, in its November 1983 report on Syria, said estimates ranged from 10,000 to 25,000 dead, mostly civilians; thousands more were left homeless. The Syrian regime of President Hafez al-Assad, which was responsible for carrying out the massacre, did little to dispute these figures or to tidy up Hama before reopening the main highway that ran through it from Damascus in May 1982. I am convinced that Assad wanted the Syrian people to see Hama raw, to listen closely to its silence and reflect on its pain.
That was how I was able to get in. I had arrived in Beirut a few weeks earlier to begin my tour there as the correspondent for The New York Times, and I had some time to explore. I wanted to know exactly what had happened in Hama. After all, it wasn’t often that an Arab government destroyed one of its largest cities. Most textbooks on Middle East politics tend to ignore incidents such as Hama; they either dismiss them as aberrations or sanitize them in political-science jargon, saying, for instance, that “the system overloaded” or “there was a crisis of legitimacy.” I wanted to try to understand whether Hama’s destruction was an aberration, a one-time-only affair, or whether it could be traced to some more permanent features in the political landscape. I was to learn many useful lessons in Hama—lessons that would come in very handy in helping me navigate the road from Beirut to Jerusalem.
A city of about 180,000 inhabitants located 120 miles northwest of Damascus on the central Syrian plains, Hama has always been a Sunni Muslim town known for its piety. Many of its women kept their faces covered with veils, while many of its menfolk preferred the traditional gandura robe to Western suits and ties. Throughout modern Syrian history, Hama has been a hothouse for conservative Muslim fundamentalist organizations hostile to the secular central governments in Damascus. Not surprisingly, it became a constant source of irritation for Hafez Assad after he, as the Defense Minister, seized power in a coup d’état on November 16, 1970. Assad hailed from the village of Qardaha, near the Syrian seaport of Latakia, and he and his main allies were not Sunni Muslims but Alawites. The Alawites, a splinter sect of Islam with many secret and even Christian-like tenets, have lived for centuries in the isolated mountain villages of northern Lebanon and Syria. Alawites make up roughly 10-12 percent of the Syrian population of 11-12 million. However, owing to their tightly bound tribe-like solidarity, they have managed since the late 1960s to dominate the Syrian army and, through it, key power centers in the state and the ruling secular Baath Party. This has left Syria’s Sunni Muslims, who make up about 70 percent of the country’s population, in eclipse and frequently frustrated: the more religious elements among them viewed the Alawites as Muslim heretics or secular radicals, while the traditional Sunni landed aristocracy viewed them as mountain peasants totally unworthy of ruling Damascus.
Not long after Assad took power, the Muslim Brotherhood, a loosely knit underground coalition of Sunni Muslim fundamentalist guerrilla groups, which had existed on and off in Syria since the late 1930s, began working to topple the predominantly Alawite Assad regime through a ruthless campaign of assassinations and bombings. The Brotherhood drew its leadership from local Muslim clerics, or ulama, and its rank and file from the young urban poor and Sunni middle classes, who were either alienated from, or economically hurt by, the Westernization, secularization, and modernization of Syrian society being directed by Assad. By 1979-80, barely a week went by in Syria without a bomb going off outside a government institution or Soviet Aeroflot office, and brazen daylight shootings of Soviet advisers and Baath Party officials became almost routine; even President Assad’s personal interpreter was abducted. Assad was usually referred to in Brotherhood literature as either “an enemy of Allah” or a “Maronite.” The Assad regime countered with a state of emergency and selective assassinations and kidnappings of its own, particularly of prominent mosque preachers. It also distributed arms to Baath Party loyalists to help the regime liquidate the Muslim urban guerrillas. Civil war seemed to be inevitable.
The Brotherhood was aided at times by Muslim trade unions and other fraternal associations in Aleppo and Hama, who were estranged from the regime owing to its pervasive corruption, economic mismanagement, and abridgment of civil liberties. In early 1980, a coalition of clerics and trade unionists centered in Hama issued a manifesto demanding, among other things, that President Assad honor the Human Rights Charter, abolish the state of emergency, and hold free elections. The petition was circulated through mosques and backed by a call for a general strike against the “infidel” government—in Syrian terms a declaration of war. This was not lost on the regime. Patrick Seale, in his authoritative biography of Assad,1 with which the President himself cooperated, notes that at the Baath Party congress held in late 1979 and early 1980 President Assad’s aggressive younger brother Rifaat called for an all-out war against the Muslim Brotherhood. (Rifaat commanded the Saraya al-Difa’, the “Defense Companies”—an elite, heavily armed Praetorian guard, dominated by Alawites, whose sole responsibility was protecting the Assad regime from its domestic opponents.)
Stalin had sacrificed 10 million to preserve the Bolshevik revolution and Syria should be prepared to do likewise, Seale quoted Rifaat as telling the Baath gathering. Rifaat, Seale added, “pledged his readiness to fight ‘a hundred wars, demolish a million strongholds, and sacrifice a million martyrs’” in order to defeat the Muslim Brothers. No, this was not a battle for the faint of heart. On June 26, 1980, Muslim Brotherhood assassins threw two hand grenades and loosed a burst of machine-gun fire at President Assad as he was waiting to welcome the visiting chief of state from Mali to the official visitors’ palace in Damascus. Assad managed to escape with only a foot injury, thanks to the fact that his bodyguard smothered one of the grenades and he himself kicked the other away. His retribution was not long in coming, though. At 3:00 the next morning, June 27, some eighty members of Rifaat’s Defense Companies were dispatched to Tadmur (Palmyra) Prison, which housed hundreds of Muslim Brothers arrested the previous year. According to Amnesty International, the soldiers “were divided into groups of 10 and, once inside the prison, were ordered to kill the prisoners in their cells and dormitories. Some 600 to 1,000 prisoners are reported to have been killed … . After the massacre, the bodies were removed and buried in a large common grave outside the prison.”
Throughout the next year, surprise searches of Hama, Aleppo, and other Muslim Brotherhood strongholds became a weekly event. During these roundups, curbside executions were regularly carried out against youths suspected of involvement with the Islamic underground. More than once Hamawis awoke to find a sidewalk or a central square littered with bullet-riddled bodies. Some more elderly Muslim clerics had half of their mustaches shaved off, their beards burned, or were forced to dance in the streets while wishing President Assad “long life,” the Muslim Brotherhood claimed. That was mild, though, compared to the treatment meted out to those who had the misfortune to be sent to government jails, where, as one arrested student from Aleppo told Amnesty International, prisoners were introduced to “al-’Abd al-Aswad.”—the Black Slave.
“Whenever a person is tortured,” the student testified to Amnesty, “he is ordered to strip naked. Inside the room there is an electric apparatus, a Russian tool for ripping out fingernails, pincers and scissors for plucking flesh and an apparatus called the Black Slave, on which they force the torture victim to sit. When switched on, a very hot and sharp metal skewer enters the rear, burning its way until it reaches the intestines, then returns only to be reinserted.”
The Muslim Brothers responded in kind. On November 29, 1981, Muslim guerrillas were accused by the Assad regime of responsibility for the car bomb that exploded in the heart of Damascus, killing 64 innocent bystanders and wounding 135. Two months later, only a few weeks before the Hama massacre, Assad discovered a Muslim Brotherhood–inspired plot in the air force aimed at toppling his Alawite-led government. During their interrogation of the Syrian air-force officers implicated in the plot, the Syrian intelligence agency, known as the Mukhabarat—the mere mention of which sends a chill down the spine of every Syrian—apparently obtained information linking the plotters to the Muslim Brotherhood.
In February 1982, President Assad decided to end his Hama problem once and for all. With his sad eyes and ironic grin, Assad always looked to me like a man who had long ago been stripped of any illusions about human nature. Since fully taking power in 1970, he has managed to rule Syria longer than any man in the post–World War II era. He has done so by always playing by his own rules. His own rules, I discovered, were Hama Rules.
Exact details of what happened in that February of 1982 are, to this day, incomplete. No reporters were allowed to enter Hama during the massacre. Most of the survivors were scattered or intimidated into silence; the Assad government refuses to talk about what transpired. What follows is a picture pieced together from five sources: Western diplomats in Damascus, my own visit to Hama, Amnesty International’s report on the massacre, an analysis, based in part on Israeli intelligence, published by Israel Television’s Arab affairs reporter Ehud Ya’ari (Monitin magazine, August 1985), and a book called Hama: The Tragedy of Our Time, published in 1984 in Cairo by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood publishing house, Dar al-I’tisam. This book—the cover of which features Hafez Assad with his hand dipped in blood and a smoldering city in the background—is the Brotherhood’s own account in Arabic of what transpired. It is certainly the most detailed picture of the Hama massacre ever published, and, while obviously written from the Muslim Brothers’ perspective, is quite sober.
According to Western diplomats in Damascus, President Assad entrusted overall responsibility for taming Hama to Rifaat, whose first move, according to Ya’ari, was to quietly infiltrate roughly 1,500 men from the Defense Companies into buildings in Hama, including a stadium, a school for activists from the Baath Party, and a cultural institute. At the same time, another 1,500 commandos attached to Colonel Ali Haydar’s Special Forces erected a tent camp near a dam at the outskirts of Hama and dug out a landing pad for helicopters, which would be used later. Additional intelligence units and elements of the 47th Independent Armored Brigade, commanded by Alawite Colonel Nadim Abbas, with its T-62 tanks, were also stationed in and around the town.
Tuesday, February 2, 1:00 a.m., was set as the time for the “clean-up” of Hama to commence.
They say that it was a cold, drizzly winter night, the kind that you often find in Beirut or Jerusalem, where the combination of wind and rain leaves you chilled to the bone and wishing you never had stepped outside. The residents of Hama were shut inside their homes, most of which were warmed by oil-burning stoves or steam radiators. The operation began with some 500 soldiers from Rifaat’s Defense Companies, along with a large contingent of Mukhabarat agents, surrounding the old Barudi neighborhood on the western bank of the Orontes River, where the most religious Hamawis lived in a beehive of narrow alleyways and arch-covered roads. The more modern eastern bank of the Orontes housed the main souk and government-built apartments for state employees, and had always been less troublesome.
As they entered the Barudi district, the Syrian officers apparently carried with them lists with the names and addresses of suspected hideouts and arms caches of the Muslim rebels. They did not get past the first name. According to Western diplomats in Damascus, the Muslim Brothers residing in Barudi had been tipped off that the regime was about to strike and had placed lookouts on several rooftops in the neighborhood. As the Syrian soldiers walked deeper and deeper into the web of alleyways, an alarm was sounded and the Muslim Brothers mowed them down with a fusillade of machine-gun fire, punctuated by shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” God is greater [than the enemy]. Another group set up a barricade on the bridge leading from the western bank to the eastern bank of the Orontes to help cut off reinforcements. Defense Companies in the adjacent neighborhood were also attacked, and by dawn the Syrian troops were all forced to retreat, carrying their dead.
Word was quickly spread through the microphones atop mosque minarets that Barudi had held its ground and that Hama was being “liberated.” The Assad regime had stumbled. The Muslim Brotherhood thought now was the moment to move in for the kill. The call for “Jihad”—Holy War against Assad and his Baath Party—echoed across Hama.
As dawn broke on February 2, thousands of additional government troops were rushed to Hama, and the 47th Armored Brigade was ordered to move from the outskirts into the city. Later the same morning, the Muslim Brotherhood commander, Sheik Adib al-Kaylani, called on his men to come up from the underground, to pull out their guns from under their beds and their secret hiding places, and to drive the “infidel” Assad regime from Hama and right out of power, according to the Brotherhood account. Al-Kaylani apparently hoped to spark a national rebellion. He told his men that it was better to die a martyr on the “altar of Islam” than await imprisonment, torture, and certain execution. For the first time since the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Assad regime began, there was to be a face-to-face battle in the light of day. Both sides understood that it was winner take all.
The Muslim Brotherhood, with the help of many secular neighborhood youths who had been alienated from the regime as a result of previous crackdowns on Hama, actually seized the initiative, attacking Defense Brigades positions around town and setting up their own roadblocks made of boulders and garbage. From the mosque microphones they blared the same message over and over: “Rise up and drive the unbelievers from Hama.” Then they started their own little massacre. According to Western diplomats in Damascus, squads of Muslim Brothers ran through the city streets, ransacking the local armory and police stations, and then bursting into the homes of leading Baath Party officials. At least fifty local government and party functionaries were either machine-gunned in their beds and living rooms or stabbed to death by many hands. Mukhabarat agents who had the misfortune of driving through the wrong neighborhoods were dragged out of their cars or jeeps and murdered at roadside by roving bands of youths.
The army called in more reinforcements, particularly tanks, to burst through the rebel roadblocks and helicopters to alert soldiers from the air where the Muslim Brotherhood ambushes were being laid. Other units were ordered to cut all telephone and telegraph links between Hama and the rest of humanity, and then to secure the main roads bisecting the city, thereby isolating the Brotherhood cells in their respective neighborhoods.
The next morning, February 3, the government tanks tried to penetrate the winding streets and alleyways of the Brotherhood-held neighborhoods. Operating in the middle of a city and at very close quarters, the Syrian tanks initially were allowed to use only the heavy machine guns mounted on their turrets, but the Brotherhood strike teams proved quite effective in neutralizing them with a combination of rocket-propelled grenades and Molotov cocktails. That night Rifaat apparently decided that only overwhelming armored force would crush the rebellion. He called for the 21st Mechanized Brigade to join the battle for Hama. All the officers and soldiers in the 21st who were from Hama were transferred out, before the unit commander, Fouad Ismail, an Alawite, led the advance into the town along Said ibn al-A’as Street.
According to the Brotherhood, some twenty tanks started rumbling down the street on February 4, firing indiscriminately with their cannons at the barricades blocking the way and the homes overlooking the road. A multistory building went up in flames; the large mosque at the center of the street collapsed under the barrage. In a few hours, most of the buildings along the barricaded part of the street were destroyed. From then on, Rifaat’s tactic shifted from trying to ferret out nests of Muslim Brotherhood men to simply bringing whole neighborhoods down on their heads and burying the Brotherhood and anyone else in the way. In addition to using tanks and attack helicopters for this purpose, the Syrian army units surrounding Hama engaged in direct artillery bombardments of the Barudi, Kaylani, Hadra, and Khamidia neighborhoods, where the Brotherhood was known to be at its strongest. The Brotherhood claims that it intercepted a radio transmission from Rifaat to one of his officers in which he allegedly decreed, “I don’t want to see a single house not burning.”
Judging from what I saw in the aftermath, Rifaat was not disappointed. Virtually every building in Hama was damaged in some way. Hama’s most famous archaeological site, the 1,200-year-old Kaylani family palaces on the banks of the Orontes, were ravaged. Virtually every mosque had its minaret blown down, which wasn’t surprising considering that the Muslim Brothers had used them as sniper’s nests. Yet, despite these severe tactics, between February 7 and February 17, the Brotherhood succeeded in keeping control of many of the older neighborhoods on the western half of the river. With their commander, Sheik al-Kaylani, moving from position to position to encourage his fighters and to read with them from the Koran, the Brotherhood repeatedly repulsed Syrian commando teams which tried to penetrate their densely populated districts.
On the east bank, which the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to abandon, the Syrian army looted what was left of those homes in each neighborhood they “pacified,” the Brotherhood said. Long convoys of trucks loaded down with furniture were reported to have been spotted driving away, and the Brotherhood claims to have killed a Syrian officer who was found with 3.5 million Syrian pounds on his body (then the equivalent of about $1 million). Entire families were apparently rousted out of their homes and gunned down on the streets, simply because a single member was listed by Syrian intelligence as being linked to the Brotherhood. Those civilians who could tried to escape through underground sewers or bribe their way through the ring of steel the Syrian army had thrown up around Hama, but few were successful.
On February 17, the Muslim Brotherhood’s commander, Sheik al-Kaylani, was killed by a mortar blast, but it would take the army another ten days to finally snuff out the last pockets of resistance in the Barudi district. On February 22, the Syrian government broadcast a telegram of support addressed to President Assad from the Hama branch of the Baath Party. The message referred to Muslim Brotherhood fighters killing Baath Party officials and leaving their mutilated bodies in the streets. It added that security forces had taken fierce reprisals against the Brotherhood, “which stopped them breathing forever.”
For the next several weeks, there was a settling of accounts between the Assad regime and Syria’s fourth-largest city; many more people perished as a result. Most of the casualties in Hama apparently were registered during this phase. Syrian army engineers set about systematically dynamiting any buildings which remained standing in “Brotherhood” neighborhoods, with whoever was inside. Ancient Hama, the marketplace, craft quarters, and mosques, which provided the social fabric for the Muslim Brotherhood to flourish, were totally obliterated. As the army mopped up the city, many of those who had survived or had not fled were brought in for interrogation in makeshift detention camps set up by the Mukhabarat intelligence service. According to the Muslim Brotherhood, something called “Solomon’s Chair,” which was fitted with iron spikes, was offered to any prisoner who hesitated to talk. Others had their hands welded. The torture and interrogations, according to Ya’ari, were supervised by Colonel Mohammed Nassif, an aide to Rifaat.
Just to make sure that those people who lived in the Muslim Brotherhood districts would be dispersed and forced to find new housing and new jobs at the mercy of the government, Rifaat brought in bulldozers and crushed all those buildings and neighborhoods which had been shelled beyond repair. Then he brought in steamrollers to flatten the rubble like parking lots. According to both Amnesty International and the Muslim Brotherhood, groups of prisoners suspected of anti-government sentiments were taken from detention camps, machine-gunned en masse, and then dumped into pre-dug pits that were covered with earth and left unmarked. Amnesty also quoted allegations that cyanide gas containers were brought into the city, connected by rubber pipes to the entrances of buildings believed to house insurgents, and turned on, killing everyone inside. Virtually the entire Muslim religious leadership in Hama—from sheiks to teachers to mosque caretakers—who survived the battle for the city were liquidated afterward in one fashion or another; most anti-government union leaders suffered the same fate.
From the beginning of the operation on February 2, no reporters were allowed to even approach the city, and the Syrian government refused to give any detailed explanation as to what was happening there. In early March, after the campaign ended, the Syrian authorities gathered religious students from the villages around Hama and brought them in to sweep the streets, to wash off the blood, to gather up the bodies, and to leash the dogs that were taking over the bomb-ravaged neighborhoods, the Brotherhood said.
When I drove into Hama at the end of May, I found three areas of the city that had been totally flattened—each the size of four football fields and covered with the yellowish tint of crushed concrete.
My taxi driver and I rode across one such flattened neighborhood that sloped up from the still verdant bank of the Orontes. We stopped our car right in the middle. For a moment, I felt the same light-headed sensation I used to have as a boy when in winter we would drive our car out to the middle of a frozen lake in Minnesota to go ice fishing; it was that uneasy feeling of standing on top of something you know you shouldn’t be on top of. I kicked the ground beneath my feet and uncovered a tennis shoe, a tattered book, and a shred of clothing; elsewhere pieces of wood or the tips of steel reinforcement rods protruded through the dusty surface. The whole neighborhood, with everything in it, had been plowed up like a cornfield in spring and then flattened. As my taxi driver and I rode off, we encountered a stoop-shouldered old man, in checkered headdress and green robe, who was shuffling along this field of death.
“Where are all the houses that once stood here?” we stopped and asked.
“You are driving on them,” he said.
“But where are all the people who used to live here?” I said.
“You are probably driving on some of them, too,” he mumbled, and then continued to shuffle away.
Yet even Hama Rules have a logic, and I spent much of the next few years trying to figure it out. I think the best way to understand what happened in Hama is to understand that politics in the Middle East is a combination of three different political traditions all operating at the same time.
The first and oldest of these traditions is tribe-like politics. I use the term “tribe-like” to refer to a pre-modern form of political interaction characterized by a harsh, survivalist quality and an adherence to certain intense primordial or kin-group forms of allegiance. Sometimes the tribe-like group that is in power in the Middle East, or is seeking power, is an actual tribe, sometimes it is a clan, members of a religious sect, a village group, a regional group; sometimes it is friends from a certain neighborhood, an army unit, and sometimes it is a combination of these groups. What all these associations have in common is the fact that their members are all bound together by a tribe-like spirit of solidarity, a total obligation to one another, and a mutual loyalty that takes precedence over allegiances to the wider national community or nation-state.
The best way to understand the influence of tribalism on political behavior in the modern Middle East is by looking at the phenomenon in its purest original form among the nomadic Bedouin of the desert. Life in the desert, observed Clinton Bailey, an Israeli expert on the Bedouin of the Sinai and Negev deserts, was always dominated by two overriding facts: first, in the desert, water and grazing resources were so limited that “everyone had to become a wolf and be prepared to survive at the expense of the other tribe. There just weren’t enough wells or grass to satisfy everyone all the time. Often it came down to who was going to get the last blade of grass and you had to make sure it was you. This meant that every man was simultaneously hunter and prey.”
Second, in the desert there was no outside mediator or government to enforce laws or to adjudicate disputes in a neutral way between tribes when they resorted to predatory behavior in order to survive. Your family, your clan, your tribe were out there searching for grazing space on their own. There was no police car patrolling the desert wadis and canyons, no 911 to call when you were in trouble, so you had to find ways to take care of yourself.
In such a lonely world, the only way to survive was by letting others know that if they violated you in any way, you would make them pay, and pay dearly. You sent that message first and foremost by banding together in alliances. These alliances began with the most basic blood association—the family—and then expanded to the clan, the tribe, and then to other tribes. Every Bedouin understood that because of the nature of his world, the bonds of kinship must be honored before all other obligations; anyone who did not behave in this way was totally dishonored. Hence the Bedouin Arabic proverb: “Me and my brother against our cousin. Me, my brother, and my cousin against the stranger.” In Lebanon and Jordan, many rural tribes changed their names to plural forms in order to give the impression that they were larger than they were.
But even this was not enough protection. Sometimes you found yourself in the middle of the desert far away from your core kin group, and the temptation for others to violate you was great. Therefore, you had to make sure that if someone violated you in any way—even the smallest way—you would not only punish them but punish them in a manner that signaled to all the other families, clans, or tribes around that this is what happens to anyone who tampers with me. “Back off” was the credo. “I am my own defense force and I am good.”
A tribe could earn this reputation either by using physical violence to badly hurt those who wronged them, or by using the Bedouin system of justice to get all the families, clans, or tribes in the area to impose a heavy fine on the offender. (This approach is by no means confined to desert tribesmen. The symbol of Scotland is the thistle, above the motto: “Nobody hurts me unharmed.”) Either way, a family, clan, or tribe’s first line of defense was always its known ability to go all the way in exacting a price from those who dared to tread on them.
To be sure, a tribe can make concessions to, or compromises with, their rivals, provided these concessions grow from proven strength or magnanimity in the wake of victory. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat could make his historic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977 only after he had led the Egyptian army across the Suez Canal in the 1973 war—that is, after he had proven to everyone around that he could exact a price on the Israelis and that in going to Jerusalem he was acting out of strength and not weakness. It was no accident that when Sadat returned to Cairo from his visit to Jerusalem and addressed the Egyptian parliament about his reasons for going, he kept referring to his people as “Ya, Sha’ab October”—Oh, you people of October—a reference to the Egyptians’ victory over Israel in the early stages of the October 1973 war. Only such a victorious people can make compromises. In his speech Sadat used the reference eighteen times.
What you never do in the desert, though, is allow concessions to be arbitrarily imposed on you. If someone steals half your water, you can never say, “Well, this time I will let it go, but don’t ever let me catch you doing it again,” because in this world of lone wolves, anyone who becomes viewed as a sheep is in trouble—a point underscored by the Bedouin legend about the old man and his turkey. One day, according to this legend, an elderly Bedouin man discovered that by eating turkey he could restore his virility. So he bought himself a turkey and he kept it around the tent, and every day he watched it grow. He stuffed it with food, thinking, Wow, I am really going to be a bull. One day, though, the turkey was stolen. So the Bedouin called his sons together and said, “Boys, we are in great danger now—terrible danger. My turkey’s been stolen.” The boys laughed and said, “Father, what do you need a turkey for?” He said, “Never mind, never mind. It is not important why I need the turkey, all that is important is that it has been stolen, and we must get it back.” But his sons ignored him and forgot about the turkey. A few weeks, later the old man’s camel was stolen. His sons came to him and said, “Father, your camel’s been stolen, what should we do?” And the old man said, “Find my turkey.” A few weeks later, the old man’s horse was stolen, and the sons came and said, “Father, your horse was stolen, what should we do?” He said, “Find my turkey.” Finally, a few weeks later, someone raped his daughter. The father went to his sons and said, “It is all because of the turkey. When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.”
Hama was Hafez Assad’s turkey. Assad understood from the start that at a certain basic level Hama was a tribe-like clash between his Alawite sect and the Sunni Muslim sect. He equally understood that if the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to seize control of even one neighborhood in Hama, then the Alawites’ blood would be in the water and all their other opponents in Syria would be feeding on them within days. That is why Assad did not just quell the rebellion. He did not just arrest the rebels. He took revenge—all the way—and with twentieth-century weapons, that revenge was devastating enough to be felt in the gut of every Syrian.
A Lebanese businessman who is a partner in several deals with Rifaat Assad once told a friend of mine about a conversation he had had with the Syrian general about the Hama rebellion.
“I guess you killed 7,000 people there,” the businessman said to Rifaat.
Normally a politician would play down such a ghastly incident and say, “Oh no, we didn’t kill 7,000. What are you talking about? That’s only propaganda from our enemies. We killed only a few hundred troublemakers.” But Rifaat knew what he was doing in Hama and, according to my friend, said to this Lebanese businessman, “What are you talking about, 7,000? No, no. We killed 38,000.”
Rifaat was apparently proud of the figure, said the Lebanese businessman. If anything, he wanted to inflate it. He understood that in a tribe-like environment such as Syria the game is either do it or it will be done to you, so he did it and he wanted all his enemies and friends to know that he did it. Rifaat understood that in a world of lone wolves it is much safer—as Machiavelli himself taught—to be feared than to be loved. Men grant and withdraw their love according to their whims, but fear is a hand that rests on their shoulders in a way they can never shake.
Hama is hardly the only recent example of such a tribe-like response to a threat against an Arab regime. In March 1988, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had some problems with Iraqi Kurdish tribesmen in the northeastern part of his country. For years the Kurds had been seeking independence with the help of Iran. Because Saddam was busy fighting a war with Iran when the Kurds began to militate for their own country again, the Iraqi President did not want to deploy a lot of troops to bring them under control. Instead, he simply sent a few planes to drop chemical warheads containing a mixture of mustard and cyanide gases on the northeastern Kurdish town of Halabja and some surrounding villages. According to reporters who visited Halabja in the aftermath, at least several hundred, and probably several thousand, men, women, and children were choked to death or had their lungs burned out by the yellow-and-white gas cloud that descended upon them without any warning. Even the cats died. The chemical attack was said to be one of the biggest uses of poison gas since the Germans virtually wiped out Ypres in 1917 with a similar killer toxic cloud.
The reason one can still find such tribe-like conflicts at work in the Middle East today is that most peoples in this part of the world, including Israeli Jews, have not fully broken from their primordial identities, even though they live in what appear on the surface to be modern nation-states. Their relatively new nation-states are still abstractions in many ways, for reasons which I will explain shortly. That is why Hafez al-Assad, even though he was the President of Syria, could order the killing of 20,000 of his own citizens. Because on some level Assad did not see the Sunni Muslim residents of Hama as part of his nation, or as fellow citizens. He saw them as members of an alien tribe—strangers in the desert—who were trying to take his turkey.
The second deeply rooted political tradition of the Middle East one could find at work in Hama is authoritarianism—the concentration of power in a single ruler or elite not bound by any constitutional framework.
The traditional authoritarian ruler in the Middle East assumed or inherited power based on the sword, to which his subjects were expected to submit obediently. The long tradition of authoritarianism in Middle East politics is related to the persistence of tribe-like affiliations. Because primordial, tribe-like loyalties governed men’s identities and political attitudes so deeply, the peoples of the Middle East (as elsewhere in the world for many centuries) rarely created nation-states of their own through which they could rule themselves and be strong enough to withstand foreign invaders. The warring tribes, clans, sects, neighborhoods, cities, and hinterlands could not find a way to balance the intimacy and cohesion of their tribe-like groups with the demands of a nation-state that would be run by certain neutral rules and values to which everyone agreed. Most peoples in the area simply could not achieve the level of consensus needed for such a polity. Rare was the clan or sect that would voluntarily let itself be ruled by another, and rarer still was the town or village that would voluntarily submit to the hinterland or vice versa.
What happened, as a result, was that on some occasions a major Arab tribe or group of soldiers would, by sheer physical force, impose itself on the tribes and cities of another region—such as the Umayyads, who came out of the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century and imposed themselves on the Levant—while on other occasions non-Arab imperial invaders, such as the Persians, Mongols, or Ottoman Turks, did the same. In all these cases the form of rule imposed from above was authoritarian, similar in kind to that found in many other parts of the world. The ruler was often a stranger: someone to be feared, dreaded, avoided, submitted to, and, occasionally, rebelled against, but rarely adored; there was usually a tremendous gulf between the ruler and the society at large.
This authoritarianism, as it developed in the Middle East, came in two very distinct forms: one form I call gentle authoritarianism, the other brutal authoritarianism.
The most enduring example of the gentle authoritarian tradition was that of the Ottoman Turks, during the heyday of their rule over the Middle East, which lasted from the early 1500s until the beginning of World War I. The founders of the Ottoman dynasty imposed their authority on the Arab/Muslim world by force. However, as the Ottoman rulers became more legitimate in the eyes of their subjects, through piety, good deeds, and good government, their swords eventually moved into the background and were replaced by a type of rule by negotiation, which, generally speaking, gave the Ottoman authoritarian tradition in the Middle East a softer edge. The more popular support the Ottoman rulers garnered through the ages, the more they sought to sustain their authoritarianism without resort to force, but instead by building bridges to key sectors of the societies they ruled, by allowing others to share in the spoils and by never totally vanquishing their opponents, but instead always leaving them a way out so that they might one day be turned into friends. This approach earned the Ottoman sultans still more legitimacy, which reinforced their instinct for restraint and allowed them to operate in a way more consistent with the holy laws of Islam. (When I describe the Ottoman tradition as gentle authoritarianism, I am referring to its golden age and most idealized form. As the Ottoman Empire became more decentralized, and eventually went into decline, there were individual sultans or local Ottoman governors who could be as ruthless as any authoritarians.)
Even the most gentle Ottoman rulers always understood that occasionally a sharper edge had to be brandished in order to maintain order in regions fragmented by sects, tribes, clans, and neighborhoods, and they did not hesitate to do so. A colorful example of this can be found in the way in which the Ottomans controlled southern Palestine and the Negev Desert, which was inhabited by some particularly quarrelsome Bedouin tribes who were constantly at each other’s throats. Legend has it that only in 1890 was a particular Ottoman governor, named Rustum Pasha, able to finally put an end to the tribal wars that had plagued the Negev throughout most of the nineteenth century. Rustum Pasha was known for his toughness and for his nickname, “Abu Jarida.” The jarida is the stick of a palm frond, which Rustum Pasha regularly employed as a weapon with which to beat the Bedouin in order to keep them in line. The Bedouin of this era were relentless in their efforts to bribe officials like Rustum Pasha and divert them from his objective of bringing order. According to Palestinian historian Arif el-Arif, whenever a Bedouin chief tried to bribe Rustum Pasha he would bring him into his office and sit him down in a chair. Then the Ottoman governor would take out a red tarboosh. (The tarboosh, sometimes known as a fez, is a brimless, cone-shaped, flat-topped hat, usually made of felt, which was the favored headgear of gentlemen in the eastern Mediterranean, and the symbol of Ottoman rulers.) Rustum Pasha would set the tarboosh on a pedestal and then begin to have a conversation with it in Arabic in front of the Bedouin.
“O tarboosh,” Rustum Pasha would say to the red hat. “What do you prefer? Money [fulous] or law and order [namous]?”
Then Rustum Pasha would pause for a moment, and in another voice he would answer for the tarboosh. “I want order,” the hat would say. And with that answer Rustum Pasha would lift his jarida branch and whack the Bedouin sitting before him from head to toe.
Thus was order maintained among the tribes of the Negev.
Not every autocrat in the Middle East, however, enjoyed the legitimacy of the Ottoman sultans, which is why the history of the region is replete with examples of “brutal authoritarians”—rulers who did not simply rely on palm fronds to keep order. Many of these brutal autocrats were professional soldiers who never stayed in power long enough to win the support of those they governed, so they had to depend on totally despotic, arbitrary, and merciless forms of control that were in direct contravention of Islamic law. One of the first brutal authoritarians in Islamic history was the founder of the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad, Abul-Abbas al-Saffah, who ruled Baghdad from A.D. 750 to 754. His name meant “Abul Abbas the Bloodletter”—a title which he proudly gave to himself, because he knew he enjoyed no consent from the Arab tribes he ruled and he wanted them to understand that he would show no restraint to those who might challenge him. The executioner was part of his royal court.
Precisely because so many brutal authoritarians rose up in the history of the Middle East, an entire body of Islamic political theory developed to justify even their style of rule—despite the fact that this style contravened all the precepts of Islamic political law, which demanded fair and consultative government. Middle Eastern societies were primarily merchant societies, which dreaded chaos and feared what might happen if control from above was eliminated and all their tribes and sects went at each other. Therefore, Islamic political thinkers gradually began to argue that obedience to even the cruelest, most illegitimate, non-Islamic despot, who at least kept some order, was preferable to the greater evil of a society left to the depredations of endless internal warfare. Or, as the ancient Arabic proverb put it: “Better sixty years of tyranny than one day of anarchy.”
Islamic historian Bernard Lewis, in his book The Political Language of Islam (1988), observed that “in preaching this doctrine of submission, [Islamic] jurists and theologians made no pretense at either liking or respect for the oppressive government in question, nor did they make any attempt to conceal its oppressiveness. In a passage often quoted by modern scholars, Ibn Jama’a, a Syrian jurist of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, is quite explicit: ‘At a time when there is no imam [a combination spiritual and political leader who rules by Islamic law] and an unqualified person seeks the imamate [spiritual and political leadership] and compels the people by force and by his armies … then obedience to him is obligatory, so as to maintain the unity of Moslems and preserve agreement among them.’ This is still true, even if he is barbarous or vicious.”
In the modern Middle East, the authoritarian tradition has survived in both its forms—the softer Ottoman approach and the more brutal, un-Islamic, Abul-Abbas-the-Bloodletter variety. In the most homogeneous Arab countries, such as Egypt and Tunisia, and in those countries where the rulers have won a high degree of consent from their people, such as in King Hussein’s Jordan, King Hassan’s Morocco, King Fahd’s Saudi Arabia, and all the Gulf sheikdoms, the gentle Ottoman authoritarian tradition is very much in evidence today. To be sure, the sword is always there in these countries, but generally out of sight. These regimes have a good deal of legitimacy in the eyes of their people and hence they can afford to rule with a good deal of restraint: coopting opponents, even sharing a degree of power and allowing for some freedom of the press and expression. This accounts for the generally relaxed atmosphere one can find in these Arab states—provided one doesn’t try to challenge the man in charge.
However, in those Arab countries where the societies are highly fragmented between different particularistic tribe-like sects, clans, and villages, and where the modern rulers have not been able to achieve much legitimacy—most notably Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and North and South Yemen—the more brutal authoritarian tradition is in evidence. Restraint and magnanimity are luxuries of the self-confident, and the rulers of these countries are anything but secure on their thrones. It is no accident, I believe, that the two Arab countries that tell the most jokes about themselves, Egypt and Tunisia, are also the most homogeneous. The only joke I ever heard about Syrian President Assad was told by a Lebanese. It went like this: After a national “election” in Syria, an aide comes to President Assad and says, “Mr. President, you won the election with a 99.7 percent majority. That means only three-tenths of 1 percent of the people did not vote for you. What more could you ask for?” Assad replies, “Their names.”
What makes the more brutal form of authoritarianism so dangerous today is that these insecure, nervous autocrats are not responding to threats against them with simple swords, let alone palm fronds, but with chemical weapons, modern armies, and devastating means of destruction that can reach beyond the royal court to far-flung regions.
Which brings us back to Hama. Hama was not just what happens when two tribe-like sects—the Alawites and the Sunnis—decide to have it out; it was also what happens when a modern Middle Eastern autocrat who does not enjoy full legitimacy among his people puts down a challenge to his authority by employing twentieth-century weapons without restraint. Hafez Assad was Abul-Abbas the Bloodletter, only with Soviet-built T-62 tanks and MiG jet fighters.
Assad and Saddam Hussein have survived longer than any other modern autocrats in Syria or Iraq—Assad has been in power since 1970, Saddam since 1968—not only because they have been brutal (many of their predecessors were just as brutal), but because they have been brutal and smart. They have no friends, only agents and enemies; they maintain overlapping intelligence agencies that spy on each other, the army, and the people, not just neighboring countries; they use everything that the twentieth century has to offer in the way of surveillance technology in order to extend the government’s grip far and wide, so that no corner of the country is outside their control; they never waste time murdering those whom they hate—such as Jews or Communists—but only those who are dangerous, like those closest to them; and most important, they know not just when to go all the way against their opponents but when to stop before overreaching themselves. Men like Assad and Saddam are dangerous and long-lasting because they are extremists who know when to stop. They are a rare breed. Most extremists don’t know when to stop, which is why they ultimately do themselves in by going too far for too long. But these men know how to insert the knife right through the heart of one opponent, and then invite all the others to dinner.
On July 16, 1979, Saddam Hussein, who had been the number-two man in Iraqi politics for eleven years, put all these lessons to good effect in order to shove aside his superior, the ailing President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, and have himself declared President. At the time of his takeover, Saddam was convinced that at least five of his closest friends and colleagues in the Iraqi leadership had some reservations about his succession. So, on the eve of his ascension, he had one of them arrested—Muhyi Abd al-Husayn al-Mashhadi, the secretary-general of the Iraqi Baath Party. Al-Mashhadi was then apparently tortured into agreeing to make a confession that he was planning to topple Saddam with the help of some other members of the leadership.
Then, on July 22, with real theatrical flair, Saddam convened an extraordinary meeting of the Iraqi Baath Party Regional Congress in order to hear al-Mashhadi’s confession—live. As al-Mashhadi would tell his story and mention the name of someone else in the leadership involved in the bogus plot, that person would have to stand, and then a guard would come along and drag him from the chamber. Al-Mashhadi just “happened” to mention as co-conspirators the four other members of Iraq’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council—Mohammed Ayish, Mohammed Mahjub, Husayn al-Hamdani, and Ghanim Abd al-Jalil—who Saddam felt were not totally supportive of him. A videotape of the confessions was then distributed to Baath Party branches across Iraq, as well as to army units; a few bootleg copies even made their way to Kuwait and Beirut.
A Lebanese friend of mine saw the video and described it as follows: “This guy would be reciting his confession and he would come to a person and say, ‘And then we went to see Mohammed to ask him to join the conspiracy.’ And this Mohammed would be sitting in the room, and he would have to stand up. And you could see this guy crying, his knees shaking, and he could barely stay on his feet. And then this guy would say, ‘But he refused to help us,’ and then this Mohammed would slump back down into his chair, exhausted with relief, and they would move on to the next guy. I had nightmares about this video for months. In my nightmare I was accused and would have to stand up, only in my dream they would claim that I did cooperate with the conspiracy and the guards would come and drag me away.”
On August 7, 1979, all five main conspirators, along with seventeen others, were found guilty and sentenced to death by “democratic executions.” According to the book Iraq Since 1958 (1988), an authoritative history by Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, the morning after the sentencing a firing squad consisting of Saddam Hussein himself and the remaining senior members of the Baath leadership executed the plotters, apparently with submachine guns. After the execution, no one questioned the “legitimacy” of Saddam’s ascension, nor did anyone wonder why Saddam married his beautiful daughter Raghd to the commander of his personal bodyguards, Hussein Kamel.
“This episode was particularly remarkable,” noted the Slugletts, “in view of the fact that many of those executed had been among Saddam Hussein’s most intimate associates, particularly Hamdani, a close personal friend of long standing.”
But tribalism and authoritarianism together still cannot fully explain Hama or Middle East politics today. There is a third tradition at work, a tradition imposed from abroad in the early twentieth century by the last group of imperial invaders of the region, the British, French, and Italians: the modern nation-state.
This was a very new concept for the Middle East, where there was a long tradition of authoritarian dynasties stretching from one end of the region to the other. In these sweeping dynasties, whether it was the Ottoman or Abbasid or any other, men did not identify themselves with, or hold patriotic loyalty to, their specific empire or country of residence. “Countries and nations existed; they had names, and evoked sentiments of a kind,” noted Bernard Lewis. “But they were not seen as defining political identities or directing political allegiances” in the modern Western European sense. The empire and its dynastic ruler in the Middle East were distant, often alien, entities. Political identities tended to be drawn instead either from one’s religious affiliation or one’s local kin group—be it the tribe, clan, village, neighborhood, sect, region, or professional association.
In the wake of World War I, however, the British and French took out their imperial pens and carved up what remained of the Ottoman dynastic empire, and created an assortment of nation-states in the Middle East modeled along their own. The borders of these new states consisted of neat polygons—with right angles that were always in sharp contrast to the chaotic reality on the ground. In the Middle East, modern Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan and the various Persian Gulf oil states all traced their shapes and origins back to this process; even most of their names were imposed by outsiders. In other words, many of the states in the Middle East today—Egypt being the most notable exception—were not willed into existence by their own people or developed organically out of a common historical memory or ethnic or linguistic bond; they also did not emerge out of a social contract between rulers and ruled. Rather, their shapes and structure were imposed from above by the imperial powers. These shapes had little or no precedent in either the medieval or the ancient world. Rather, boundaries were drawn almost entirely on the basis of the foreign policy, communications, and oil needs of the Western colonial powers that were to dominate these new countries—with scant attention paid to ethnic, tribal, linguistic, or religious continuities on the ground. As a result, these states were like lifeboats into which various ethnic and religious communities, each with their own memories and their own rules of the game, were thrown together and in effect told to row in unison, told to become a nation, told to root for the same soccer team and salute the same flag. Instead of the state growing out of the nation, the nation was expected to grow out of the state.
What happened in the twentieth century when these new nation-states were created was that in each one a particular tribe-like group either seized power or was ensconced in power by the British and French—and then tried to dominate all the others. In Lebanon, for example, it was the Maronites who emerged as dominant, in Saudi Arabia the Saud tribe. In today’s Syria, the Alawites, and in today’s Iraq, Saddam Hussein, along with other members of his home village of Tikrit, have scrambled to the top. In Jordan, King Hussein’s grandfather Abdullah was left in charge by the British, and Hussein has managed to maintain the dynasty, as have many of his fellow monarchs and emirs in the Persian Gulf. What enabled these specific families or groups to initially dominate their societies and government bureaucracies was usually their tribe-like solidarity.
Not only were the boundaries of these new Arab states artificially imposed from above; so, too, were many of their political institutions. The British and French in conjunction with certain Westernized elites in each of these countries, imported all the accoutrements of Western liberal democracies—including parliaments, constitutions, national anthems, political parties, and cabinets. But the imperial powers left before these institutions could fully take root, and before these societies could really experience the political, economic, and social reforms that were necessary to give these institutions real meaning.
Nevertheless, despite the artificial origins of most Arab states, it did not take long after their creation for certain vested interests to take hold and make them concrete realities, not just agglomerations of disparate tribes, clans, villages, and religious sects with only a flag in common. After a while, Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Yemeni, Jordanian, and Saudi nationalisms all became realities to some extent. They still talked about pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism, and tribes and clans, but everyone did learn to root for his own country’s soccer team to some extent. The Lebanese historian Kemal Salibi put it succinctly when he observed: “As men of political ambition began to compete for power and position in the different countries, and as each of these countries came to have its own ruling establishment and administrative bureaucracy, the lines of demarcation separating them, hardly any of which was a natural or historical frontier, began to harden.”
Because of this, men like Hafez Assad and Saddam Hussein cannot be viewed only as tribe-like chieftains or brutal authoritarians; they also have to be seen as the kind of men of ambition to which Salibi referred: modernizing bureaucrats trying to solidify and develop their relatively new nation-states. Both men have to be given credit for engaging in initiatives for economic development that have greatly benefited their respective countries. This has involved everything from building modern highways or low-cost public housing in Syria to providing free education and medical care in Iraq. These practices won each of their regimes a certain degree of legitimacy, which can be seen when one visits some far-flung Syrian village in which the relatively stable Assad government has built a new road, a medical clinic, a new school, extended electricity, and connected telephone lines. It is quite possible to find in such a village a Sunni Muslim villager who has hung a picture of Alawite President Assad on his wall, not simply because it will ingratiate him with the local party and intelligence officials, but also because he sincerely feels that this man Assad has behaved not just as an Alawite, and not just as a power-hungry autocrat, but as his own President, with a national interest in mind.
That is why, on a third level, the Hama massacre has to be seen as the natural reaction of a modernizing politician in a relatively new nation-state trying to stave off retrogressive—in this case, Islamic fundamentalist—elements aiming to undermine everything he has achieved in the way of building Syria into a twentieth-century secular republic. That is also why, if someone had been able to take an objective opinion poll in Syria after the Hama massacre, Assad’s treatment of the rebellion probably would have won substantial approval, even among many Sunni Muslims. They might have said, “Better one month of Hama than fourteen years of civil war like Lebanon.”
To reinforce these sorts of national feelings, Assad and Saddam have also consciously tried to shed their own tribe-like affiliations for more nationalist-oriented ones. The real name of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, for example, is Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti. Tikrit was the home village of Saddam and of virtually all the key conspirators who took power with him in the 1968 Iraqi coup d’état. After Saddam and his clique were in power for several years, any Iraqi who was from anywhere near Tikrit added al-Tikriti to his name in order to draw closer to the regime. The preponderance of Tikritis in key positions in the Iraqi army, intelligence agencies, and ruling Baath Party prompted Hanna Batatu, a historian of Iraq, to observe once that “it would not be going too far to say that the Tikritis rule [Iraq] through the Baath Party, rather than the Baath Party through the Tikritis.”
But in the mid-1970s, Saddam surprised everyone with a sudden about-face. Practically overnight, the Iraqi state-controlled media was ordered to drop al-Tikriti from the President’s name and to refer to him solely as Saddam Hussein—Hussein is actually his middle name and also his father’s first name—in order to downplay the tribal makeup of his regime and to emphasize its national pretensions. For years after this name change, however, Israel Radio’s Arabic Service continued calling him “Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti,” just to get on his nerves and remind the Iraqi people of the tribe-like character of their regime.
There is no question today that both the artificially imposed borders and governmental institutions of the relatively new Arab nation-states are beginning to take root. Over many generations the integrative nationalist ideologies and practices of men such as Assad or Saddam may win their regimes enough legitimacy and security for them to feel comfortable forging true social contracts with their people. Only then will these countries have real public spheres—neutral spaces where men can come as equal citizens, check their tribal memories at the door, and enter into a politics governed by mutually agreed-upon laws. Only then will the words “parliament,” “constitution,” and “political parties” have any real meaning for these countries and their peoples.
But that day is still a long way off, as the surviving members of South Yemeni President Ali Nasir Muhammad’s last Cabinet can attest.
On the morning of January 13, 1986, Ali Nasir tried to give a whole new meaning to the expression “cabinet shake-up.” My New York Times colleague John Kifner visited Yemen a few days later and described in detail what happened. Ali Nasir had called a meeting of his ruling fifteen-member “politburo” at his pastel-green headquarters near the Aden harbor for 10:00 a.m. As his ministers took their places around the Cabinet table waiting for Ali Nasir to arrive, one of the President’s bodyguards started serving tea from a thermos, while another, named Hassan, went to the head of the table and opened the President’s Samsonite attaché case. But instead of pulling out Ali Nasir’s papers, as the guard usually did, he pulled out a Skorpion machine pistol and began raking Ali Antar, the Vice President, up and down his back with gunfire.
Moments later, other guards burst through the doors to finish off the rest of the ministers with AK-47 assault rifles. But this was no ordinary politburo. President Ali Nasir’s Cabinet colleagues were also packing pistols, and they and their bodyguards began firing back. Kifner visited the politburo room a few days later, which he described as a grisly monument to all-out tribal politics, with blood still congealed on the wall-to-wall carpet and bullet holes peppered across the walls and chairs. Each of the ministers was associated with one or another tribe, so as soon as word spread about the shoot-out in the Cabinet room, the battle exploded on a grander scale in the streets of Aden. Before it was over, an estimated 5,000 people had been killed in less than a week of clashes between Yemeni tribes—some of them armed with heavy machine guns and artillery—who supported the President and those who opposed him; another 65,000 tribesmen were forced to flee to neighboring North Yemen. Kifner quoted Ali Salem al-Beedh, one of the three ministers to crawl out from under the Cabinet table alive, as saying, “Who would have thought a colleague could do such a thing? Why, only last June there was a resolution adopted by the politburo that anyone who resorted to violence in settling internal political disputes be considered a criminal and betrayer of the homeland.”
I am sure al-Beedh had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he uttered those words. He knew better, of course, but unfortunately many Western observers of the Middle East do not. They don’t appreciate the different traditions which make up the politics of this region. They assume that all the surface trappings of nation-statehood—the parliaments, the flags, and the democratic rhetoric—can fully explain the politics of these countries, and that tribalism and brutal authoritarianism are now either things of the past or aberrations from the norm; the lesson of Hama or Halabja or South Yemen is that they are not.
“The liberal tradition in the West tries to impute to the behavior of the native or the underdog an idealist position which is not really there,” argues the Lebanese historian Kemal Salibi. “They want to think of the peoples of this region as ‘noble savages,’ as Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it. Instead of saying, what we have here is an outmoded form of thinking clashing with an attempt to construct modern nation states … . When it comes to thinking about Middle East politics, the American liberal mind is often chasing rainbows. They are living in a world of delusion.”
The real genius of Hafez Assad and Saddam Hussein is their remarkable ability to move back and forth among all three political traditions of their region, effortlessly switching from tribal chief to brutal autocrat to modernizing President with the blink of an eye. They are always playing three-dimensional chess with the world, while Americans seem to know only how to play checkers—one plodding move at a time.
Their timing is what is most impressive. Assad and Saddam know just when to play the tribal chief or the brutal autocrat and level Hama or Halabja, and when to be the modernizing presidents and order their parliaments to rebuild these towns with low-cost government housing. (Assad rebuilt much of Hama after the massacre, including a new hospital, playgrounds, schools, apartments and even two mosques, but their use was tightly controlled to make certain that they could never again become breeding grounds for Muslim fundamentalists. According to Seale, the girl’s Ping-Pong team from the Hama Sporting Club won the 1985 Syrian national championships.) One day Assad can be hosting former American President Jimmy Carter and playing the role of the Syrian President who only wants “peace” for his people and the whole Middle East, and the next day he can be meeting with Lebanese Druse tribal chief Walid Jumblat. Walid’s father, Kemal, was assassinated, purportedly by Syrian agents, in Lebanon in 1977, when he dared to openly cross Assad. Walid was fond of telling friends about a particularly memorable meeting he later had with the Syrian President. Walid was ushered into Assad’s huge office and at a distance he could see the President sitting behind his desk. From afar, Walid would say, Assad looked like a pea sitting on a cushion. As Walid approached, Assad greeted him warmly with the traditional Arabic salutation “Ahlan wa sahlan, ahlan wa sahlan”—my house is your house. The two men got to talking, and Assad in his roundabout manner intimated to Walid how he expected him to behave with regard to a certain situation developing in Lebanon. Walid evinced some reluctance. At one point, according to Walid, Assad looked at him lovingly and told him, with his thin smile, “You know, Walid, I look at you sitting there and you remind me exactly of your dear father. What a man he was. What a shame he is not with us. Ahlan wa sahlan.”
Walid immediately understood that he was being made an offer he could not refuse. It is not for nothing that the Lebanese have a proverb: “He killed him and then marched in his funeral procession.”
Whatever mode Assad and Saddam are in, though, I am certain that they never fool themselves about the underlying tribe-like and autocratic natures of their societies. They always understand the difference between the mirage and the oasis, between the world and the word, between what men say they are and what they really are. They always know that when push comes to shove, when the modern veneer of nation-statehood is stripped away, it all still comes down to Hama Rules: Rule or die. One man triumphs, the others weep. The rest is just commentary. I am convinced that there is only one man in Israel Hafez Assad ever feared and that is Ariel Sharon, because Assad knew that Sharon, too, was ready to play by Hama Rules. Assad knew Sharon well; he saw him every morning when he looked in the mirror.
A Lebanese Shiite friend of mine, Professor Fouad Ajami, an outstanding political scientist who grew up in Beirut, used to tell me about a man his father admired for his toughness. Fouad’s father was a landlord in Beirut, as was this other man. Fouad’s father would tell him that this other man was so tough he would not only eat the egg, “he would eat the egg and its shell. He never left anything for anyone else—not even the shell.”
That was what Hama was all about and that is what politics in places like Syria, Lebanon, the Yemens, and Iraq are so often about—men grabbing for the egg and its shell, because without both they fear that they may well be dead.