Life After SIPA - Tartus

I suppose I should get this off now, as the next few days are looking a little hectic and I'm starting to forget things from last weekend. We're all heading to the Marine Barracks bar ("Chesty's") for happy hour tonight, and I suppose that's an appropriate place to start.

Last Thursday a friend from class dragged me up to the American Embassy for the weekly happy hour and barbecue, and wow - I hadn't realized how much I missed American style pubs. A dartboard, a pool table, grilled meat with honest-to-God Heinz barbecue sauce, and two-for-one on all beers. Not only beers, but American beers - they had a full stock of Budweiser, Coors, and Michelob in addition to the imports. I ordered two Carlsbergs.

The Marine bar is chock full of expats on Thursday nights - students and Embassy workers and sundry others. I struck up a conversation with a young FSO and got a bunch of interesting info on the situation here and life in the State Dept. Probably the most interesting thing he said was that Assad had shifted his stance after the war in Lebanon last year - he's gotten more cocky and demanding. Previously, Assad had been less sure of himself; after an initial move to liberalize the political climate and open Syria up to new technologies and the West (he brought in internet and cellphones for the first time, for example) he clamped down pretty hard when political dissent starting erupting all over. Since the war last summer, says the FSO, that's changed a bit - not the domestic climate, but the foreign policy stance. Assad now "walks around the way his father did when he had the Russians behind him." This is dangerous, because his father at least had a deep understanding of how the world works and the realities of power politics. Bashar spent most of his life training to be an ophthalmologist. The FSO didn't see a major war anytime soon, but likewise he didn't hold out much hope for the rumors of Syrian-Israeli peace talks either.

I would have loved to stick around, but after schooling a few embassy staff on the pool table I had to race back home and pack for Tartus. Someone, it seems, had given Professor Ahmad downstairs a rather savage beating with the crazy stick and he'd decided we were hopping on a bus to the coast at 3:00 AM that morning. Ahmad, Hannine, Khaldun, Rashed, Lily, Julia and I bundled into our assigned seats on the bus and rattled our way north, eventually getting dropped off under a bridge in the pre-dawn countryside bleary-eyed and bewildered. Ahmad's friend (or relative - I wasn't sure how everyone was related that weekend, but there was a mix of both) picked us up in a van a few minutes later and we were soon at Ahmad's family's house in the country with tea and a breakfast of beans, hummus, sweetened milk balls and pita promptly whisked out. Thankfully they had some spare rooms as well, so we got to crash out for a couple hours.

Their house sits up on a hill in a cluster of other houses and shacks, each with a largish vegetable garden out back, and frequently a cow and a few chickens. Just up the road Ayman, the head of this particular household, walked us around the remains of what must have been an old crusader citadel; the only distinguishing mark on it is a cross over an archway. The grounds are now the family's personal burial plot, with Ayman's uncle, grandfather and grandmother already in residence.

I’m not entirely sure what Ayman does, nor what any of the other men we met that weekend do. Judging by a few military tattoos here and there and the relative wealth of the family, I suspect that most or all of them are employed in the security services. Syria, like most other countries in the region, is a dictatorship with multiple pervasive security and intelligence services keeping constant tabs on political dissent and foreigners, and you can never be perfectly sure who’s working for the state or not. I had decided before flying out that I would just assume that anything I said or did would be known to the mukhabarat and so neatly avoided trying to make guesses about anyone in particular. This weekend was the first time I really thought about it in detail.

The foreigner contingent in the house has decided that Ahmad is probably mukhabarat. Lily noted to me that in Romania under Ceausescu all the Romanian-as-a-foreign-language teachers had been intelligence officers – it’s a great way to keep tabs on foreigners in your country, especially the ones who aren’t there to just see the sights. Certainly I would expect that the university and teachers have to turn in regular reports even if they’re not working directly for the mukhabarat. But regardless, Ahmad’s apparent family connections, his position at the university, and his relative wealth all point to his being a bit more than a lowly Arabic professor.

The day was starting to get away from us, so presently we all piled into a minibus we had for the day - Ayman, his wife, their three kids, the crew from Damascus, the driver and his military(?) friend - and headed out. This minibus, I have to say, was something else. The horn wasn't so much a horn as a very loud midi keyboard that the driver could play intricate tunes on, which he did frequently and with great abandon. The ceiling consisted of two hot pink Barbie(tm) beach blankets tacked up under plastic. The whole thing was a high-speed blaring party as we whipped around the hills and dales of Lattakia - horn yodeling, Arabic music blaring, kids shouting, everyone clapping, and pedestrians diving out of the way. Good thing I got those two hours of sleep.

Before hitting the beach we saw an old Crusader citadel in Sofita - the view was spectacular and there was an old Syrian Orthodox church in the first floor, still in use – and a cavern – a welcome respite from the punishing sun. The region of Lattakia is hilly and forested, a dramatic change from the arid flatlands around Damascus. It recalls Lebanon to the south in terms of terrain, and the Dominican Republic in terms of human civilization. Almost half of the buildings we passed were half built, with rebar strands sticking out of poured concrete floors and walls into rooms that don’t quite exist yet. Ramshackle roadside stands and farms alternate with smallish dusty towns, and the pace is sleepy and sedate (as long as you’re not in front of our minibus).

Our last stop before hitting the beach was lunch at a spacious, resort-y restaurant on an artificial lake in the mountains. Hannine and Ahmad ordered up a veritable feast of appetizers and entrees, as well as several hookahs and large bottles of Ash-Sharq, the local Syrian beer (Barada rules the south around Damascus, but damned if I can tell the difference) and a few bottles of Arak, a cloudy licorice-tasting liquor that's all over the Middle East (they call it Ouzo in Greece, but don't try telling them it's the same thing.) There are some wonderful pictures of me being forced to dance to the live music that we've unfortunately misplaced and will never ever be found again.

We hit the beach around 5:30 PM. Public beaches in the Middle East (admittedly my experience is limited to Beirut and Trabzon, in northeast Turkey) are a very different animal from those in the West. The women generally dress as they would back in town, hijab and all, though the more adventurous get down to spandex bike shorts and a tank-top. Julia and Lily were a tad conspicuous in their bikinis. The garbage situation is another point of departure, though that’s less an East/West thing than a First/Third World thing. The Syrian litter habit is pervasive and deeply ingrained. At one point one of us ignorant foreigners put out a cigarette in the hookah ashtray and Hannine grabbed it up right away. “Hetha layssa mfeed fi Suria,” (“That’s not appropriate in Syria”) she said, as she tossed the butt over her shoulder on to the sand. Nobody noticed, because the beach was, well, littered with trash up and down the whole length. The water itself didn’t seem too bad, but there were a few complaints of strange rashes the next day (everyone’s better now, and no it wasn’t me).

We weren’t there long before we heard deep, soft thuds echoing up the beach from the south. Sure enough, we were close enough to the border – about 15 miles – to hear the artillery fire in Nahr al-Bared, the Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon. The Lebanese Army still hasn’t completely dislodged Fatah al-Islam, the militant group that popped up this past spring, though the last I heard they had narrowed them down to a handful of fighters on one street of the camp. That’s a lot of firepower for such a small group, though. We could hear the explosions intermittently for the rest of the night, even after we’d gotten back to the house in the country.

Perhaps the most interesting person I met that weekend was Ayman’s friend Seyyer, or at least I think that was his name. He didn’t give it to me, but I think I heard someone else call him that at one point. Seyyer was in his 40s, and arrived on a moped with his young wife while we were just getting the narguileh started at the beach. Seyyer had spent the past six years in Lebanon, in Jounieh and Broumana (wealthy Christian areas), doing precisely what was unclear but one can guess. At one point he popped out his cellphone and showed us all a video on it of a couple guys smuggling oil from Syria to Lebanon, dragging a huge chain of barrels through the forest with a tractor. I asked how long ago that was, and he responded, “Elaan - kul youm.” (“Now, every day.”)

When Seyyer found out I was American, he and his wife became very interested in talking to me. The very first thing was what I thought of the U.S. Now, most of you are quite aware that I’ve been a strong critic of this administration from the beginning, and it’s often been beneficial to be able to admit that I don’t like Bush in conversations in the Middle East; I might be American but there may be hope for me yet, the thinking goes. But I’m not quite comfortable airing “family arguments” in front of Syrian government agents, so I left it that I loved my country very much, even if I didn’t always agree with everything it did. The follow up question on what I thought of the Syrian government was even more difficult; I said I thought it should allow more free speech and then plead ignorance on any other subject.

They left me alone for a bit after that, but back at the house over fish that night Seyyer and I had a bit more to talk about (and I’m damn proud that most of this was in Arabic). Seyyer wanted to know if I thought there would be a war – between Syria and Israel or between the U.S. and Iran. I said, “no,” and “insh-allah no.” We talked about the possibilities of rapprochement between Syria and the U.S., and prospects for peace with Israel. He was pessimistic about both. Then he told a really interesting story. He said that in Syria (and here I think he means in government circles in Syria) there is a story about a man who was sitting in a coffee shop in Damascus smoking a long cigarette. As he was sitting there he received a call and had to leave, but he left his cigarette in the ashtray unfinished. That cigarette, says Seyyer, is still waiting for the man to return. The man in question was Russian. I took it to mean that the Syrians still hold out hope that a rejuvenated Russia will be their patron again against Israel. How likely this is I don’t know, but again, interesting. I told him that I didn’t think Syria or Iran, or even China, were the real rivals of the U.S., but rather Russia in the long term and he seemed to agree.

I seemed to make a good impression with all that, and there were warm goodbyes and well-wishing all around as we left that night. Yeah, that night – 3:00 AM again. Nobody ever seems to sleep in this country.