Eugene weekly., June 28, 2007, Page 16, Image 16

is officially struggling over how to treat the
country sandwiched between Iraq and the hard
places of Lebanon and Israel. President Bush
condemns Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism
and has refused to talk to its leaders, yet the
bipartisan Iraq Study Group recommended
greater dialogue with Damascus. Between
December and March, relations warmed consid-
erably when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
met separately with the U.S. assistant secretary
of state, several Republican congressmen and
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Suddenly, Syria had become enough of a
buzzword that most Americans had now heard
of it. And just as suddenly, it felt like time for me
to go. I flicked off my fears, drew a sharp breath
and booked a plane ticket.
U
Road to
Damascus
Learning to love America
while traveling in Syria
Story and photos by Kera Abraham
EDITOR’S NOTE: National award-winning reporter Kera Abraham, who has a
master’s degree in journalism from UO, left EW in January to join the staff at Monterey
County Weekly. The California paper printed a shorter version of this story June 7.
A
month ago I had only impressions of Syria. In my media-influ-
enced mind, I saw Syrians angry with the U.S. — for supporting
Israel as it occupies the Golan Heights, for positioning military
bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, for starting a war that has inun-
dated their nation with 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. When President
George W. Bush added Syria to the “axis of evil” in 2002, I wondered how the insult
sat with the country’s populace.
But in the part of my brain that wraps childhood memories in a hand-knit blanket, I
coddled completely different impressions of Syria — the warm stuff that trickled, like
honey in layers of philo dough, through four generations. My paternal great-grandpar-
ents immigrated to the U.S. from Syria’s predominantly Christian northwest mountains
in the early 1900s, and while their language was lost to me, my family retained some of
their religious and culinary traditions. In the personal realm, thoughts of Syria evoked
my grandmother’s sweet Arabic bread and lemony dolmas, which she made with leaves
from the grape vine in my grandfather’s garden and served at her Orthodox church.
For years I had wanted to reconcile these two visions by visiting Syria, but fear froze
me. Syria’s government is secular, but international human rights groups have criticized
it for oppressing free speech and political expression. Would secret police detain and
torture me? Would terrorists kidnap me? (Ironically, I didn’t have the same worries
about visiting my mother’s ancestral homeland even though Ireland has seen more than
a dozen terrorist attacks in the past 25 years and Syria about four.)
Months ago, a good friend of mine moved to Damascus to study Arabic. A journey
to explore my heritage began to seem possible.
Around the same time, Syria began showing up in the news. Washington, it seems,
16 JUNE 28, 2007
pon arrival in Damascus, I was promptly
greeted by President Assad himself. His
face — high forehead, small blue eyes under a
slightly knit brow, narrow nose, trimmed mus-
tache over a tight mouth and weak chin — was
everywhere. Over the next two weeks I saw his
likeness plastered on billboards, city walls, store
windows, telephone poles. Assad airbrushed and
looking concerned; Assad wearing a vacant
expression behind aviator sunglasses; Assad
toothy in an army cap; Assad waving in a busi-
ness suit. One poster triangulated his mug with
the smiling, disembodied heads of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
My buddy, whom I’ll call Reza, told me that while the Assad propaganda machine
is always running, it was on steroids leading up to the “presidential election” scheduled
for May 27. (International media described the event more accurately as a referendum,
only offering voters the option to vote “yes” or “no” on Assad’s inevitable second
seven-year term, with no opposition candidate.)
The posters bore handwritten phrases, which tended toward the emotional rather
than the practical. “Dear leader, we love you!” “From the heart, Yes!” and so forth, with
no mention of policies or promises. I couldn’t read the Arabic newspapers, but the
graphics got the message across. Page after page carried photos of crowds rallying for
Assad; Assad smiling with his wife; a portrait of Assad in front of a Syrian flag-colored
thumbprint, symbolizing a vote.
I tried to imagine Bush-Cheney ’04 posters with W’s face in the center of a heart,
surrounded by the slogan “Beloved leader! Yes, yes, YES!”
B
ashar al-Assad assumed the presidency in 2000, succeeding his father, Hafez,
who had ruled from his post-coup “election” in 1971 until his death in June 2000.
Hafez’s secular socialist regime was known for bloody repression of political oppo-
nents, especially Muslim fundamentalists; enmity with neighbors Israel and Iraq; and
the occupation of Lebanon, which the U.S. permitted as a tacit reward for Syria’s aid in
the Gulf War.
Bashar, a British-educated ophthalmologist, was groomed for the presidency after
his older brother Basil died in a suspicious car crash in 1994. After his father’s death,
Bashar freed hundreds of political prisoners and pledged to modernize the country,
prompting some Western pundits to speculate he’d lead Syria toward democracy.
Subsequent crackdowns on political dissidents soon quashed that hope.
After hearing from several locals that “there are eyes and ears everywhere,” I kept
my own conversations and emails sanitized of subjects such as sex, drugs and politics.
The many foreigners living in Damascus — I met mostly Europeans studying
Arabic, a few Asians and only two Americans — rolled their eyes at the speech restric-
tions but seemed to adhere to them, or at least to approach risky topics in hushed voic-
es. A young Spanish woman interning with the U.N. refugee office joked that the taboos
left her with nothing interesting to discuss with her Syrian friends — just the weather,
food, family and Allah.
Bush condemns Syria as a state
sponsor of terrorism and has refused
to talk to its leaders, yet the biparti-
san Iraq Study Group recommended
greater dialogue with Damascus.