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NY Times May 10, 2011
Syrian Elite to Fight Protests to ‘the End’
By ANTHONY SHADID
DAMASCUS, Syria — Syria’s ruling elite, a tight-knit circle at the
nexus of absolute power, loyalty to family and a visceral instinct
for survival, will fight to the end in a struggle that could cast
the Middle East into turmoil and even war, warned Syria’s most
powerful businessman, a confidant and cousin of President Bashar
al-Assad.
The frank comments by Rami Makhlouf, a tycoon who has emerged in
the two-month uprising as a magnet for anger at the privilege that
power brings, offered an exceedingly rare insight into the
thinking of an opaque government, the prism through which it sees
Syria, and the way it reaches decisions.
Troubled by the greatest threat to its four decades of rule, the
ruling family, he suggested, has conflated its survival with the
existence of the minority sect that views the protests not as
legitimate demands for change but rather as the seeds of civil war.
“If there is no stability here, there’s no way there will be
stability in Israel,” he said in an interview Monday that lasted
more than three hours. “No way, and nobody can guarantee what will
happen after, God forbid, anything happens to this regime.”
Asked if it was a warning or a threat, Mr. Makhlouf demurred. “I
didn’t say war,” he said. “What I’m saying is don’t let us suffer,
don’t put a lot of pressure on the president, don’t push Syria to
do anything it is not happy to do.”
His words cast into the starkest terms a sentiment the government
has sought to cultivate — us or chaos — and it underlined the
tactics of a ruling elite that has manipulated the ups and downs
of a tumultuous region to sustain an overriding goal: its own
survival.
Though the uprising has yet to spread to Syria’s two largest
cities — Damascus, the capital, seemingly tranquil, and Aleppo, a
key conservative bastion, has been relatively quiet — the protests
have unfurled in Damascus’s suburbs and across much of the rest of
the country, building on longstanding neglect of the countryside
and anger at corrupt and unaccountable security forces. While the
government offered tentative concessions early on, it has since
carried out a ferocious crackdown, killing hundreds, arresting
thousands and besieging four cities.
“The decision of the government now is that they decided to
fight,” Mr. Makhlouf said.
But even if it prevails, the uprising has demonstrated the
weakness of a dictatorial government that once sought to draw
legitimacy from a notion of Arab nationalism, a sprawling public
sector that created the semblance of a middle class and services
that delivered electricity to the smallest towns.
The government of Mr. Assad, though, is far different than that of
his father, who seized power in 1970. A beleaguered state, shorn
of ideology, can no longer deliver essential services or basic
livelihood. Mr. Makhlouf’s warnings of instability and sectarian
strife like Iraq’s have emerged as the government’s rallying cry,
as it deals with a degree of dissent that its officials admit
caught them by surprise.
Mr. Makhlouf, a childhood friend and first cousin of Mr. Assad,
whose brother is the intelligence chief in Damascus, suggested
that the ruling elite — staffed by Mr. Assad’s relatives and
contemporaries — had grown even closer during the crisis. Though
Mr. Assad has the final say, he said, policies were formulated as
“a joint decision.”
“We believe there is no continuity without unity,” he said. “As a
person, each one of us knows we cannot continue without staying
united together.”
He echoed an Arabic proverb, which translated loosely, means that
it will not go down alone.
“We will not go out, leave on our boat, go gambling, you know,” he
said at his plush, wood-paneled headquarters in Damascus. “We will
sit here. We call it a fight until the end.” He added later, “They
should know when we suffer, we will not suffer alone.”
Mr. Makhlouf, just 41 and leery of the limelight, stands as both a
strength and liability of Mr. Assad’s rule, and in the interview
he was a study in contrasts — a feared and reviled businessmen who
went to lengths to be hospitable and mild-mannered. To the
government’s detractors, his unpopularity rivals perhaps only that
of Mr. Assad’s brother, Maher, who commands the Republican Guard
and the elite Fourth Division that has played a crucial role in
the crackdown.
Mr. Makhlouf’s name was chanted in protests, and offices of his
company, Syriatel, the country’s largest cellphone company, were
burned in Dara’a, the poor town near the Jordanian border where
the uprising began in mid-March.
The American government, which imposed sanctions on him in 2008,
has accused him of manipulating the judicial system and using
Syrian intelligence to intimidate rivals. The European Union said
Tuesday that Mr. Makhlouf was among more than a dozen Syrians who
were subject to sanctions.
Asked why he believed he was the target of sanctions, he said:
“Because the president is my cousin, or I’m the cousin of the
president. Full stop.” He suggested that anger at him arose from
jealousy and longstanding suspicions that he served as the
family’s banker.
“Maybe they are worried about using this money to support the
regime,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe. But the regime has the
whole government, they don’t need me.”
He said he was aware of the anger, but called it “the price I have
to pay.”
Mr. Makhlouf represents broader changes afoot in the country. His
very wealth points to the shifting constellation of power in
Syria, as the old alliance of Sunni Muslim merchants and officers
from Mr. Makhlouf’s Alawite clan gives way to descendants of those
officers benefiting from lucrative deals made possible by reforms
that have dismantled the public sector.
He serves as an instrument, too, in Mr. Assad’s vision of economic
modernization, where Syria serves as a crossroads of regional
trade and a hub for oil and gas pipelines that link Iraq and the
Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and Europe. Cham Holdings, a
vast conglomerate with a portfolio of $2 billion, in which Mr.
Makhlouf owns a quarter of the shares outright, is at the
forefront of that faltering scheme.
Turkey’s recent anger at Syria’s crackdown has fed feelings of
betrayal in the government because Turkey was viewed as a
centerpiece in that vision. Concerns are growing, too, over the
uprising’s economic impact, deepened by Syria’s growing isolation
and flight of capital — a legacy that may very well prove more
threatening to the government than the protests.
Mr. Makhlouf suggested that economic reform would stay primary.
“This is a priority for Syrians,” he said. “We have to ask for
economic reform before speaking about political reform.” He
acknowledged that change had come late and limited. “But if there
is some delay,” he added, “it’s not the end of the world.”
He warned the alternative — led by what he described as Salafists,
the government’s name for Islamists — would mean war at home and
perhaps abroad.
“We won’t accept it,” he said. “People will fight against them. Do
you know what this means? It means catastrophe. And we have a lot
of fighters.”
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