Seif is one of 83 M.P.s in the 250-seat Parliament who do not belong to the ruling Baath Party (he says the others have not openly supported him). He was re-elected in 1998 with 184,250 votes, making him one of the most popular opposition candidates. Then, last year, Syria’s ruthless President Hafez Assad died and was succeeded by his son Bashar, an ophthalmologist now 35 years old. “Dr. Bashar,” as he is widely known, belongs to an emerging generation of young Arab rulers–educated in the West, comfortable with the Internet and determined to bring their countries up to date. Seif believes Bashar shares his own long-term goal: to create a multiparty system in Syria. “We expect he will go for more democracy,” Seif says, “but in a careful way.”
So far, Bashar has sent mixed signals. He relaxed martial law and freed 600 political prisoners. He introduced contested elections for Baath Party officials. He freed exchange rates, invited private banks to do business in Syria and talked about starting a stock market. Initially, the new president appeared to encourage the debate clubs set up all over the country by people like Seif to talk about Syria’s political future. But the president seems to be more a Deng Xiaoping than a Gorbachev; he has said publicly that economic reform must come before political change, as it has in China.
Once the debate clubs were in full swing, Vice President Adbel Halim Khaddam, the hardest of Syrian hard-liners, complained that they had crossed a political “red line” and were threatening security and stability. The government said future meetings had to be registered with the police two weeks in advance. That effectively shut down all of the organizers except Seif, who was shielded by parliamentary immunity. Then hard-line legislators lifted his immunity so that he could be subjected to a menacing, two-hour interrogation by an investigating judge. Asked why he was holding political meetings in his home, the maverick parliamentarian replied: “As an M.P., if I don’t have an open dialogue, who will?”
Seif was not intimidated by the investigation, which seems unlikely to produce official charges against him. “They cannot find a reasonable case against me that will convince the people in an open trial,” he says. But he found that the people who came to his meetings had been cowed into silence on sensitive political topics. So for now, he has called off the debate sessions, applying to the police for formal permission to resume them.
Approval is uncertain. Munir Ali, an official in the Information Ministry, says the debate clubs “have undermined the unity of the Syrian Arab Republic. They don’t represent the majority of Syrian intellectuals,” he adds. Ali notes dismissively that Seif has no college degree and has gone bankrupt. Seif, who used to be one of Syria’s richest entrepreneurs and biggest exporters, claims he was ruined financially by the government, which used arbitrary taxation to put him out of business, costing more than 1,000 employees their jobs. That has meant a sharply declining standard of living for Seif and his family. “I now enjoy sharing the poor life with the majority of Syrians,” he says. Seif has not paid the rent on his office for a year and a half, and he is four months behind in paying the wages of his top aide.
Seif knows he cannot challenge the regime head-on. He has no illusions that his followers will take to the streets if he is arrested for his political activities, or even if he is convicted. “My problem is that I represent people who will only pray for me,” he says. “To demonstrate in the streets is to do something that the system will never tolerate. Even if I am hanged, they will only cry.” Politically defenseless and stripped of his wealth, Riad Seif has found his way to a kind of serenity. “The feeling of being afraid has disappeared totally,” he says. For now, the lack of fear is his strongest weapon against Syria’s hard-liners.
