Bidding for a Bigger Role: Syria seeks to become the prime Arab power

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Soviet Union. In 1970, Assad staged a bloodless coup and launched his "corrective movement." He lifted martial law, which had been in effect since 1967, halted the nationalization of industry and improved relations with Egypt and the conservative gulf states. Syria felt it had acquitted itself well in the 1973 war with Israel, vindicating its pitiful performance six years earlier. Diplomatic ties with the U.S., severed by the 1967 war, were resumed after Richard Nixon's visit to Damascus in 1974. Supplemented by handouts from the gulf states and revenues from its petroleun pipeline during the oil boom of the mid-1970s, Syria enjoyed its most prosperous years ever, with economic growth hitting an average rate of 13% in 1978.

Then things started to sour. Syrian intervention in the Lebanese civil war proved immensely unpopular at home and triggered a wave of car bombs and assassination attempts against government officials, including three attacks on Foreign Minister Khaddam. Assad faced his most serious challenge from the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamic group rabidly opposed to Damascus' secular policies. In June 1979 the group gunned down more than 60 cadets, mostly Alawites, at the Aleppo military academy. The next spring, a general strike in northern Syria was stopped only after 12,000 troops killed hundreds and arrested thousands.

If the Brotherhood's goal was to provoke more repression that in turn would alienate more Syrians from the regime, it succeeded. Since the late 1970s, the elaborate security apparatus—which includes the Mokhabbarat, the secret police organization with some 20,000 to 30,000 members, and Saraya al Difa, a praetorian guard run by Assad's merciless brother Rifaat—has grown more heavyhanded. After a bodyguard reportedly tried to kill Assad with a hand grenade in June 1980 (the President's life was saved when another guard threw himself on the explosive), some 250 to 300 political prisoners were massacred at Tadmur prison. In February 1982, when militants rebelled in Hama, the country's fifth-largest city, an edgy Assad responded by besieging the city of 200,000 for three weeks and killing at least 10,000 residents.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International, the respected London-based group that monitors human rights violations around the world, released a 65-page report detailing abuses in Syria. The account makes chilling reading. Thousands have been jailed without charge, including former President Noureddine Atassi, who has been held in Damascus' Mezze military prison since his overthrow by Assad in 1970. Relatives of political suspects are sometimes held hostage until officials find their man; in one case, three family members were detained for nine years before their release in 1980. Twenty-three types of torture are listed in the report, including pouring boiling water on victims, electric shock and sexual abuse. An oft-used tactic is called dullab, in which a person is hung from a suspended tire and beaten with cables and whips. In one testimony, a 15-year-old boy told of being whipped and threatened with blindness if he did not reveal where his father was. Another student described a soundproof torture room in Aleppo that featured a machine called "the black slave." Recounted the youth: "When switched on, a very hot and sharp metal skewer enters the rear, burning its