CURRENT EVENTS UPDATE

By MATTHEW COOPER

When Hafez Assad died on June 10, Syrian state media trumpeted classical music and koranic verses—a TV prayer vigil for the 69-year-old dictator. The cameras captured weeping members of the Syrian parliament mourning the onetime air force pilot who had taken a poor nation of 17 million and made it, well, still poor but nevertheless a pivotal player in the Middle East.

For three decades, Hafez Assad ruled Syria—and confounded the world. Six American Presidents found him frustrating, remote. The Egyptian pyramids lay to the southwest, but it was Assad who was dubbed the Sphinx. Assad remained a riddle. Austere, he neither smoked nor drank. He would summon aides at all hours to discuss an issue, then closet himself for days before abruptly announcing a decision. He never came to America; from Nixon to Clinton, they either traveled the road to Damascus or met him in neutral Geneva. They worried about elections and deadlines; a dictator, he never worried about the clock ticking. He was legendary for his marathon negotiating sessions and infuriating refusal to compromise. But it was his actions that so befuddled American leaders. Syria helped lead the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel; in 1976, it marched into Lebanon and never left. Assad’s Syria has been a constant on the State Department’s terrorism list since its inception in 1979—but it was also part of the anti-Iraq coalition that fought in the Gulf War.

As the world changed around him—shifting from the chilliest of cold wars to the hottest of capitalist expansions—he stood alone, more worried about how to hold on to his power than what to do with it. Says Richard Haass, a Brookings Institution foreign-policy expert: “He missed out on globalization, missed out on democratization. And he missed out on peace.”

There is hope that Assad’s all-but-certain successor, his 34-year-old son Bashar, might display at least a tad more flexibility than his father. But it seems likely that Bashar’s first task will be to consolidate his power. Among his key tasks will be reaching out to the Syrian military, intelligence agencies and other pillars of his father’s power.

Time, June 19, 2000

Questions
1. Why did Hafez Assad “confound the world”?
2. For what is Assad likely to be remembered?

TIME CLASSROOM