Syria's Assad approaches moment of truth
Mon Nov 7, 2005
By Lin Noueihed
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is facing the toughest challenge of his five-year-old rule after a United Nations inquiry implicated Syrian security officials in the bombing that killed a Lebanese former prime minister.
A Syrian official said on Monday the U.N. investigators had asked to question six Syrian officials in Lebanon, but he declined to name them. Assad must now decide whether to comply.
Apparent diplomatic blunders by the young leader have helped precipitate a showdown with the U.N. Security Council, which voted unanimously last month for a resolution demanding Syria cooperate with the U.N. team seeking Rafik al-Hariri's killers.
Assad has always insisted that Damascus had no role in the February 14 blast, but was forced to withdraw Syrian troops from Lebanon in April under intense global and Lebanese pressure.
Last month he ordered a Syrian probe into Hariri's death and he has vowed to punish any Syrian whose involvement is proven.
"If it happened then it is treason," Assad told CNN in an interview last month. "If (Syrians) are implicated they should be punished. International (court) or Syrian, whatever."
But with one version of a report by chief U.N. investigator Detlev Mehlis naming his powerful brother and brother-in-law, Assad may eventually have to give up members of his own inner circle for trial or face possible economic sanctions.
Damascus has been in Washington's sights since Assad said in 2003 he hoped the United States would lose its war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a neighbour and former Baathist rival of Syria.
Assad now says Syria is doing its best to stop Islamist fighters crossing its frontier to attack U.S. troops in Iraq and has closed the offices of anti-Israeli Palestinian groups.
Washington is not convinced and last year imposed sanctions against Syria, long on its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Assad's decision to relinquish Damascus's 29-year grip on Lebanon did not buy him a reprieve in Washington or even Paris, which also treats Syria increasingly as a rogue state.
Fearing the Americans would blight his role at a U.N. summit in New York in September, Assad cancelled plans to attend.
FALL FROM GRACE
Assad's predicament is a far cry from the heady days of 2000, when the world welcomed the British-trained eye doctor as a potential pioneer of reform in autocratic Syria.
The soft-spoken 40-year-old took office after the death of his formidable father Hafez al-Assad, who brooked no dissent and refused to bend in the Arab-Israeli conflict for 30 years.
Assad mended fences with neighbouring Turkey, which had almost gone to war with Syria a few years before. He clung to Syria's demand for all of the Golan Heights, while calling for talks over the strategic plateau it lost to Israel in 1967.
Assad envisaged European support after launching a charm offensive that took him and his much-admired wife Asma on visits to London, Paris and Madrid soon after taking office.
But the honeymoon was shortlived. The gap between Syria and the world widened when Assad snubbed calls not to seek an extension of pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud's term.
At home, reform has remained a concern for Assad, groomed for leadership only after his older brother Basel was killed in a car crash in 1994. But he has taken a very gradual approach.
At a Baath Party conference in June, he shed influential members of the "old guard", including two vice-presidents and a long-serving defence minister, to make way for the political and economic liberalisation he pledged on taking office.
Responding to criticism over the glacial pace of change, that meeting laid the ground for multi-party elections, limited privatisation and consideration of the rights of minority Kurds.
Assad appointed a cabinet at the end of 2001 packed with Western-trained technocrats in economic portfolios charged with developing a modern financial system to draw foreign investors.
The most visible result has been a swathe of legislation to ease financial restrictions and establish private banks.
In 2003, Assad reshuffled the cabinet citing disappointment with the pace of reform. He made more changes in 2004.
Encouraged by the release of some political prisoners in the early months of Assad's rule, intellectuals and human rights activists tested the waters with debate clubs at which they voiced calls for democracy. But the initial tolerance did not last and Assad clamped down, arresting leading dissidents.
Assad has two sons and a daughter.
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