BEIRUT — It seems that the roads around Damascus remain active in the business of miraculous transformations. After St. Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus some 2000 years ago, he dedicated the rest of his life to preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God, through the instrument of the Holy Spirit. Former Syrian Vice-President Abdel Halim Khaddam seems to have had his own miraculous vision as he was leaving for retirement on the road out of Damascus; he wants to dedicate the rest of his days to bringing on the Republic of Democratic Syria, through the instrument of President Khaddam.
Since St. Paul has defined and inhabited this Damascene transformational terrain for so long, he probably deserves more credibility in the miraculous revelations department than Abdel Halim Khaddam. We are still in the early stages of the aftershocks of Khaddam’s blockbuster revelations last week, in which he accused the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad of being behind the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He has since raised the stakes, stating explicitly that he is working with other opposition groups to overthrow the Syrian regime, and that he hopes to become president himself.
We will find out soon enough whether the Assad regime is vulnerable and in trouble, or whether the Khaddam challenge ends up being just one more pinprick that the Damascus ruling elite can absorb with only minor annoyance, rather than any serious threat. I am more concerned with the grotesque phenomenon that Khaddam represents in the modern Arab political context.
While so many in the region are entertained by the drama he has sparked, and others exploit him to increase the pressure on the Syrian government, the real loser in the end is likely to be the average Arab man and woman. The good citizens and ordinary people of our otherwise warm and sensible Arab societies are once again seeing our integrity demeaned and our very humanity scarred by a peculiarly modern Arab combination of public criminality and disdain.
There is zero credibility in Abdel Halim Khaddam’s attempt to reinvent and market himself as a born-again democrat, lover of freedom and national savior, after spending the last half a century as a central cog in an undemocratic power structure that propelled a wealthy country into mediocrity, poverty, isolation and marginalization. Khaddam helped to engineer and implement the modern Syrian governance system, using force when necessary, since his days as a law student in the 1950s, when he joined the Baath Party. After the party assumed power in 1963, his days as a lawyer ended and his political career developed briskly, and it skyrocketed after Hafez Assad seized power in 1970. For the next 30 years Khaddam held top posts in the government and the party.
He started molding Lebanon into Syria’s preferred image as early as May 1975, when he first directly intervened in domestic Lebanese politics to engineer the appointment of Syria-friendly prime ministers. For the next quarter century, Lebanon was Khaddam’s political responsibility, where he wielded and brokered power like a football coach moving players on the field.
It is difficult to have a clearer track record than this man — and his record is a moral and political abomination. Corruption, criminal violence, state bureaucratic incompetence, abuse of power, massive wealth disparities and increasingly violent and intemperate opposition movements are just some of the legacies that men like Khaddam have bequeathed us after their half a century in public life.
He now wants us to believe that he can make right all that he made wrong in the first place? His attempt now to repackage himself as a white knight who will fix the mess in Syria and restore Lebanon’s splendor is profoundly insulting and contemptuous of our dignity as Arab men and women whose entire lives have been plagued by autocratic and authoritarian rulers like him. It is bad enough that we endured the initial insults and pains of his abuse of power; now he insults and pains us again by expecting us to embrace him as the remedy to the disease he represents?
If Khaddam goes anywhere from Paris it should not be to the presidential palace in Damascus: It should be to a modern court of law in a civilized country where he can be held accountable for the consequences of his half century of abuse of power. If he is innocent, then God be with him and let him finish his life in peace and health. If he wants to entertain the befuddled, dazed, dehumanized Arab masses with new forms of political titillation and freak shows, let him use his wealth to start a satellite television station.
Above all else, people like him need to be held accountable for their decades in power, for the thousands of deaths and the lives of decent citizens spent in prison that occurred on their watch, for the fabulous riches that individuals and families accumulated without merit but merely for being well connected, and for allowing splendid, wealthy, humanity-rich lands like Syria and Lebanon succumb to a modern legacy of institutional mediocrity and low-intensity criminality.
When men like Abdel Halim Khaddam suddenly see the light and cry “give me liberty or give me death,” ordinary Arabs who have suffered the indignities of their sustained abuse of power should respond, “give us accountability before all else.”
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 10 January 2006
Word Count: 894
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