CHAPTER TWENTY

Even to Kings, He Comes . . .

How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city. Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets . . . It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

MY HOME IN BEIRUT has been a time-box for thirty years, a place where time has stood still. I have sat on my balcony over the Mediterranean in the sticky, sweating summer heat and in the tornadoes of winter, watching the midnight horizon lit by a hellfire of forked lightning, the waves suddenly glistening gold as they slide menacingly below my apartment. I have woken in my bed to hear the blades of the palm trees outside slapping each other in the night, the rain smashing against the shutters until a tide of water moves beneath the French windows and into my room. I came to Lebanon in 1976, when I was just twenty-nine years old, and because I have lived here ever since—because I have been doing the same job ever since, chronicling the betrayals and treachery and deceit of Middle East history for all those years—I am still twenty-nine.

Abed, my driver, has grown older. I notice his stoop in the mornings when he brings the newspapers, the morning dailies in Beirut and The Independent , a day late, from London. My landlord, Mustafa, who lives downstairs, is now in his seventies, lithe as an athlete and shrewder, but sometimes a little more tired than he used to be. The journalists I knew back in 1976 have moved on to become associate editors or executive editors or managing editors. They have settled into Manhattan apartments or homes in upstate New York or in Islington in London. They have married, had children; some of them have died. Sometimes, reading the newspaper obituaries—for there is nothing so satisfying as the narrative of a life that has an end as well as a beginning—I notice how the years of birth are beginning to creep nearer to my own. When I came to Beirut, the obituary columns were still recording the lives of Great War veterans like my dad. Then the years would encompass the 1920s, the 1930s, at least a comfortable ten years from my own first decade. And now the hitherto friendly “1946” is appearing at the bottom of the page. Sometimes I know these newly dead men and women, spies and soldiers and statesmen and thugs and murderers whom I have met over the past three decades in the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland. Sometimes I write these obituaries myself. One cold spring day, I wrote of the life of my old friend and journalist colleague Juan Carlos Gumucio, a man of inspiring courage and deep depressions—who saved my life in war and who had sat on my own balcony so many times, dispensing wisdom and cynicism and fine wines—and who took his life, shooting himself at his home in Bolivia because the world no longer seemed a kind or gentle or worthy place for him.

And still I am twenty-nine. I can look back over the years with nightmare memories but without dreams or pain. Lebanon has a brutal history but it has been a place of great kindness to me. It has taught me to stay alive. And amid all the memories of war, of friendships and beautiful women and books read past midnight—long into the early hours, when dawn shows the crack between the curtains—there has always been the idea that Beirut was the place one came home to. How many times have I sat on the flight deck of MEA’s old 707s—from the Gulf, from Egypt or from the Balkans or Europe—and watched the promontory of Beirut lunging out into the Mediterranean “like the head of an old sailor” and heard a metallic voice asking for permission to make a final approach on runway 18 and known that in half an hour I would be ordering a gin and tonic and smoked salmon at the Spaghetteria restaurant in Ein el-Mreisse, so close to my home that I could send Abed home and walk back to my apartment along the seafront to the smell of cardamom and coffee and corn on the cob.

Of course, I know the truth. Sometimes when I get out of bed in the morning, I hear the bones cracking in my feet. I notice that the hair on my pillow is almost all silver. And when I go to shave, I look into the mirror and, now more than ever, the face of old Bill Fisk stares back at me. The night he died, a car collided with an iron rubbish skip outside my Beirut flat. The impact made a gong-like sound, followed by the scraping of the skip’s iron wheels on the tarmac. The car drove away without stopping, so I padded downstairs in my dressing gown and helped Mustafa push the heavy cart back to the side of the road so that no other motorists would be hurt, and then, at around 8:15 a.m., Peggy called to tell me that Bill had died in his nursing home. She wouldn’t be attending his funeral, she said. I had to arrange that. And I told her—it was the first thing that came into my head—that he was a man of his generation; it was an allusion to his infuriating Victorian obtuseness but I added that he had taught me to love books, which is true and which Peggy found herself able to agree with. So I went downstairs and told Mustafa and his family that my father was dead, and, according to Arab custom, each in turn shook hands with me—an affecting and somehow appropriate way of expressing sorrow, far more honourable than the clutching and happy-clappy hugging of so many Westerners. But I couldn’t say I was sorry. Maybe Bill had lived too long—or maybe Lebanon and the war crimes I had reported had made me somehow atavistic, as if the backlog of history that always seemed to hang over the events I witnessed had driven into me a cold and heartless regard for the present.

The knights of the First Crusade, after massacring the entire population of Beirut, had moved along the very edge of the Mediterranean towards Jerusalem to avoid the arrows of Arab archers; and I often reflected that they must have travelled over the very Lebanese rocks around which the sea frothed and gurgled opposite my balcony. I have photographs on my apartment walls of the French fleet off Beirut in 1918 and the arrival of General Henri Gouraud, the first French mandate governor, who travelled to Damascus and stood at that most green-draped of tombs in the Umayyad mosque and, in what must be one of the most inflammatory statements in modern Middle East history, told the tomb: “Saladin, we have returned.” Lara Marlowe gave me an antique pair of French naval binoculars of the mandate period—they may well have hung around the neck of a French officer serving in Lebanon—and in the evenings I would use them to watch the Israeli gunboats silhouetted on the horizon or the NATO warships sliding into Beirut port. When the multinational force had arrived here in 1982 to escort Yassir Arafat’s Palestinian fighters from Lebanon—and then returned to protect the Palestinian survivors of the Sabra and Chatila camps massacre—I counted twenty-eight NATO vessels off my apartment. From one of them, the Americans fired their first shells into Lebanon. And one night, I saw a strange white luminosity moving above the neighbouring apartment blocks and only after a minute realised that they were the lights of an American battleship towering over the city.

Iranians I meet often believe that Beirut is populated by CIA agents; Americans are convinced that Beirut is packed with bearded Iranian intelligence men. Sometimes I suspect they are both right. For in a sense, Beirut continues the tradition of postwar Vienna, an axis for the world’s opponents to look at each other and wonder what common bond or hatred keeps them on this earth together. I recall that an American ambassador in Beirut once described how Lebanon was a beacon of democracy in the Arab world—in the very same week that Sayed Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah announced that Lebanon was “a lung through which Iran breathes.”

Those were the days, in October 1983, when Vice President George Bush could announce—after the killing of 241 U.S. servicemen at the Beirut U.S. Marine barracks—that “we are not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards shake the foreign policy of the United States. Foreign policy is not going to be dictated or changed by terror.” How archaic those words seem now, how lost in time. By 1998, we had found a new focus for what was to become “war on terror.” Al-Qaeda’s bombs were striking at the American jugular, at embassies and barracks. President Bill Clinton bombed Sudan—an innocent pharmaceuticals factory, despite Washington’s initial lies to the contrary—and then sent a swarm of cruise missiles into Osama bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan. Where was this going to end?

Against such history, what did Bill’s death matter? It was easy to forget, sitting on my Beirut balcony, that General Gouraud had arrived in Lebanon as a result of the Sykes–Picot agreement and the Anglo–French victory in the 1914–18 war, that even before the official collapse of the Ottoman empire, the French were deposing the Arab king, Feisal, who had taken Damascus. France would rule Syria and carve Lebanon out of its body and give it to a thin Christian Maronite majority that would soon be a minority amid the Muslims of the new and artificial French-created Lebanese state. Lebanon’s existence, like much of the future Middle East, was contingent upon the victory of the British, French and Americans, and was made possible by the peace that followed the armistice of 11 November 1918—on the evening of which Second Lieutenant Bill Fisk had marched to his billets in Louvencourt.

I have in my Beirut home volumes of works on the French Mandate—most of them published in Paris in 1921, recording the reconstruction of the country, the restructuring of the Ottoman system of justice, the new currency and banks and railway renovation, all part of France’s supposed mission of civilisation to the Middle East. The French brought to the Lebanese–Syrian railway system a set of modern steam locomotives for use between Tripoli and Homs, big 08-0s which had been awarded to them under the Treaty of Versailles as wartime reparations from the Kaiser’s Germany.

With a schoolboy enthusiasm for steam locos that my father understood all too well, I went up to look at them in the aftermath of Lebanon’s civil war. They still stood on their tracks, these great steamers, their boilers cut open by shells, their eight driving wheels chipped by bullets—they had formed part of the Palestinian front line against Syrian troops around Tripoli’s port in 1983—and their oil continuing to bleed from their gaskets, a railway junkyard of early nineteenth-century state-of-the-art technology. For when I wrote down the engine serial numbers and returned to Beirut and called that renowned expert of Middle East steam, Rabbi Walter Rothschild of Leeds, he informed me that they had indeed belonged to the Reich railway system. These behemoths, it transpired, had once pulled the middle classes of Germany from Berlin to Danzig. And I remembered how once, long ago or so it seems to me now—it was in 1991—a woman friend whom I treasured wrote me a poem in which she said that she loved “the little boy in you who wanted to drive steam trains.”

And I did. I loved railways. Peggy’s French holiday scrapbook shows me loco-spotting at Creil, and one of Peggy’s first colour films shows me watching the red-and-cream Trans-Europe express pulling into Freiburg station in Germany. Once in Lebanon, I found that the government had temporarily restored the old track between Beirut and Byblos, and I sat with the driver as he steered his massive Polish diesel loco and its single, tiny wooden carriage—brought across from British India after the First World War—so slowly that Abed would travel alongside the train and wave at me as the engine-driver tooted cars out of our way.

And then there came a day, of course, when it was my mother’s turn to die. Peggy had suffered from Parkinson’s disease since before Bill’s death, but she had carried on living in the home I grew up in at Maidstone, where three kindly ladies looked after her. She wanted to die at home and so in September 1998 there was another call from Maidstone and this time one of the women who cared for Peggy said she thought my mother had only a few more days to live. I still had time to reach England. Years before her death, Peggy told me there must be no black ties at her funeral. “Everyone must wear bright clothes,” she said. And so in the beautiful little Anglo-Saxon church at Barming outside Maidstone, she had the funeral she asked for. There were mountains of flowers, not a black tie in sight—even the bearers wore casual suits—and the congregation sang “All things bright and beautiful.” But my mother’s death was not as she would have wished. And it was certainly not a death she deserved.

Like Bill, she was a patriotic soul, though with none of Bill’s bombast. In the Second World War, during the Battle of Britain, she joined the Royal Air Force, repairing radio sets in war-damaged Spitfires; her sister Bibby trained air gunners in radio navigation. Peggy became a flame of optimism over my young life. “Everything will work out all right in the end,” she used to say to me. And when I once asked what was the point of struggling with my homework when we were all going to die one day, she replied: “By the time you grow up, they may have found a cure for that.” In a way, my mother did believe in immortality, and I took her incurable optimism with me thousands of miles from Kent—to Afghanistan, through the terrible battles of the Iran–Iraq War and to the conflict in Lebanon.

But there was another side to Peggy. As Father fretted in retirement, she became a magistrate. I recall how one day, gently arguing with my father—whose views on criminal justice might have commended themselves to Judge Jeffreys— Peggy said, quite sharply: “The accused often tell the truth—and I don’t always trust policemen.” When I was a small boy, the first book she urged me to read on my own was The Diary of Anne Frank—because she wanted me to understand the nature of good and evil. During the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, she discovered a rare telephone line into the Lebanese capital and used it to tell me how she deplored the cruelty visited upon the Palestinians. She asked me repeatedly why governments spent so much money on guns.

She took up painting, watercolours and oils, still life and portraits. Her diary testifies to the difficulties of living with Bill in his old age but she would talk quietly about the life of independence she would lead afterwards. She wanted to travel, to visit Lebanon, to go to Ireland. She saw a lifetime of painting in front of her. But after the onset of Parkinson’s, she steadily lost the physical ability to live a dignified life—as surely as she maintained the will to survive. Within four years, she could scarcely speak or walk. So she communicated by pointing with a stick to letters on a piece of cardboard. Then she could no longer point. She insisted on being pushed about the garden of her home in a wheelchair. Then Peggy became too ill to move. Her last attempt to paint ended when she threw her brush onto the floor in frustration. Almost to the end, she believed they would find a cure for Parkinson’s—the same “they” who might one day find a cure for mortality.

In her last days, Peggy lost the power to swallow or eat and caught pneumonia. Bibby visited her and told her that she had been “the apple in your mother’s eye” and Peggy had managed a smile. When I arrived home, she was desperately trying to cough, apparently drowning in her own lungs, weeping with pain. And as I watched her dying, I remembered the cost of Bill Clinton’s latest adventure in the Middle East. In all, the U.S. government spent $100 million in five minutes firing those cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan. How much had it spent on investigating Parkinson’s disease? How much, for that matter, had the British government spent?

On 11 September 1998, the day after Peggy died—there was no glimmer of recognition or emotion, Peggy just stopped breathing—I called the Parkinson’s Disease Society in London. Each year, they put up between $1.5 and $2 million on research. So did the British government. But in 1997, an official for the society told me, the Medical Research Council stopped funding neurological research. I called New York to talk to one of the top Parkinson’s groups in the United States. Around $45 million was spent by the U.S. government on neurological research (not all on Parkinson’s), another $10 million by private organisations, just over $3 million by the U.S. Defense Department (for veterans), and pharmaceutical companies spent about $35 million. So we—the West—were spending less on Parkinson’s research in a year than we spent in five minutes on weapons.

It was the kind of human folly that would have angered Peggy. And at her flowered funeral, I decided to point this out. I suggested to her friends who came to Barming church that we spent far too much time accepting cruel deaths, uncomplaining when money that might have cured cancer or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s was spent on weapons or military adventures. “Why do we not rage against those who accept the shameful idea that sickness must be ‘incurable,’ that our betters know what they are doing when they prefer missiles to medicine?” I asked. If resources had been better spent, I said, Peggy would not have been in that coffin in front of the altar.

All this had an odd effect. You could have heard a flower petal drop when I was speaking. But the rector, a kindly, intelligent man though evidently not from the Church Militant, responded with a prayer, saying he would “commit this anger to God”—which, of course, entirely missed the point. Unless there is a Heavenly Post Office which redirects packages of anger to our presidents and prime ministers, there wasn’t much point in bothering the Almighty. It was Peggy’s friends I was addressing. Some of them had told me of their own relatives who were dying of supposedly incurable diseases; yet I felt afterwards that I had failed to make them understand as surely as I had the rector.

They talked about Peggy being “at rest” now that she was no longer suffering. Letters arrived that spoke of Peggy’s “release”—as if my mother wanted to die. I heard from one old lady about “God’s will,” which would suggest, if taken to its logical conclusion, that God was a sadist. If the message of Peggy’s life was optimism and joy for others, the manner of her death—courtesy of our society’s inverted values—was totally unnecessary. My father, an old-fashioned man, would have condemned my remarks in the church. It was also, I suppose, the first time Osama bin Laden’s name had been mentioned in the sanctuary of the Church of England. Peggy might have objected to the vehemence of my words. But she would have wanted me to tell the truth.

She missed September 11, 2001, by three years and a day. Would her love of life, her optimism, have been tarnished by the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania? Or would the sense of right and wrong which had provoked her anguished phone call to besieged Beirut in 1982 have surfaced? She had a sense of proportion that was quite lacking in the aftermath of 2001. I think it was because she had lived through the Second World War. She always complained when politicians used parallels with that Golgotha of a struggle. She knew that perhaps 50 million perished in those years, that thousands were slaughtered around the world every day between 1939 and 1945. Hard-hearted though it may be to ask, what are 3,000 dead compared with such a testament of blood? Certainly, Peggy—and, it has to be said, in old age my father too—would curse at the mendacity of our presidents and prime ministers. Peggy had finely tuned political antennae and—in the way that the dead come back to us and talk in our imaginations—I could hear her anger in the years to come, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, just as I could feel her confidence in life. And now that this life was becoming more dangerous—especially to journalists, especially for us—I could remember with ever greater clarity the words I had muttered to myself as Peggy lay dead in bed in the front room of her home. I suppose every child without brothers and sisters says the same thing: I’m next.

I flew back to Beirut that wet September. I had known the Lebanese airline crews for years and I sat as so often behind the pilot’s seat. A journalist has a magpie’s instinct for the collection of useless facts, a rag-bag of inane details conjured from a thousand flights, visits to a hundred hospitals. The Lebanese pilots were political beasts, mines of gossip and information. They would soak up every story I told them and—by way of return, I suppose—they would try to interest me in their job. They would teach me to read the aircraft instruments, help me to understand the principles of powered flight, the purpose of the engine reverse thrust, the system of communication with ground control. Could it really be this easy to learn to fly?

“I am lucky to be alive,” a local taxi-man said to me when I climbed into his car on the Beirut Corniche four years ago. “And you are also lucky to be alive.” And it was my companion who noted the significance of these words—and then I thought yes, I was lucky, very lucky to be alive. I had travelled so far over those years, I had criss-crossed the Middle East month after month, and by the mid-Nineties I was lecturing across Europe and America, flying to the United States from Beirut, often twice a month. One evening I would be lecturing in Los Angeles, next morning I would be in Paris and twenty-four hours later Abed would be driving me through southern Lebanon. I would wake up on airliners, perspiring, quite forgetting where I was travelling, anxiously peering through the windows. Was it morning or dusk? Had I arranged to call the office from Paris? Should I have filed a report from California last night—“last night” being mid-morning in London? My parents could never have imagined such a life.

I was still Northern Ireland correspondent when I first visited New York in 1975. I was flying to see a girl from Clonmel who worked in Wall Street and I arrived in a snowstorm, bashed my hire-car against the side of a bus on the Verrazano bridge and then—with my date sitting beside me, impatient for dinner—I misread the route to our restaurant and got lost beside the East River. I brushed the ice off a phone booth and dialled the restaurant. They’d keep open for us, the waiter said, just follow the direction of the new World Trade Center towers and I’d drive past the restaurant. It was blizzarding across New York but we watched those two towers far across Manhattan for more than an hour until we drove right up to them and there was the waiter standing in the snow with an umbrella.

The United States did not seem so aggressive then. The British were angry that the IRA could raise funds in America—since these were the years before the “war on terror,” the RAF did not choose to take the conflict to the enemy and bomb Boston—and the United Nations seemed able to handle “peace” in the aftermath of the 1973 Middle East war. I had visited pre–civil war Beirut on holiday from Belfast and noticed that there were too many Lebanese soldiers in the streets, that the Palestinians lived, armed and resentful, in the slums of Lebanon’s refugee camps. But I was too involved then with the conflict in Britain’s own dependency of Northern Ireland to comprehend the fires that were being lit so far away.

Sometimes the beauty of the sea off Beirut would discourage me from travelling. I would be due to leave on a 6 p.m. flight for Jordan but then, halfway through the afternoon, seduced by the sun and the bright green of the trees against the waves, I would call Ahmed Shebaro, my travel agent, and plead with him to find an early morning flight next day. And so I would sleep early and wake to the cooing of doves in the palms and then head off to that little sandpit that Winston Churchill created for the Hashemites, whose ruling family was still represented by the man we called the “PLK,” the Plucky Little King.

Dinner with the PLK. That’s how the news would go the rounds of the Middle East press corps. Informal, the royal court would insist. Off the record, we would assume. And when we turned up for dinner at the palace—this was in September 1993—and saw the candlelit table, more candles nestling amid the bookshelves, the mezze laid out along the flower-smothered marble table, it seemed that informality meant confidential. So when King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan said “on the record,” the notebooks fluttered like doves into our laps, the pocket cassette recorders clacking onto the marble table top. If invited, the king might visit Arafat in Jericho. The Israeli government was “courageous and far-sighted” in recognising the PLO. The world should support this historic initiative. It was “a last chance.”

How often had we heard those words “last chance”? Camp David had been a “last chance.” Now the Arafat–Rabin accord was a last chance. And it was inevitable that an American reporter should enquire after the king’s health. Of course, he told us, he had returned from the United States minus one kidney. “But the last check-up did not show any trace of cancer.” There would be a check-up every six months. “I’m trying to exercise as much as I can—and I’m still trying to give up smoking.” And we all looked at the packet of Marlboro Lights that appeared in the king’s left hand at the end of the meal. Not a frail man, but the PLK was aware of his mortality, an elder statesman now with nothing to lose by speaking his mind in public. Though when the lady from the Washington Post dared to question his right to postpone elections, he quoted the Jordanian constitution—and the king’s prerogatives—in a faintly irritated way. Not a man to be crossed, one thought, not a man to brook opposition. But it was often difficult to fault the PLK. He promised equality for those Palestinians in Jordan who chose to remain Jordanians after Arafat’s self-autonomy elections. And after acknowledging in Rabat back in 1974 that the PLO was the sole representative of the Palestinian people, he remained the only Middle East leader in half a century to formally relinquish his claim to Arab lands rather than demand more.

We sat round the table and listened to all this, the half-American Queen Noor supervising the pourers of orange juice and the purveyors of spiced chicken and fruit, we scribes almost too respectful to raise, Banquo-like, the ghost of Saddam Hussein. But he had to appear at the feast. What, we asked the king, would be Saddam’s role in a Middle East peace? And out it tumbled. Jordan had suffered for its humanitarian concern for the Iraqi people during the 1991 Gulf War. Aqaba, Jordan’s only artery to the rest of the world, was moving towards desuetude. “It’s no secret that I’ve not seen eye-to-eye with the Iraqi leadership for a very long period of time, since before the war . . . my whole concern was . . . for every country in this region.” Jordan had tried and failed to persuade the Iraqis to withdraw from Kuwait. But had we read the report by UNICEF that by the end of 1993, a million Iraqi children would die as a result of UN sanctions? Yes, “in a context of peace and if Iraq can pull itself together—a democratic, pluralist Iraq, respecting human rights—the country has a tremendous part to play.” That seemed to exclude Saddam, although the king did not say so. And the PLK talked about democracy, that unique phenomenon which he claimed could save the Middle East from extremism.

Were we taken in by this? The king may not have wanted to run his country without a parliament, as he told us, but Jordan was not exactly a Western-style democracy. “More democracy, more participation, more human rights,” he said at one point. What did this mean? He hoped, he said, to live to see Jerusalem again. The candlelight gleamed off the king’s balding head. He hoped nothing would happen to “Chairman Arafat.” Mortality had made its appearance at the dinner table. King Hussein had just over five more years to live.

The PLK was a tough man and his refusal to oppose Saddam Hussein after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait kept the Jordanians and their half population of Palestinians loyal. He had the disarming—and disconcerting—habit of calling everyone “Sir,” which must have been a hangover from his days at Sandhurst, but which led us journalists into the trap of thinking that he felt respect for his interlocutors. He had been damned by the usual American media for not supporting America’s war against Saddam; newspaper readers were then forced to make their way through endless analyses of the king’s likely fate. Was this the end of the Hashemites? Would Jordan cease to exist? The same outcome had already been predicted for Arafat. Was this the end of the PLO? But of course, the same international isolation that made Arafat weak enough to make peace with Israel also made King Hussein friendless enough to make peace with Israel.

It was a peace that froze very quickly and one that King Hussein might have preferred to wait longer to find. But Arafat’s own blundering deal at Oslo made Jordan’s treaty with Israel on 26 October 1994 inevitable. We went there, needless to say, to watch the next “last chance.” It needed a lot of signatures. Down in the heat of Araba, even the statesmen found it hard to comprehend. There were four volumes of documents, each to be signed by six hands, and pages of annexes. No wonder Bill Clinton, the desert light reflecting off the papers, kept rubbing his face, asking for sunglasses and dabbing his pained eyes with a black cloth. Then soldiers brought the maps.

Six feet in length, they were opened for more signatures. Maps of Baqura-Naharayim, of Zofar, of ground-water tables, of Yarmouk, of saltpans in the Dead Sea. Abdul Salam Majalli, the Jordanian prime minister, raised one arm in astonishment as more volumes were thumped onto the table. Clinton, overwhelmed by the light off the sheets, turned his back on his guests as an aide provided him with an eye-bath, right there in the middle of the desert. Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister, wore a sun-cap and sunglasses that made him look—as he scribbled his name again and again—like a football manager signing up a new star.

Thus did the men of Araba firmly divide Jordan from Israel, and Jordan from the land that was Palestine. Thus did King Hussein allow Israelis to go on living on strips of Jordanian territory. Thus did Jordan and Israel end their forty-six years of war, witnessed by just a single, junior PLO official from Amman, the sole representative of the people—the Palestinians—over whom they had fought each other. A minute’s silence honoured the thousands of Israelis and Jordanians—some of whom must have been Palestinians—killed in those forty-six years. “I believe they are with us on this occasion,” King Hussein said.

It was the noblest remark of the day by an ageing and tired king, a man who now thought much of death and one whose own people had the gravest reservations about this peace. Not many kilometres over the grey-brown mountains to the north-west of the seats upon which the dignitaries perched lay the city of Jerusalem, its eastern side—and the West Bank—still under the occupation of the very Israeli army that stood to attention before us. The Jordanian journalists stood unsmiling in the heat. “There’s no real jubilation on our side,” one of them said as Bill Clinton’s stretch limo swept between the old minefields of the Jordanian–Israeli frontline. “The people are looking at this like surgery—something they have to go through. For the Israelis, this is a victory. For us, it’s defeat.”

That was not how the statesmen of Araba put it. It was “a peace of the brave” (Clinton), a “source of pride,” the “dawn of a new era” and “a day like no other” (King Hussein), “the peace of soldiers and the peace of friends” (Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin). The king came across as the most dignified of men and ended with a remark that left an unanswered question: “This [treaty] is not just a piece of paper . . . it will be real, as we open our hearts and minds to each other.” Rabin touched on the same thought when he said that “peace between states is peace between people.” Yet both men knew that in much of the Middle East, peace between states did not necessarily mean peace between people.

An Israeli journalist threw his arms around a Jordanian bureaucrat while scores of Israeli girls distributed cold water, each bottle labelled “Israeli–Jordanian peace October 1994” in Arabic and Hebrew, but with its provenance—the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights—printed only in Hebrew. The hundreds of chairs were tied together with thin plastic handcuffs, the same handcuffs used by the Israeli army. The twenty-one-gun salute by artillery crews who could have been shooting at each other, the rumbustious Jordanian anthem played before the haunting beauty of the “Hatikvah,” the two granddaughters of Jordanian and Israeli soldiers killed in the 1967 war; they touched the elderly warriors standing next to the American president. But it needed Bill Clinton’s stock of clichés—“Turn no-man’s-land into every man’s home”—and his ritual threats against “terrorism” to remind the 5,500 guests that this was an American peace, engineered by the United States and guaranteed by the United States—whose closest Middle East ally is Israel. Only when the annexes were published later did we discover that the border between Jordan and the occupied West Bank had been marked as the frontier between Jordan and Israel.

Nor did Hussein have any reason to feel that Jordan was safer for the peace treaty. Only weeks before his death, he was particularly vexed when an Israeli journalist, Israel Harel, disinterred an idea that had long appealed to Ariel Sharon. Writing in Ha’aretz, Harel claimed that “Jordan was founded on part of the Jewish homeland . . . It will ultimately become apparent . . . that two nations [i.e., Israel and Palestine] cannot live on the small piece of land to the west of the Jordan and that two states cannot live there. If nations with vast stretches of land that have no need for additional acreage are feasting their eyes on Jordan, Israel must also stake its claim to Jordan . . . With that territory—even part of it—we could solve in cooperation with our peace process partners, many territorial disputes we have with the Palestinians.”

Israeli prime minister Rabin was to be assassinated by an Israeli—an “extremist,” according to Western journalists, of course, not a “terrorist”—just over a year after the Araba treaty was signed, and King Hussein would survive for only another four and a half years. He had never given up the Marlboro Lights and his death from cancer followed gruelling chemotherapy treatment in the United States and an ill-advised, rain-soaked motorcade through Amman to celebrate his supposed recovery.

It was on this initial return to Jordan that a scandal of royal proportions broke over the Hashemites. Hussein disgraced the cosy, avuncular figure of his brother Hassan by taking away his role as crown prince. Hassan knew the game of kings had ended the moment Hussein arrived at Queen Alia airport. There was a formal embrace from the man who thought he had won his battle with cancer. But he ignored Hassan’s son Rashid and then showed what he thought of his crown prince by choosing to travel into the city not with Hassan—his normal routine—but alongside Queen Noor. Hassan was left behind. The man who had waited thirty-four years to be king of Jordan was stunned.

In his American clinic, Hussein had been told that Hassan had tried to fire the chief of staff of the Jordanian army, that Hassan’s Pakistani-born wife Princess Sarvath had changed the carpets in the royal palace in anticipation of becoming queen. Both stories appear to have been untrue. Hassan had told Walid bin Talal, a Saudi billionaire, that he could not purchase the home of the chief of staff because it belonged to the field marshal. And Sarvath had been redecorating her own home—a period villa once owned by the former British ambassador Sir Alec Kirkbride—not the king’s. But far too many portraits of Crown Prince Hassan had begun to appear across Jordan and—a dangerous precedent, this—pictures of his own son as well. Hussein publicly accused Hassan of plotting little less than a coup d’état.

When word of the king’s suspicions first reached Hassan, he presented himself before his brother and asked Hussein bluntly: “How have I offended you? Here is my gun. If I have been disloyal to you, please shoot me—but do not disgrace me.” The king ordered Hassan to take his gun back and reassured him that he was still regent. The sequel to this was far more extraordinary. The king called Hassan to the royal palace at half-past midnight on 20 January 1999, to present him with his letter of dismissal. A photographer was waiting to snap Hassan handing over his insignia to the new crown prince, Hussein’s son Abdullah. Hassan returned to his car without time to read the document; driving away, he turned on the radio only to hear the contents of the unopened letter on the national news. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Many Jordanians felt that the manner of his dismissal was unnecessarily cruel. As crown prince, Hassan had been ordered by the king to handle Jordan’s development projects—a role that inevitably brought him into conflict with the government of Prime Minister Abdul Karim Kabariti, who was said to dislike Hassan personally. Ministers believed that Hassan was trespassing on their prerogatives— something he had no right to do, since in Jordan the right of succession is the crown prince’s only constitutional power.

But had Hassan cast his mind back to the day nearly forty-three years earlier when another trusted servant of the Jordanian monarchy believed he was secure in his job, he might have known his fate. King Hussein was only twenty-one at the time but he had already argued with Lieutenant General Sir John Bagot Glubb, British commander of his Arab Legion and principal military adviser to his majesty. Glubb had disagreed with Hussein over strategy—the young king wanted to retaliate against the Israelis for raids on his border—and Glubb also presented Hussein with a list of Arab Legion officers who he claimed were “subversives” and should be dismissed.

Convinced that London was trying to control Jordan’s armed forces, the king fired the fifty-nine-year-old British general, along with his two top officers, the chief of staff and director of intelligence. In a tantrum, Hussein told his cabinet that his orders should be “executed” at once. Glubb Pasha was taken to the airport next morning in Hussein’s own car. The king’s anger subsided. Everything had been done in the interests of his nation. But to the sick king in the Mayo clinic in 1999, the crown prince was trying to take over the army—just as Glubb Pasha had been accused of trying to accomplish in 1956.

There was therefore nothing surprising about the dismissal of Crown Prince Hassan. The Hashemites had always lived on the edge, provoking disaster and recovery with a drama and nerve that still astonish other Arab leaders. They have a tendency to move rapidly between rage and contemplation, political folly and eternal friendship, that might be a characteristic of the Gulf Arabs rather than the Levant. But of course, Hussein’s family did indeed come from the Gulf, from the province of Hejaz, and it was his great-grandfather, also Hussein, whom the Ottomans named as emir, sherif of the holy Muslim city of Mecca. An austere religious group faithful to the al-Saud family—the “Islamic fundamentalists” of their time—were to drive the Hashemites from what was to become Saudi Arabia and Winston Churchill was to appoint King Hussein’s grandfather Abdullah as emir of Transjordan. Abdullah had wanted to be king of Palestine—for which the British had other plans. Abdullah’s brother Feisal would become king of Iraq, the consolation prize for losing the monarchy of Syria—for which the French had other plans. King Abdullah tried to make peace with the Zionists who were planning their new state on Palestinian land—and after the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, the monarch’s life was forfeit. He had annexed the West Bank of the Jordan River; almost all the rest of Palestine had become Israel. The fifteen-year-old Hussein personally witnessed Abdullah’s assassination in Jerusalem, a killing organised by Palestinians.

The Hashemites were thus a family of loss, a dynasty used to suspicion as well as resolution. They lost the Hejaz, they lost the west of Palestine. In Baghdad ten years later, King Feisal the Second—grandson of old Abdullah’s brother who had been appointed by the British—was murdered in a part-Baathist coup which, twenty years later, would bring Saddam Hussein to power. In 1967, King Hussein, in the greatest disaster of his career, chose to join Egypt and Syria in their war against Israel, and was driven out of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In less than half a century, therefore, the Hashemites had lost the Hejaz, Iraq and all of Palestine.

Inevitably the story of the family became the story of the PLK. His English schooling naturally endeared him to the British, who admire courage in adversity and, even more, plucky losers. When Hussein married Antoinette Avril Gardiner, daughter of a Royal Engineers lieutenant colonel, in 1961, it felt as though Jordan had become a British protectorate once again. “Toni,” who became Princess Muna, gave birth to two sons, Abdullah—now the king—and Feisal. She was the second of four wives for a king whose marriages could be as turbulent as his nation’s politics.¹⁷⁵ He had divorced his first and older wife Dina within eighteen months; the Jordanian ambassador to Egypt delivered the king’s goodbye letter to the queen when she was visiting a sick relative in Cairo. The marriage to “Toni” foundered when his roving eye settled on the beautiful Alia Toukan, an employee of Royal Jordanian Airlines, whose love for the king might have given him lasting peace of mind—they married in 1972—had she not been killed in a helicopter crash just over four years later. Amman’s Alia international airport is thus the only international airport in the world to be named after the victim of an air crash. Then in 1978, the king married Elizabeth Halaby, who became Queen Noor, an equally beautiful but forceful woman who physically towered over the king and who developed a strong distrust of his introverted, over-intellectualising brother Hassan. If the latter had become king, it was said in Amman, Noor would have left the country.

Having lost the West Bank, the king had to face the consequences: Palestinian contempt and what amounted to an attempted coup d’état by Palestinian guerrillas. With a ruthlessness that has still not been fully acknowledged, Hussein’s Bedouin troops slaughtered their way through the Palestinian camps of Jordan and crushed guerrilla power. Having learned from his rash decision to go to war in 1967, the king sat out the 1973 Middle East conflict in near silence, maintaining semi-secret contacts with Israeli leaders, just as his grandfather had done. What he had, he would hold. The preservation of Jordan—as artificial a country as Britain ever invented—became the be-all and end-all for the Hashemites. The PLK would be a friend of the West. When a Washington newspaper claimed that the king had received millions of dollars from the CIA, the stories were suppressed in Amman.

In the West, we tend to divide the Arabs into three fictitious groups that prove our own racism as much as our ignorance: the scheming, hook-nosed greedy Gulf businessmen who appear in feature films and anti-Semitic cartoons in the American press—the Arabs, like the Jews, being Semites; “fundamentalist terrorists”; and thirdly—a throwback to the original Hollywood portrayal of the Bedouin desert leader immortalised by Rudolph Valentino—as “hardy warriors of the desert.” The Hashemites were definitely in the “hardy warrior” bracket, or at least King Hussein was. A friend of the king once compared Hassan to Cecil Rhodes, a difficult personality to follow.

As for the king, he not only enjoyed sport and flying; he had a keen eye on the sport of the bedroom. Only months before his cancer was diagnosed, he was courting a Jordanian in her early twenties. Queen Noor was not amused. But it did his reputation no harm. Saudi Arabia’s princes do not lack women and the emir of Kuwait has endured a series of revolving-door marriages with tribal ladies. Yet it was impossible to separate King Hussein’s prolific love life from political gambles. Long regarded as a pliable “friend” of the West, he astonished his American allies by embracing Saddam Hussein—quite literally—after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.¹⁷⁶ Did he really believe that Saddam would “liberate” Jerusalem? Or that Jordan could survive without the Gulf Arabs? He grew a beard; in Amman he was called Sherif of Mecca. The Saudis were enraged. He appeared to be looking towards lost lands. He knew the Palestinians would support Iraq. He became the most popular monarch in the Arab world at the very moment he became the most unpopular monarch in the West.

The Americans were ready to roll up the Hashemite carpet. But then in 1993 came Arafat’s peace “deal” and his own treaty with Israel and overnight, the treacherous ally of the beastly Saddam had become again the Plucky Little King. Jordan was “ours” again. The Americans built a new, massive, fortified embassy on the outskirts of Amman. “Is this the new CIA headquarters?” Hussein joked to Jordanian friends one night as he looked across their gardens at the floodlit compound. He may have been right. The Hashemites may trace their ancestry back to the Prophet Mohamed—as they do—but they are Tudors rather than democrats, an oligarchy rather than a modern monarchy, however liberal and decent they are as individuals.

The wraithlike king was finally taken to hospital in Amman to die, and the storms that embraced the Middle East that first week in February 1999 seemed to presage something, the dark night that strangled the travelling lamp after Duncan’s murder. Whirlwinds moved in from the sea off Beirut; one hit my balcony just after I saw it coming and escaped indoors, hurling my glass dining table to the wall and smashing the plates. In Amman, a dark fog covered the city, wrapping itself around the thousands of shrouded figures outside the King Hussein Medical Centre. Such wind, such very thick fog, but I could hear their voices from a kilometre away. “With our blood, with our soul, we sacrifice ourselves for you.” Always the same words, the same desire for martyrdom. We had heard it from Palestinians, from Iraqis, now from Jordanians. Did they mean this when they said it?

Inside the hospital, royal courtiers struggled with a unique problem: when to turn off the king’s life-support system which was all that kept him alive. Dialysis machines and intravenous drips were still pumping life into a king who, as a deeply religious man, believed that he should die when God—not man—decided. But the science of prolonging the life of the desperately sick took no account of the Koran any more than it did of the Bible. No Muslim prelate had yet succeeded in defining Islam’s response to a development which had taken the moment of death out of the hands of Allah. In the end, he died, as a friend of the royal family told me, “in an orderly way and without any sense of shock.” Even to kings, he comes . . .

Outside the hospital, the crowd’s posters portrayed the dead king who lay only a few hundred metres from us: fighter pilot Hussein, Bedouin warrior Hussein, Field Marshal Hussein. But not a single photograph of the king and his son together. The new King Abdullah—how strange the name sounded that day—was not in the thoughts of the screaming men or of the old woman who prostrated herself in a torrent of freezing water streaming down the roadway.

King Abdullah. It had a strange resonance; of another king almost half a century earlier at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Abdullah’s great-grandfather, with a bullet in his head and his turban rolling away from him, while a teenage boy—now the bald corpse inside the hospital behind us—collapses in horror. Jerusalem still lay only 70 kilometres away through the suffocating, frozen fog, as lost to the Jordanians today as it was when King Hussein’s army retreated more than three decades ago.

So now this odd, fragile, brave little land had another British military graduate to run its affairs. Sandhurst, Oxford, Georgetown, tank commander and general with his very own Praetorian Guard. His special forces—one of those supposedly “crack” units that breed all over the Middle East—had put down a riot or two over the past few years. You only had to watch those people outside the hospital—and the uncontrollable nature of their grief—to understand how heavy would be the burden for King Abdullah. The people pushed at the police lines and sobbed into their hands and collapsed fainting into the mud around the gates. To a Westerner, to a tourist, Jordan is a friendly sandpit of Roman ruins, rock palaces, camels and an old railway line blown up by Colonel Lawrence. But its people had been wounded; 65 per cent of them could count Palestinian dispossession in their family tree. All day, the rain fell out of those cold, lowering clouds. And there was something about Hussein’s funeral that betrayed a fearful reality for those who saw it.

Two Jordans buried their king. There was the formal, Westernised nation with its Scottish-style bagpipers and new, English-accented monarch who invited the world’s statesmen to bury the “fallen warrior” on his polished gun carriage, Hussein’s Arab steed—empty boots reversed in the stirrups—clopping obediently behind the coffin. And what the world saw—indeed, what the world was supposed to see—was the adoration of kings, presidents, prime ministers and princes: Clinton, Bush Senior, Blair, Assad, Yeltsin, Chirac, Shamir, Netanyahu, Mubarak, Weizman, Arafat, Sharon, Carter, Ford, the Prince of Wales . . . After all, had not President Clinton already consigned this man to paradise in his latest pronouncement on Jordan’s loss?

Then there was the other Jordan. Outside the gate, sweating and shrieking to God, smashed back by gun butts, sworn at by the descendants of Glubb Pasha’s Arab Legion as they clawed their way towards King Hussein’s coffin, the other Jordan did not quite fit in with the pageantry on the other side of the palace wall. When the Jordanians broke through the troops and charged in their thousands towards the gates, they were confronted by hundreds more armed soldiers. “In the name of God, help me!” an old woman moaned as the crowd stamped her into the mud.

So which was the real Jordan? Was it the nation enshrined just above the marble floor of the Rhagadan Palace, where the coffin of the “little king” was honoured, prayed to, watched and nodded at by all the dangerous, untrustworthy allies who had variously loved, hated or plotted against him? Such sincerity, such affection, they all showed. There was Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had sent his killer squad into Jordan only a few months earlier to assassinate a Hamas official, bowing stiffly before the coffin. There was former president George Bush, who only eight years earlier had regarded Hussein as little more than an enemy agent. Yassir Arafat, whose gunmen once sought to destroy Hussein’s kingdom, snapped to attention in his olive fatigues, twice saluting the flag-draped coffin in front of him.

And behind the coffin, scarcely moving, was the studied, often frowning face of King Abdullah the Second and his two half-brothers, Crown Prince Hamzah and Prince Hashem. They stood there, hands out in prayer from time to time, all dressed in immaculate suits and ties and wearing the same kind of chequered red-and-white kuffiah as Arafat. It was as if they were acting out some kind of unusual ritual, more like English public schoolboys in an unfamiliar play than Arab warrior princes, trying to cut a dash among the tall men of the old Arab Legion— Hussein had renamed them the Jordan Arab Army after dismissing Glubb—who guarded the coffin and its royal standard.

“Vulnerable” was the word that came to mind. The princes did not look old enough, or hard enough, or cynical enough, to handle the sleek men who passed before them to honour their father, some of them gentlemen, others venal dictators, quite a few with an awful lot of blood on their hands, the harmless and the harmful, one after the other, parading before the coffin as if waiting for passport pictures. I suppose it was not surprising that history was being rewritten for the watching world. On satellite television, the cancer-dead king was being eulogised as the man who freely made peace with Israel, whose country was praised—this from CNN—because it was now closer to Israel than to many Arab states. So we had to forget that the king once privately talked of the “manacles” of the Oslo agreement, which forced Jordan into so unpopular a peace treaty with Israel, and remember what Clinton had told us two days earlier: King Hussein was now in paradise. Which is where we were told Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had gone after his death—that being the destiny, it seems, of all Arab leaders who make peace with Israel at our behest.

The television boys—in some cases, the very same “experts” who had predicted the fall of Hussein when he refused to support America’s 1991 war—were in full flow. “Unassailable moral integrity,” “a visionary for peace,” “a man of great charisma” with an “unquestioned” legacy, a man who “always wanted to give his people the rights that they deserved.” These are, unfortunately, authentic quotations. What was that legacy again? And what political rights did Jordanians receive, save for a vote in a rubber-stamp parliament and the knowledge that if they stepped out of line in their “man-in-the-street” interviews with Western television reporters on the future of King Abdullah—just like his father, a soldier king, a chip off the old block, in fact—they would be taken off to His Majesty’s constabulary for a thumping.

As for those crowds whose voices could be heard baying beyond the palace gates by the beautifully groomed kings and presidents inside, they loved the king, some of them. But there was less enthusiasm for the new king and much less for Prince Hamzah, Hussein’s son by his last wife, Queen Noor. “Hamzah was chosen as new crown prince by the United States,” a girl insisted.¹⁷⁷ She was a Palestinian Jordanian.

“Rubbish,” I snorted at her. “You shouldn’t believe in the moamara, ‘The plot,’” I said. But then, an hour later, I saw the full list of dignitaries at the palace and was struck by the number of State Department men, the boys from the Washington peacemaking department led by Martin Indyk, the ex-research director at the largest Israeli lobby group, who could not manage to persuade Netanyahu to stop building Jewish settlements on Arab land but who insisted Arafat must “crack down on terrorism.” So was the real Jordan, then, among the swaying mass of shabbily dressed, shouting youths on the highway to the palace, many of them poorly educated, some pathetically adorned with crinkled pictures of the dead king glued to their shirts and scarves?

For when the coffin approached, a kind of ripple, half sound and half movement, spread through the lines of tired, somehow broken faces, as if a stone had been thrown into a human pond. There was no signal from them in advance, no instruction or indication save for a line of children who suddenly moved from the trees into the road. Then en masse the people swarmed towards the coffin and its jeepload of headscarved Jordanian guards, tears streaming down their faces, hands outstretched to touch, even to seize, the flag or perhaps the coffin itself.

I remembered thinking, before a panicking soldier struck two men with his rifle and punched me in the chest as the crowd fell on us, that it was like throwing petrol onto a kitchen stove. It was a strange, frightening kind of hysteria because it combined both love and fury in almost exactly equal measure, intense loyalty married to absolute rage. When I rolled over, I found the soldier lying beside me. At the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini almost ten years earlier, the crowds tore at his shroud. And if the Arab Legion’s descendants had not shouted in the name of their dead king and if the other soldiers had not laid into the first of the young Jordanians who tried to clamber onto the carriage, it might have happened again.

Violence is portrayed so differently when its progenitors are outside palace walls. How, one wondered, did these masses feel about the large presence of the Israeli foreign minister, Ariel Sharon, in front of their king’s coffin, the very man who sent Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist allies into the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps in 1982? What did they make of the arrival of President Assad of Syria, who ordered his soldiers to “eliminate” an Islamic uprising in Hama in 1982, an operation that left the dead in their thousands? Or of the former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, whose 1996 offensive against Lebanon culminated in the Israeli massacre of 109 Lebanese civilians in a United Nations camp at Qana, not to mention the dead of that ambulance in Mansouri? In every case, the victims had been Muslims, just as they had been in the war unleashed by the man who most astonished the world by turning up in Amman, whose butchery in Chechnya was still scarcely mentioned in the West. Boris Yeltsin waved to the cameras—I am alive, I am alive, he was trying to tell us—and walked falteringly into the palace. Close to him, Hussein’s favourite white stallion, Amr, briefly reared up on his hind legs behind the coffin. As a remark of respect, it was said, he would never be ridden again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.¹⁷⁸ 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.

Assad’s own hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood comes through in a speech he made a month after the Hama bloodbath, his words now dutifully preserved in Hasna Askihita’s computer memory in the Assad Library under the date of 7 March 1982. Assad’s comments are astonishing, even frightening, for he might have been talking about Algeria. “Nothing is more dangerous to Islam than distorting its meanings and concepts while you are posing as a Muslim. This is what the criminal Brothers are doing . . . They are killing in the name of Islam. They are butchering children, women and old people in the name of Islam. They are wiping out entire families in the name of Islam . . . Death a thousand times to the Muslim Brothers, the criminal Brothers, the corrupt Brothers.”

And so it came to pass, just as President Assad said; death did find them, a thousand times and more.

Two years after Hama, Rifaat would try to seize power from his brother, trundling his T-72 tanks through the streets of Damascus, and would be exiled to Spain and would, even when Hafez died, speak of the “farce” of the presidential succession—which was not to be his. The restaurateur and nightclub owner and sword of vengeance against the Muslim Brothers of Hama would never come to power. Like Prince Hassan of Jordan, he had mightily—though more violently— displeased his brother.

Other enemies, meanwhile, remained at Syria’s gates. After agreeing to the land-for-peace formula of the old Bush administration, Assad was now being told by the Israelis that he must make peace without the return of Golan. Six times in 1996, the Israeli military talked of a possible war with Syria. When Assad transferred some of his 21,000 troops out of Lebanon and positioned an armoured brigade south of the Damascus–Beirut highway to prevent a possible Israeli assault that autumn, he was accused of preparing an attack on Israel. In reality, he was the only Arab leader to warn of the dangers of the “peace process” and to speak publicly of his suspicions that the Israelis would decide—after obtaining concessions from the Arabs—to hold on to most of the land they seized in 1967.

It is not difficult to see just how much land this involves. I sped down the long straight road to Quneitra, the Syrian city that the Israelis systematically destroyed when they retreated from the initial 1973 postwar ceasefire lines under the Kissinger agreement. To my right, the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967—and the very fulcrum of the “peace process”—grew purple through the winter haze, capped by a line of snow. Israel’s refusal to return this territory— contrary to the pledges given by the United States before the 1991 Madrid Arab–Israeli summit—remains, outside the occupied Palestinian lands, the one outstanding casus belli in the original Arab–Israeli conflict.

I drove past the old front lines of the 1967 war, the abandoned, overgrown gun-pits of the 1973 war, the new revetments of the Syrian army’s forward units, sprouting with radio aerials, defended with armoured vehicles and troop trucks. And far down the road, inside the UN ceasefire zone, I came to the ghost-town of old Quneitra, greeted as usual by an Assad statue and a string of banners above a ruined house, each portraying a smiling Assad and his son Basil. In the name of the father and of the dead son, the land beyond this town—the heights of Mount Hermon and the string of hills boasting Israel’s high-tech radar stations—is all supposed to be liberated one day, whether by peace or by war. On the Syrian front line—so close that I could see the Israeli soldiers looking at me through binoculars—a Syrian lieutenant pointed to a group of tourists across the fields. “You see those three cars? They are probably Jews, foreigners, being told that Syria is their country, that everything they see should belong to them, Damascus and beyond.” This, I am sure, is what the lieutenant believed. And I was almost equally certain that the tourists in those three cars were being told that Golan was part of Israel and that Syria was only waiting to seize it.

A hundred metres away, neatly maintained amid yew trees and grass plots, I found the graves of the Syrian soldiers who fought across this ground over almost half a century. Most lay beneath Islamic headstones, though some were beneath Christian crosses. Here lay twenty-nine-year-old Major Ismail Bin Khalaf al-Shahadat, a Muslim who “fell martyr on October 9th, 1973.” Beside him lay Sergeant Mikael Srour bin Wahebi, a Christian from northern Syria, who was killed in action just one day earlier. There were twenty-one-year-old corporals from Latakia and Aleppo and, behind them, older remains. Here was Private Kamel Mohamed Yassin of the 2nd Infantry Regiment, killed in action “for the Pan-Arab cause”—the attempt to destroy the infant state of Israel—on 13 July 1948; and Corporal Salah Brmawi of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, and a hundred others.

At the edge of the cemetery, I found former Syrian air force Private Assad Badr, now the grave-keeper of Quneitra, tending his roses in the bright midday sun. How did he feel about the dead? “The feeling of any live man for the dead,” he replied. “We take pride in martyrdom.” But when I asked if he had seen death in war, the man’s smile clouded. Yes, he said, at the Dumair air base during the 1973 war. “We were sitting in a slit-trench eating our lunch out of tin cans when an Israeli Phantom jet suddenly came at us, firing its cannon. The bullets ripped right through the trench and just missed me. But my friend, Morem es-Sair, was next to me and the bullets cut him in half—right in half beside me.” Then two explosions changed the air pressure around us and, far above the front line to the west, two Israeli jets sonic-boomed their way northwards, their silver contrails hanging like ropes behind the war memorial and the white gravestones.

But Golan was not the only “lost land” the Syrians desired. The map of Syria that you can buy in Damascus bookstalls contains an intriguing anomaly. To the south, the Golan Heights are shown as Syrian—which they are, though under Israeli occupation—but in the north, the national territory is drawn up the Mediterranean coastline, way beyond Latakia. Yet drive up the coastal highway and the map seems to be a little ambitious. Even before I reached the town of Sweidiyeh, I found, beyond a Syrian customs post, the Turkish flag. And above the frozen mountain road inland to Aleppo, alongside the wood-smoked valleys and frosted orange orchards, Turkish flags stood upon the heights—100 kilometres south of the border printed on my map. Only on closer inspection did I notice a thin, almost invisible broken line on the paper, marking the modern-day Turkish frontier and another piece of lost Syria. The cartography told that largely forgotten story of France’s 1939 “gift” to Turkey of the Syrian city of Alexandretta in the hope of persuading the Turks to join the Allied side in the forthcoming war against Germany.

It was astonishing to realise how much Syria—as a land rather than a nation— had lost in the twentieth century. Portrayed as an expansionist state only awaiting the opportunity to seize all of Lebanon, Palestine, even Israel, Syria has contracted rather than expanded, losing northern Palestine, Lebanon and Transjordan after the First World War. Alexandretta in 1939, Golan in 1967—the first three through Western trickery and the last through war. If the Hashemites had spent their modern life losing land, so had Syria.

Just over a year after King Hussein departed, another caliph was to die, the Lion of Damascus himself, and in circumstances of some irony for Syria’s enemies. For almost a quarter of a century, Assad’s army had been present in Lebanon—to oppose Israel’s invasion, it is true, but also to ensure obedience. At noon on Saturday, 10 June 2000, Hafez Assad was talking on the telephone to his Lebanese protégé, President Emile Lahoud, telling him—and this was the way Assad spoke—that “our destiny is to construct for our children a future which reassures them.” At this point, Lahoud heard the telephone drop and the line cut. Ten minutes later, Lahoud was reconnected to the presidential palace in Damascus, to find another voice on the phone. It was Bashar Assad, the president’s ophthalmologist son. “My father has just passed away,” he said.

Another king, another funeral. Yet when at last it reached us, Assad’s coffin seemed ridiculously small, a narrow, polished wooden box under a Syrian flag, dwarfed by the truckload of sweating troops in front and the pale green field gun behind. The Lion of Damascus had also compared himself to Saladin, whose own twelfth-century remains lay little more than a kilometre from us. But then a few metres away—a shock in the heat and dust and xenophobia of Damascus—walked the tall figure of his son Bashar, black-suited, black sunglasses above a tiny moustache and prominent nose, ramrod-straight, brisk and businesslike behind the gun carriage that bore his father. If his uncle Rifaat, Assad’s brother, really wanted to dethrone him, as many in Syria believed—if there was anyone here amid the tens of thousands, a single person who wanted to destroy the life of the heir apparent— Bashar did not seem to care. In Amman, the leaders and the people had been kept apart. In Damascus, they walked together.

Bashar Assad, a computer enthusiast who never expected to be the crown prince of Baathism, was flanked by his braided generals, as all Middle East leaders must be, and I had seen most of them before, over the years: General Ali Aslan, the chief of staff whose 5th Division almost recaptured the Golan Heights in the 1973 Middle East war and who ordered Syria’s helicopter units to prevent Israel’s advance up the Lebanese mountains in 1982; General Mustafa Tlass, Assad’s faithful retainer and minister of defence, who almost died in an Israeli air raid on Lebanon. And there was Bashar Assad’s younger brother, Maher. And his uncle Jamil, who once, pleading for Rifaat after he had opposed Hafez Assad, was told by the old man now lying in the coffin: “I am your elder brother to whom you owe obedience—don’t forget that I am the one who made you all.” Thus the creation of the dead president followed him on his last journey through Damascus. “How can we bring Assad back?” the crowds thundered. And their reply was the beat of a funeral drum.

It was an orderly affair as such things go in the Middle East, less of the shrieking chaos of King Hussein’s funeral, more of the regimented mourning learned in ministries and police stations. The Republican Guard with their automatic rifles faced away from the cortège, towards the Syrian “masses” who so often gave— and here we take a sublime leap into the mysteries of Assad’s electoral system— 98 per cent of their votes for the now dead president. The two police cars in front had the word “PROTOCOL” in capital letters painted in white on their bonnets— which is the way this regime liked to conduct its affairs: ordered, measured, ruthlessly uncompromising.

So it was surprising, amid the dust rising from the feet of the running crowds and the soldiers screaming at the young men in black to stand back from the gun carriage, to hear a youth turn on a policeman. “ Lesh amtet fauni?” he bawled. “Why are you pushing me?” And equality, I suppose, is what Baathism was supposed to be about. Thousands of teenagers in cheap shirts and jeans—smelling of sweat and cigarettes and, some of them, crying—ran level with the coffin, and there was indeed an equality of hysteria and desperation. But at the People’s Palace, we learned what equality was really about. U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright marched like a Georgetown teacher into the state rooms in blue hat and white scarf, ahead of President Mohamed Khatami of Iran. But there she stayed while the Syrians brought the dignified, robed Iranian leader at once to the coffin.

Where was Clinton? How come Hussein of Jordan deserved an American president but not Assad of Syria? Was this bureacracy? Or was it because Hussein did what the Americans wanted and Assad did not? Khatami prayed before the flagdraped casket, lips moving, just as President Mubarak of Egypt had done a few minutes earlier, the Egyptian president’s eyes all the while moving fishlike across the diplomats in the same room. Did Mubarak reflect on the two stars that still adorned the flag on the coffin, the almost forgotten symbol of union between Syria and Egypt, the very last vain attempt at Arab unity?

Arafat was given his moments at the coffin, but merely coffee beside Bashar, his left, Parkinson’s-quivering hand clutching the side of a chair. How Hafez had raged at this little man in his ill-fitting uniform and kuffiah, once expressing his irritation that Arafat’s Arab slobbering kisses lasted far too long. For once, there were few mourners with blood on their hands—barring, I suppose, the long-congealed blood of those tens of thousands of Iraqi children who had died under the sanctions that Madeleine Albright had so sternly supported. Vladimir Putin, the killer of Grozny, sent the old Russian prime minister, Primakov. Sharon could never have come. Rifaat, the butcher of Hama, faced arrest if he turned up for the funeral. But there were guerrilla fighters aplenty: as well as Arafat, the chairman of Hizballah, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, and a clutch of minor, soon-to-die Palestinian fighters from the old, beaten days of Fatahland in southern Lebanon.

On Syrian television, they back-clothed the whole affair with Beethoven while a commentator swooned over the dead president. “You are our teacher and our method and we have learnt from your example—we will learn from your thoughts and ideas. Our hearts are broken and our eyes are weeping—we were stunned by your death and we cannot really wake up . . . and we cannot believe that you have left us.” Here again was that essential infantilism of every dictatorial regime. This was not adoration. This was, you might say, more than adoring; a systematic, god-like transformation of Syria’s leadership into Titans.

It was no different at Qardaha, where Assad was now ceremonially laid in the ground, in the same mosque as his son Basil, beneath a bed of white flowers. “Oh God!” an old man shrieked beside the grave, hurling himself to the marble floor, writhing and groaning, his words more and more distorted by the cavernous interior of the building. “My God! My God!” he kept crying. “He has lost his senses,” the head of protocol muttered. Maan Ibrahim was a tall man in midnight-black clothes. “This often happens here. The people loved him so much, you see. But we see these things all the time now.” The middle-aged man was dragged past us by three officials, the back of his head reflected off the marble floor, thick clouds of incense drifting past us in the smoky interior.

Idolatry or love? Affection or insanity? They passed through the mosque at the rate of 5,000 an hour, Shiite prelates and Catholic priests and Syrian generals, the sunlight splashing off their golden lapels, and elderly women and girls in tight black trousers and village men, unshaven and weeping, and an entire passenger aircraft crew, all in their neatly pressed Syrian Arab Airlines uniforms. There was only so much of this that a visitor could take. Critical obituaries were not to be had in Syria; references to past “mistakes” are only acceptable because Assad himself once referred to them.

But there were lessons to be learned. Qardaha was the very centre of the Alawi Syrian minority which has controlled so much of Syria’s destiny, indeed so much of Syria, over the past thirty years. Which also helped to explain why a convoy of Hizballah coaches turned up at Assad’s tomb, their black-shirted occupants, bearded and funeral-faced, longing to pay reverence to the greatest of all modern Alawites. The black flags and a fascination for the meaning of death seemed quite natural for these young men, the guerrillas who had just driven the last Israeli soldiers out of southern Lebanon, many of whose colleagues had been torn to pieces by Israeli rockets and bombs over the past eighteen years of guerrilla warfare.

For the Alawis themselves are a Shiite sect, a remnant of the Shiite Muslim upsurge that swept Islam a thousand years ago. Like the Shiites, the Alawites believe that the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Ali—hence “Alawite”—was robbed of his inheritance by the three caliphs. Like the Christian Maronites of Lebanon, they took refuge in mountain valleys, safe from the torments of their Sunni Muslim cousins. Most Alawites belong to four tribes—the Matawira, the Haddadin, the Khaiyatin and the Kalbiya. Assad’s grandfather Sulieman belonged to the Kalbiya.

Officially, Baathism, the great equaliser, could not accept the concepts of Alawite leadership—certainly no discussion of it—and Assad was a Syrian first and a Syrian last. Forget the Qardaha motorway, the luxury hotel, the local airport. “I’m just a Syrian Arab citizen,” Maan Ibrahim had told me when I asked him where he was from. The Alawites comprised perhaps 12 per cent of Syria’s 15 million people. So under Assad’s rule, any questioning of the apparent disproportion of Alawites to the majority Sunnis in positions of power could cost you your freedom or your job. Yet close analysis proved how many senior positions in the military and government had been given to Alawites. Assad and his family were Alawites, so was the head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon, Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, and the then information minister, Adnan Omran. So were many of the most powerful intelligence and special forces officers in Syria.

During the French Mandate, some—though by no means all—Alawites gave their support to Paris, helping to repress Sunni insurgency. And during the Sunni “Islamist” insurgency against Assad’s rule, exploding from the cities of Aleppo and Hama, Alawites were the primary target. More than fifty Alawite officer cadets were massacred at the Aleppo artillery school in 1979; the initial Hama atrocities by fundamentalists were directed against Alawite officials and their families.

While Assad ensured a large Sunni participation in government—including the defence and foreign ministers—the ethnic origins of Syria’s political power have been used by the country’s enemies. Israel’s constant predictions of civil war between Alawites and Sunnis have not been fulfilled. But Alawite power explains many things. It explains why Iran—the very vanguard of the Shiite Muslim revolution—should have become so close an ally of a country ruled by a man whose own faith sprang from Shiism. It explains why the Hizballah, a Shiite organisation though it claims to be interfaith, should be so enamoured of the regime in Damascus. Though the Baath is secular, the women of Qardaha cover their faces even more assiduously than the women of Tehran.

Yet not since the days of Haroun al-Rashid had we seen a non-monarchical Arab potentate pass on his inheritance to his son. The Syrian parliament lowered the age of future presidents to thirty-four to accommodate Bashar Assad’s new inheritance. In private, he echoed his father: a strategic decision of land-for-peace, no peace treaty with Israel until all of Golan was returned, a final agreement based not on Arafat-style piecemeal bargaining but on UN Security Council Resolution 242: an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory in return for the security of all states in the area. And good relations with the Christians of Lebanon—providing they do not scream for the withdrawal of Syria’s 21,000 soldiers. If Syria ever leaves her little “sister” Lebanon, it would not be at the behest of the Christian minority that first invited her there.

From the place of Assad’s burial, I returned briefly to Hama. Outside a state school in this haunted city hung a black banner. “Oh master of our nation, to Paradise eternal gone!” it proclaimed. But from the homes of Hama’s survivors, there hung only washing and tattered sun awnings. In the paper shop across the road from the great, creaking noria water-wheel, three piles of unsold posters lay on the counter: Hafez, Basil and Bashar. Fear remained. “What happened, happened,” an old Hama friend remarked sadly as the sun cut through the broken glass of an old store and the cats hissed at each other in the light. “The past is gone. We are children of the present—’eighty-two is over with. Let’s say no more.” The water-wheel outside his home creaked on, a screaming complaint of ancient iron axles and soaked wood and weight as the water of the Orontes splashed onto the disused aqueducts.

But still no one will tell the truth: of the slaughter in the underground tunnels of Hama, of the Muslim “suicide girls” who hurled themselves into the arms of soldiers and blew them up with grenades held to their breasts, the original “black widows” whom we would later see in the occupied West Bank and Gaza and Israel and in Chechnya and Russia. The party men and Rifaat’s lads went round the smoking ruins afterwards, summarily executing the wounded and the suspicious and those who could not explain their presence.

Which raised a familiar question. Can a regime survive without some form of acknowledgement of sins past, a truth-accountancy test for the inheritors of Baathism as well as the survivors of the murderous Muslim Brotherhood? Would a time come when Bashar Assad could—would—say that terrible things were done in the name of the party? Given his need for the support of some of the same dark forces that were responsible for Hama, I doubt it. Truth and reconciliation may work in South Africa or in Northern Ireland, but in the Middle East, history lies too deep. Too deep in Algeria, too deep in Iraq—where no Baathist regime survives to resist such admissions—too deep in Palestine, too deep in Israel, too deep in Lebanon.

In Beirut, true, there is a “garden of forgiveness,” but the only physical memorial to the civil war—save for a concrete block impregnated with guns and armour outside the defence ministry and the thousands of Lebanese houses still peppered with bullet holes—is the old statue commemorating the Christians and Muslims who were hanged by the Turks in 1915 and 1916 for daring to oppose Ottoman rule. “Martyrs’ Square,” as it was called, acquired a different meaning during the fifteen-year Lebanese civil war, for it lay on the front line between Christian and Muslim militias, its very significance demeaned by those who used its geographical location in the centre of Beirut to destroy their capital city. The statue’s protecting angel was perforated with hundreds of bullets; but it has been preserved for the future with the bullet holes still clearly visible—a permanent rebuke to those who would destroy the brotherly love that this long-ago martyrdom supposedly represented.

Before the First World War, Arab intellectuals had argued publicly for a new relationship between the Arab world and Constantinople, seeking a form of “home rule” for the Arab lands inside the Ottoman empire, either through a federal system of government—under which the sultan would be crowned king of the Arabs as well as king of the Turks—or, more mischievously in Turkish eyes, with an autonomy guaranteed by Western powers, especially France. At this time, a similar though not identical crisis afflicted the proponents of Home Rule in Ireland, some advocating a “free” Ireland within the British empire, others complete independence from Britain.

Syrian notables met in Paris before the war and discussed what form of autonomy they might be given; among other demands, they asked that Arabic should be taught in schools alongside Turkish and used with Turkish in all government affairs. But although the Turks appeared initially well disposed towards these ideas, the deliberately vague nature of the instructions sent out to Turkish governors in the Arab provinces quickly proved that the Sublime Porte had no intention of dividing power within the Ottoman empire. There would be no “Austro-Hungarian” solutions in the Middle East. Thus by the time they declared war on the Allies in 1914—arguably the greatest mistake the Ottoman authorities had made since the fourteenth century—the Turks had maintained the unity of their empire but allowed sufficient debate for this same unity to be threatened.

No one can dispute the suffering of the Lebanese during the First World War. The British and French navies blockaded the Ottoman Mediterranean coastline from 1914, preventing food entering the Levant. So Turkish Ottoman forces impounded all the grain in Lebanon for their troops and commandeered farm animals; a plague of locusts that set about the country in 1915 destroyed what crops were left. The land could not be tilled and there was a famine of biblical proportions. In northern Syria, 300,000 are estimated to have perished, 120,000 of them Lebanese; in Beirut alone, civilians were dying at the rate of a hundred a day. Abriza Kerbej was still alive in 1998 to give her own account of this semi-genocide. “We had become like animals. We took to eating rotten fruit off the ground. But that didn’t last long and we were soon digging up wild roots and grass.” Her family lived on boiled weeds. Neighbours were discovered dead only because of the stench from their homes.

Turkey’s fears were not for the lives of its Arab Ottoman citizens in the Levant—Lebanon being part of Syria—but for the Arab lands that it ruled. Ahmed Jemal Pasha was commander of the Turkish 4th Army in Syria as well as one of the triumvirate of Young Turks who now effectively governed the Ottoman empire. Just as the Turks feared that their Armenian population would assist the Russians, French or British, so they suspected that their Arab Ottoman troops might defect to the Allies or join a pro–Allied Arab revolt. Jemal Pasha dispatched Arab units of his army to Gallipoli and then turned with venom upon the handful of civilians under his rule against whom any evidence of treachery could be produced. Upon these men, Jemal Pasha’s fury would now be administered with Saddam-like cruelty.

When Turkey entered the war, the French abandoned their consulate in Beirut, and it was in this building—officially under the protection of the United States, which remained a neutral power until 1917—that the Ottoman secret service discovered letters and documents signed by thirty-three Arabs—most of them Lebanese—who had failed to leave the Levant before the war but who had been foolish enough to trust French diplomats with their written opinions on the future of Syria. These unfortunate men, both Muslim and Christian, were dragged for interrogation to the Lebanese hill-town of Aley, brutally tortured and then placed before drumhead courts for inevitable death sentences. Twenty-seven were Muslims, six were Christians, and their suffering was ever afterwards to be extolled by the Lebanese as proof that both religions could fight and die together for the independence of their country.

They were to die, most of them, on gallows set up scarcely a mile from where my Beirut home would later stand and—each time I rooted through Beirut’s old bookshops or travelled around the Middle East—I would seek some contemporary account of their life and death. Here, after all, were Arab “martyrs” who died that others should live free—and who went to their deaths for their nation rather than for sectarian regimes or armies. After many years, in a small antiquarian shop in Kasr el-Nil Street in Cairo, I came across a heavily stained pamphlet published in Egypt in 1922 and written by a Lebanese Christian Maronite priest, Father Antoine Yammine. It was littered with poorly reproduced photographs of stick-boned children and corpses lying beside laneways. But it also carried a compelling account of the last days—and last speeches—of the condemned men.

The first eleven were taken to the Beirut central police station in the Place des Canons—later, of course, to be Martyrs’ Square—where, at three in the morning, they were given white smocks to wear as shrouds for their hanging. Eleven gallows had been set up on the square and, before their execution, the Turks permitted each of the doomed men to speak to the crowds who had gathered in the darkness, along with the Turkish governor, the Turkish chief of police and members of the court martial “tribunal” who had condemned the victims.

With the rope around his neck, Abdul-Karim al-Khalil shouted down from the scaffold: “My dear fellow countrymen, the Turks want to suffocate our voice in our lungs! They want to prevent us from speaking and from claiming our right to independence and our liberation from the hateful slavery of Turkey . . . But . . . we will ask all the civilised nations of the world for our independence and freedom. My beloved country, remember always these eleven martyrs! O paradise of my country, carry our feelings of brotherly love to every Lebanese, to every Syrian, to every Arab, tell them of our tragic end and tell them: ‘For your freedom, we have lived and for your independence we are dying!’ ”

At this point, according to the Maronite author, al-Khalil himself pushed away the stepladder to the gallows, effectively hanging himself. Next to die were two brothers, Mohamed and Mahmoud Mahmessani. For a quarter of an hour, Mohamed held his brother in his arms and tried to comfort him. “I have never betrayed my country,” he told the crowd. “I swear this before God and all men. The Turks judged me guilty, but this is a lie. I don’t believe it’s a crime to love freedom and to want the liberation of my country.” Turning to the executioner, he pleaded that he and his brother should be hanged at the same moment—so that neither should see the other die. Mohamed’s wish was granted.

Other condemned men cursed Jemal Pasha for his cruelty. Joseph Bechara Hani went to the gallows, like so many others, denying any treachery. “I am innocent, completely innocent—I swear this before God . . . I have lived a blameless life and I die without fear . . .” Then the hangman kicked the ladder from beneath Hani’s feet. Within months, another fourteen men would be hanged in Beirut, two of them colonels on the general staff of the Ottoman army who went to the scaffold in full military uniform. One of them, Selim Djezairi, said that he died “with love for my fellow Arabs, love for my country and hatred for the Turks.” Of two brothers—both Christians—one wrote a last letter to his wife, saving her the knowledge of his impending execution by pretending that they would soon meet again at their home in Jounié.

Despite the natural desire to dress their words in courage, even the Turks were said to have been impressed by the heroism of the victims, who included at least one Arab from Palestine. The Ottoman authorities decreed that their bodies should be thrown into a mass grave on the beach at Ras-Beirut. In those days, the area now covered by Beirut airport had not been reclaimed and the sea shore ran along the edge of what is today Corniche Mazraa. In this red earth, the Muslim and Christian dead were buried without ceremony.

But how were they betrayed? A French scholar, researching his country’s foreign affairs archives at Nantes, has provided the most detailed account of this miserable affair. The interpreter at the French consulate in Beirut, Philippe Zalzal, himself a Christian, had been imprisoned by the Turks in Damascus and, in order to secure his return to his native Lebanese town of Bikfaya, had told Jemal Pasha of the letters, which French diplomats had concealed behind a false wall and a table in the consulate. The consul who left the documents—including signed letters that specifically requested French military intervention in Lebanon and Syria—was none other than François Georges Picot, the very same Picot who, with Sir Mark Sykes, reached the secret agreement in 1916 that France should form its own administration in Syria and Lebanon after the war was over, no matter what “independence” the Arabs were demanding. As a direct result of this foreign accord, the French carved Lebanon out of Syria and deposed the Arab king Feisal in Damascus. The slaughter at the battle of Maysaloun was a direct result of the same Sykes–Picot agreement which was concluded, in a letter from the French ambassador in London, on 9 May 1916—exactly two days after the Turks hanged the second group of Lebanese patriots in Beirut. Picot’s reaction to the discovery of the incriminating letters he so shamefully left behind was never recorded.

When the French army reached Beirut in 1918, the Lebanese martyrs were exhumed from their common grave, but the very faiths which they had placed second to their patriotism now prevented their joint re-interment. The Christians would not allow the Muslim martyrs of Beirut to be buried in their cemeteries. Nor would the Muslim authorities permit the executed Christians to lie in their holy ground. In the end, the Lebanese Druze, whose mystical Shia beliefs permit a more liberal view of life and death, offered the martyrs a small quarter-acre of Lebanon in which these courageous men of different religions who died together could remain alongside one another into eternity. Unknown to most Lebanese, their remains lie today beside the Druze parliament in the Hamra district of Beirut.

Yet perhaps even their common role as martyrs was an illusion. Both Christians and Muslims opposed Turkish tyranny in Syria, but the Christian Maronites of Lebanon were hoping for French tutelage after the war—and were to give their loyalty to the French Mandate for more than two decades. The Muslims were Arab nationalists who wished to establish an independent Arab nation, one in which the Christians would obviously constitute a small minority. Close examination of the martyrs’ last words on the scaffold shows that even in death, their aims were not in unison. A Maronite priest, Joseph Hayek, was among the first to be executed and his last words were: “Vive le Liban! Vive la France!” These were not the sentiments of those who, in their last breath, addressed themselves to their “fellow Arabs.”

But their deaths were probably the final catalyst of the Arab Revolt. Emir Feisal—the future “king” of Syria who would become Britain’s first king of Iraq— was staying outside Damascus in the spring of 1916 and had repeatedly begged Jemal Pasha to spare the second group of condemned men, who belonged to some of the most illustrious families in Syria and Lebanon. The scholar and historian George Antonius records how the emir and his hosts, the Bakri family, were breakfasting in the garden when a runner brought them a special edition of the pro-Turkish Al-Sharqnewspaper which carried a full report of the hangings. One of the Bakris read out the names of the hanged men, which “lingered like the notes of a dirge on the still air of that spring morning in the orchards of Damascus.” Someone recited the opening verse of the Koran. Then Feisal leapt to his feet, tore his kuffiah from his head and trampled it beneath his feet. The Arab Revolt had begun. “Arabs!” he cried. “Death now will be a pleasure for us.”