Hussein's Fall Leads Syrians to Test Government Limits
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: March 20, 2004
DAMASCUS, Syria, March 19 — A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for a citizen of Syria, run by the Baath Party of President Bashar al-Assad, to make a documentary film with the working title, "Fifteen Reasons Why I Hate the Baath."
Yet watching the overthrow of Saddam Hussein across the border in Iraq prompted Omar Amiralay to do just that. "It gave me the courage to do it," he said.
"When you see one of the two Baath parties broken, collapsing, you can only hope that it will be the turn of the Syrian Baath next," he said. He has just completed another film, "A Flood in Baath Country," for a European arts channel, saying, "The myth of having to live under despots for eternity collapsed."
When the Bush administration toppled the Baghdad government, it announced that it wanted to establish a democratic, free-market Iraq that would prove a contagious model for the region. The bloodshed there makes that a distant prospect, yet the very act of humiliating the worst Arab tyrant spawned a sort of "what if" process in Syria and across the region.
The Syrian Baath Party remains firmly in control, ruling through emergency laws that basically suspend all civil rights. The government says the laws are necessary as long as Israel occupies the Golan Heights, 40 miles from Damascus, and the two nations remain at war.
Yet subtle changes have begun, even if they amount to tiny fissures in a repressive state. Some Syrians are testing the limits, openly questioning government doctrine and challenging state oppression.
Syrians who oppose the government do so with some trepidation because it used ferocious violence in the past to silence any challenge. Yet the fall of Mr. Hussein changed something inside people.
"I think the image, the sense of terror, has evaporated," said Mr. Amiralay, the filmmaker.
On March 8, for instance, about 25 protesters demanding that repressive laws be lifted tried to demonstrate outside Parliament. Security forces squashed the sit-in as it started, but the event would have been unthinkable before the Iraq war.
People here do not know what previously locked doors they can push open, but they are trying to find out.
cont. at. nytimes.com |
