Power in Syria today is based on a narrow, clannish system, more akin to what was described by Ibn Khaldoun 600 years ago than to Western “development theory” or “the non-capitalist road.” Family ties are key. In the Syrian army, a major can have more power than a general if he is, like Mouin Nasif, a relative of Rif‘at al-Asad. Muhammad Makhloud, director of the State Tobacco Monopoly, is the president’s brother-in-law. A veritable army is responsible for protecting him and his family. His house in Damascus has practically been transformed into a fortress.
During the first week of February 1982, serious fighting broke out in Syria between residents of the north-central city of Hamah and the government’s armed forces. A Syrian army raid on a number of buildings that were suspected of being hideouts for local cells of the Muslim Brothers precipitated the fighting. Brother militants foiled this operation using modern small arms and grenade launchers. They then attacked a variety of government installations, including the Hama headquarters of the police and of the Baath party, and also the airfield on the edge of town. By the second day of the fighting, mosques in some sections of the city broadcast calls for a general uprising against the country’s rulers.
We met in Paris, in a small office on the top floor of a building looking out on a courtyard. Salah al-Din al-Bitar answered my questions in what was to be his last recorded interview. The year before, he had founded al-Ihya’ al-‘Arabi, the publication named after the movement that preceded the Baath Party. He devoted all his energy to this new publication. His aim was to provide a forum on Arab unity, the goal to which he devoted his life. The son of a Sunni bourgeois family from Damascus, Bitar was deeply involved in the struggle for Syrian national independence. He saw this struggle as closely related to larger developments in the Arab world. Such was the ideological thrust of the Baath, which he founded with Michel ‘Aflaq.
Who are the Muslim Brethren in Syria? What is their significance socially? How are they related to Syria's social structure? What is the social meaning of their ideas and values? Are these ideas and values responses to distinguishable conditions and interests of one or more identifiable social groups? Are the Muslim Brethren, in other words, an incidental phenomenon or the organizational expression of a basic structural force? For the most part, this essay deals with these and related questions. It provides a tentative, exploratory interpretation, with some vivid and sharp images, rather than a thorough and refined picture of the movement.
Syria, under continuous Baathist rule since 1963, has relinquished its image of the 1950s and early 1960s as a peculiarly ungovernable and unstable state. Next year the regime hopes to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. A good measure of its maturity is that a majority of Syrians were born after the revolution. The regime’s younger members may have been 10 or so when the Baath seized power. For several years now entrants to the military academy cannot remember a time when Syria was anything but Baathist.
The massacre at Sabra and Shatila camps was an episode that immediately transcended the brutal war it was part of. The Israeli commission of inquiry seems almost a distraction from the obvious responsibility of the Begin government in this affair. Many of Begin’s critics regard the massacre as an inexcusable error of criminal proportions, but its implications are more ominous than this. It was a piece of a larger campaign, beginning in the south of Lebanon in early June, that killed more than 17,000 people. The carpet bombing of the camps in the south, the artillery pounding Beirut — all this the Palestinians survived and the world tolerated.
Richard Butler is director of the Middle East office for the National Council of Churches. Jim Paul interviewed him in New York in August 1982.
When were you in Lebanon?
The Israeli Defense Forces have taken some 9,000 to 10,000 Palestinians and Lebanese prisoner in south Lebanon. Because the Israelis have not released lists of names or figures, the exact number of prisoners currently held cannot be determined. The IDF itself has released its estimate of 7,000 to 9,000 detainees. [1] Correspondents in the area thought that the al-Ansar prison camp constructed by the Israelis near Nabatiyya in south Lebanon housed anywhere from 6,000 to 9,000 prisoners in mid-July. Although 600 detainees were released in the first week of July, and 212 children were released to the International Committee of the Red Cross on July 18, new detainees continue to arrive at the camp — some 400 on July 18, for instance.
I visited Muhammad Sannoun, fourteen and a half years old, at his home in Burj al-Barajna to ask him why he had touched the triangle-shaped cluster bomb that had blown off his right arm. “It looked like some kind of aluminum cup painted red on the top, yellow on the bottom, with a black casing on the sides,” he said. “I wanted to open it to see what it was.” Mohammed and two other children accompanying him found the bomb outside a bakery in Burj al-Barajna where they were buying bread, and all suffered shrapnel wounds from the explosion.
How many people have been killed and wounded in the course of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon? Precise numbers have been hard to assemble because of unsettled conditions, lack of free access to all areas, the incomplete recovery of bodies buried under the rubble, censorship and the tendency on the part of Israel and its supporters to view casualty statistics as a tool of anti-Israeli propaganda. Still, some have hazarded aggregate numbers: the Lebanese police, in early July, counted 10,134 Lebanese and Palestinians killed and 17,337 wounded; [1] Caritas, the Rome-based Catholic relief agency, had already issued “minimum established figures” of 14,000 dead, 25,000 severely wounded and 400,000 totally homeless on June 28.
Her shoes were blown off, torn from her feet. That’s all. And the other half of the room, the entire building, simply gone. She was thrown by the force of the blast against her desk, her shoes taken from her in the explosion along with those standing across from her, her friends. An incision was precisely drawn, and half the building was cut from life. How strange that only her shoes would be taken as a token by death, while her friends across from her desk were consumed.
“Israel is fighting in Lebanon,” declared Israel’s armed forces chief of staff Raphael Eitan on July 10, “to win the struggle for Eretz Yisrael.” Addressing officers and soldiers of a front-line armored unit, Eitan declared that “destroying and uprooting the terrorists’ base in Lebanon, would weaken the Palestinians’ opposition to the Jewish presence in Eretz Yisrael.” [1] In Eitan’s view, “The principal enemy has been fighting us for Eretz Yisrael for 100 years.” [2]
On June 12, 1982, over half a million people demonstrated in New York, calling for a halt to the nuclear arms race. The demonstration was unusual in its size, and even more so in the favorable media coverage it received. About the same time, a few thousand people in scattered cities throughout the country actively protested the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the barely disguised US government support for it. A strong case can be made that the latter actions constituted the more direct and appropriate response to the very real danger of nuclear war.
I was working for an American network and I was on the coastal front during the first week. The battle of ‘Ayn al-Hilwa was still going and the Israelis were “mopping up” the resistance forces still there. Then we moved near Khalda, which became the new front. By the last day, I was already in east Beirut. The media teams just ran after the Israeli forces. The way the networks work is this: The correspondent, if he is brave, does a “standup” in the field. Otherwise, he does it in Tel Aviv. Usually the crews are sent independently, without a correspondent, to the field. Every major network has four or five crews covering the different fronts. So most of the work is done by the crews.
Elias Khoury is a Lebanese novelist and literary critic. Nubar Hovsepian is a fellow of the Institute of Arab Research in Beirut. They spoke with MERIP editors Jim Paul, Joe Stork and Sheila Ryan in New York in July 1982.
What are Israel’s war aims?
As the Israeli invasion of Lebanon enters its third month, the polarization of the Israeli public continues. People there have become increasingly aware of the terrible destruction being wrought on the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples by their military machine. More important for most citizens, concern has spread over the heavy casualties that are certain if the Israeli army seeks to conquer West Beirut.
What is the meaning of the Israeli parliamentarian's comment that “in Lebanon we have entered with a policy that is a direct continuation of Dayr Yasin and Qibya”?
Thick clouds of disinformation covered the Israeli public at the outset of the invasion of Lebanon, the counterpart to the dark clouds and debris that cover the death, the gutted cities, the utter destruction along the Lebanese coast and its hinterland. The Israeli media itself indulged in the disinformation. Pictures would show an Israeli soldier giving some food to a young survivor of the intensive Israeli bombing of civilian population centers. The press carried very long accounts of a few Lebanese being treated in Israeli hospitals.
Israel’s invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982 brings to an end the phase of Lebanese political history which opened with the 1975-1976 civil war. It is a logical outgrowth of Israel’s policies in Lebanon since 1975. The 1975-1976 war, in turn, marked a culmination of trends which had been developing at least since 1958. [1]
Dan Connell has covered the Horn of Africa for newspapers and broadcast media in North America and Europe since 1976. He spoke with the MERIP editors immediately after returning from Lebanon in early August.
Can you describe the situation in Beirut?
