12 January 2006

St. Paul was miraculously transformed on the road to Damascus 2000 years ago; former Syrian Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam wants us to believe that he experienced a similar amazing change on the road out of Damascus a few months ago. Is there no end to capacity of Arab autocrats and thugs to find new ways to abuse and insult their own people?

After St. Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus, he dedicated the rest of his life to preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God, through the instrument of the Holy Spirit. Khaddam was transformed during his journey to retirement in Paris, and now dedicates his days to bringing about the Republic of Democratic Syria, through the instrument of a President Khaddam. St. Paul probably deserves more credibility in the miraculous revelations department than Khaddam.

We are still in the early aftershocks of Khaddam's blockbuster revelations last week, in which he accused the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad of being behind the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He has since raised the stakes, stating explicitly that he is working with other opposition groups to overthrow the regime, and that he hopes to become president himself. We will find out soon enough whether the Assad regime is in trouble, or whether the Khaddam challenge is just one more pinprick that the Damascus ruling elite can absorb without serious threat. The issue of Syrian culpability in the various assassinations in Lebanon will be clarified by the ongoing United Nations investigation. The need for Syrian political and economic reform is unquestioned. I am more concerned with the grotesque phenomenon that Khaddam represents in the modern Arab political context: impunity without accountability.

While many in the region are entertained by the drama Khaddam has sparked, and others exploit him to increase the pressure on the Syrian government, the real loser in the end is likely to be the average Arab man and woman. The good citizens and ordinary people of our otherwise warm and sensible Arab societies are once again seeing our integrity demeaned and our very humanity scarred by a peculiarly modern Arab combination of public criminality and disdain. The same men who abused us for decades suddenly become reformers and offer to save us.

There is zero credibility in Khaddam's attempt to reinvent and market himself as a born-again democrat, lover of freedom and national savior, after spending the last half century as a central cog in an undemocratic power structure that propelled a wealthy country into mediocrity, poverty, isolation and marginalization. Khaddam helped to engineer and implement the modern Syrian governance system, using force when necessary, since his days as a law student in the 1950s when he joined the Baath Party. After the party assumed power in 1963, his days as a lawyer ended and his political career developed briskly, and it skyrocketed after Hafez Assad seized power in 1970. For the next 30 years Khaddam held top posts in the government and party.

Khaddam started molding Lebanon into Syria's preferred image in as early as May 1975, when he first directly intervened in domestic Lebanese politics to engineer the appointment of Syria-friendly prime ministers. For the next two decades Lebanon was Khaddam's political responsibility, where he wielded and brokered power like a football coach moving players on the field.

It is difficult to have a clearer track record than this man - and his record is a moral and political abomination. Corruption, criminal violence, bureaucratic incompetence, abuse of power, massive wealth disparities and increasingly violent and intemperate opposition movements are just some of the legacies that Khaddam and others like him throughout the Arab world have bequeathed us after their years in public life.

Khaddam now wants us to believe that he can make right all that he made wrong in the first place? His attempt to repackage himself as a white knight who will fix the mess in Syria and restore Lebanon's splendor is profoundly insulting and contemptuous of our dignity as Arab men and women whose lives have been plagued by autocratic and authoritarian rulers. It's bad enough that we endured the initial insults and pains of his abuse of power; now he insults and pains us again by expecting us to embrace him as the remedy to the disease he represents.

If Khaddam goes anywhere from Paris it should not be to the presidential palace; it should be to a court of law in a civilized country where he can be held accountable for his abuse of power. If he is innocent, then God be with him and let him finish his life in peace and health. If he wants to entertain the befuddled, dehumanized Arab masses with new forms of political titillation and freak shows, let him use his wealth to start a satellite television station.

Above all else, people like him need to be held accountable for their decades in power, during which thousands died and thousands of others spent decades in jail for political reasons, while a handful of individuals and families accumulated fabulous riches, not through merit but merely because they were well connected. Splendid, wealthy, humanity-rich lands like Syria, Lebanon and others in the Middle East have succumbed to a modern legacy of institutional mediocrity and low-intensity criminality. We know who was responsible for this.

When men like Abdel-Halim Khaddam suddenly see the light and cry: "I offer you liberty and democracy now," ordinary Arabs who have suffered the indignities of these individuals' sustained abuse of power should respond: "Give us accountability before all else."

Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR.