COCA-COLA is banned in Syria. The country's ruling Baath party justifies this prohibition on the grounds that the Coca-Cola Company markets its beverages in Israel. Hence, when I toured all of Syria's 14 provinces recently, I found all sorts of cola, but no Coke--that is until I stopped at the Ghazali Restaurant on the Damascus-Jordan highway. The owner of this facility, the only rest stop on the busy 140-kilometer highway, is Rostom Ghazali, Syria's intelligence chief in Lebanon (until the Hariri assassination). What is more, the Coca-Cola I sipped at the Ghazali rest stop was from Lebanon. If you want a Coke in Syria, you go to Ghazali, whose job is to simultaneously ban Coca-Cola while smuggling it into Syria.
The Baath regime in Syria is no longer about socialism or Arab nationalism of the 1970s. Rather, this is a regime interested in maintaining its monopoly of Syria's wealth through a network of intertwined military and economic posts.
"Corruption is the largest sector of the Syrian economy, ahead of industry and tourism," explained one Western diplomat whom I met in Damascus--and he wasn't talking about petty baksheesh business. Members of the Baath party, like Ghazali, use their monopoly over political and military power to dominate import, export, and goods distribution businesses. One university professor I spoke with pointed at "the overlap between the 100 richest people in Syria and the 100 most powerful people in the Baath regime." Take for instance Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's cousin Ramy Makhlouf, who owns the only chain of duty-free shops at the country's airports and border crossings. This business and other interests have made Makhlouf and his uncle billionaires.
Large-scale corruption is pervasive across Syria. A restaurant owner in the old city of Damascus told me he was forced to pay officials bribes of $10,000 in order open his business. In Aleppo, the country's second largest city, I was told that the town's previous mayor owned eight brand new Mercedes cars, despite earning an official salary of $500 per month.
Across the country, I heard similar stories. Syria is not quite a republic of fear, where people are afraid to talk about the government. With the exception of Kurdish Kameshli in the northeast, a town under military lockdown, Syrians freely criticize the Baath regime on issues ranging from corruption to the failure to deliver prosperity.
The defection of former Syrian vice president Abdul Halim Khaddam to France is one reason so many people feel emboldened to criticize the regime. After Khaddam started speaking against the Baath party, suggesting he may be better suited to rule Syria, the government aired his dirty laundry in an attempt to embarrass him.
This approach, however, only hurt the Baath party. At a crowded restaurant in Hama, I witnessed peoples' reactions to Syrian government TV news about Khaddam's misdeeds. The report said that Khaddam had accepted German bribes to bury nuclear waste in the Syrian desert. The people at the restaurant shook their heads, saying, "Khaddam is the regime." For them, the Baath party was confessing that it had endangered the health of the Syrian people in return for money. Khaddam's defection has started a public discussion in Syria on the ills of the regime.
A waiter at a small roadside restaurant near Homs, a conservative Sunni Arab city, testified to this fact. He said that Syria's intelligence apparatus, the mukhabbarat, has pulled out of the streets. "Accordingly, people feel free to talk about the regime in ways not possible a few years ago," he said, but then hedged his statement. "We know the mukhabbarat has only taken one step back. In other words, if we were to act, they would quickly come back to crush any opposition."
Hence, even if the Syrians are no longer afraid of the Baath party, they are, nevertheless, cautious. With the exception of Kameshli, where people are emboldened by the prospects of an independent Kurdish state next door in Northern Iraq from where they receive support, people avoid challenging the government through political action.
What's more, the Baath regime is preventing liberal intellectuals from channeling popular discontent into organized dissent. Independent thinkers are harassed and intimated on a daily basis. I was told by a diplomat that outspoken liberals are jailed if they develop a habit of meeting Westerners.
With no access to the government-run media, liberals are unable to reach out to the Syrian people. Accordingly, they are unknown outside of the intellectual and expatriate circles of Damascus.
