Syria

By Scott MacLeod/Damascus

If there is a clue to the future of Middle East peace, it may be in the fresher look that President Hafez Assad's defiant old regime is sporting these days. Almost gone are the giant Orwellian portraits of the Syrian leader that once seemed to loom over every traffic intersection. Instead, less threatening pictures of Assad's son and heir apparent Bashar, 34, decorate billboards and shopwindows from the Damascus suq to the Mediterranean coast. The favorite depicts Assad in an almost holy trinity with Bashar and Basil, Assad's idealized eldest boy and chosen successor until his car-crash death in 1994. Syrians are calling the ubiquitous montage Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

A transition of power is under way in Syria, and with it could come the best chance for regional peace since Israel was founded 51 years ago. That may not be the way it looks from Washington, where officials are struggling to get the two sides just to sit down together. Yet inside Syria, Assad, 69, ailing with heart disease, diabetes and prostate problems, appears increasingly anxious to ensure Bashar's position and with it the Assad legacy. And to make that happen, Assad seems in more of a hurry to make a deal to regain the Golan Heights from Israel than he was in 1996, when four-plus years of talks abruptly broke off. "He wants to turn to a new page in Syrian history," says a former Assad adviser. "He wants Bashar to have a fresh start."

An encouraging sign is that Assad, whose country remains on the State Department's list of terrorist states, is promoting his son as the sort of Syrian leader with whom the world, Israel included, will be able to do business. Bashar talks the language of economics rather than politics, and, until his brother's death, had chosen a career in ophthalmology rather than following his father's path into the army and power.

Dr. Bashar, as ordinary Syrians are calling him, or "The Hope," in official usage, is single but has a girlfriend. He is courteous, somewhat shy in public, but fluent in English and a lunchtime regular at Damascus' posh Club d'Orient. Though he was recently promoted to colonel in the Syrian military, the svelte heir apparent favors powder blue suits over camouflage fatigues. Bashar has taken charge of policy in Lebanon and spearheaded an anticorruption drive, but he is best known on the street as chairman of the Syrian Informatique Society, which is striving to wire isolated Syria to the Internet. He dispenses with the nationalistic swagger of his father's generation, and has been heard reflecting somberly on Syria's fears, his hopes for change, the impatience of youth and prospects for negotiating with Israel. For a son of Syria's strongman, feared and respected for ruthlessness and cunning, he has a surprisingly touchy-feely side. "Where are we?" he replied when questioned by a Saudi magazine recently about his feelings toward the new millennium. "Did we fail? Where are we heading?"

Those questions also seem to be haunting Assad Sr. Although he is anxious not to appear in haste, many diplomats are convinced that Assad is determined not to miss the new opportunity for talks that arose with the election of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in May. In Syria's earlier rounds of negotiations, Assad moved cautiously, only to react bitterly to the deadlock that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the subsequent defeat of Rabin's moderate successor Shimon Peres by hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu. Assad is also more focused on Syria's inevitable political transition, having watched the deaths this year of three fellow Arab stalwarts, King Hussein of Jordan, King Hassan II of Morocco and Emir Isa bin Salman al-Khalifa of Bahrain. Observes an Assad watcher at the White House: "He has a sense of his own mortality."

Another impetus is the ticking of the American political clock. U.S. officials say Assad believes President Clinton can help him get Syria's best deal with Israel. He knows, they add, that otherwise Syria will have to wait for a new U.S. President. Assad's aim is to enhance Syria's long-term stability by achieving a "cold peace" with Israel. His hope is to go down in history both as a peacemaker and as the Arab struggler who remained steadfast long after the Sadats, the Husseins and the Arafats did separate deals behind his back. He can portray the return of the Golan as a victory to Syrians who have known it as occupied land for most or all of their lives, since Israeli troops seized it during the Six-Day War of 1967. "He is a wise leader. We are all behind him," says Halima Khalid, 39, a Syrian homemaker picnicking with her family in Quneitra, a Golan town regained from Israel after Syria's 1973 surprise attack. He will have done it all, after surviving three wars with Israel, a fierce Islamic uprising, a coup attempt by his own brother Rifaat and the demise of Syria's only important ally, the Soviet Union. Comments Damascus law professor Mohammed Aziz Shukri: "This man built his glory not on his military career but by maintaining stability."

Will Assad's negotiators ever get back to the table and make this deal? The negotiations center on a simple-sounding swap: Israel returns the Golan and Syria delivers peace, including security arrangements and normal relations between the two nations. But there's nothing simple about the agreement. Israel insists that any return has to be gradual, a step-by-step process designed to boost each side's confidence. The Syrians claim that Israel, during Rabin's tenure, agreed to hand back the entire Golan Heights. Damascus now demands that negotations begin with that concession in the bag. Barak's government counters that whatever Rabin offered was hypothetical, and the only way to strike a deal is to resume the bargaining. Syria may eventually agree. "Assad has made a strategic decision for peace," says Uri Savir, who headed Israel's delegation during the previous talks with Syria. Says a Western diplomat: "If Assad gets his basic demands, he will sign a treaty. You couldn't say that with confidence four years ago."

For some in Syria, peace will come none too soon. One day recently, a teacher named Naim Khalil, 38, piled his wife and kids into the car and drove out to a dusty hillside west of Damascus. He looked past some barbed-wire fences and a minefield at some cousins standing on another ridge in the family village of Majdal Shams, under Israeli army control for 32 years. Holding up a battery-powered megaphone, he yelled out greetings and asked for the latest news. "I've been doing this since I was a boy," Khalil explains. "This is how I told our relatives that my mother had died." But such is the unending anguish of perpetual separation from loved ones that words don't come easily from across the "shouting valley." Khalil's favorite uncle is crying, it seems, and unable to yell anything back.

--With reporting by William Dowell/U.N., Eric Silver/Jerusalem and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by William Dowell/U.N., Eric Silver/Jerusalem and Douglas Waller/Washington