Intelligence

Where few Westerners tread

TheStar.com - Where few Westerners tread

Middle East bureau chief Mitch Potter journeys through desert

and mountains, fuelled by bottomless cups of coffee and kindness

MITCH POTTER
MIDDLE EAST BUREAU

Placed just about anywhere else on the planet, this ancient desert oasis would be teeming with travellers. Today, you could shoot a cannon through its forest of Greco-Roman columns and not hit a single one.

A strategic crossroads through nearly four millennia — and for a time, 2,000 years ago, arguably the single most important junction in the Silk Road upon which East met West — Palmyra now is visited by only a smattering of European brave hearts.

So much to see, and so few to see it.

The ruins of Palmyra rise lonely, breathtaking and remarkably intact some 240 parched kilometres northeast of the Syrian capital of Damascus, which itself is as beguiling a hive of Old World authenticity as ever you will find.

An arid stretch of desert lies in between, and its one landmark offers a kind of reality check: the intersection where the road to Damascus meets the road to Baghdad. Three separate homesteads beckon with handwritten signs in English, advertising "Baghdad Café." For Western faces such as ours, that direction means danger.

But here in Syria, it may surprise many to know, the opposite is true.

If Syria equals terror, then it should follow that Syria is terrifying. Only it isn't, not even a little, as we learned for ourselves last week behind the wheel of a rented Kia — 1100cc's of pregnant roller skate.

Warm smiles and instant invitations to coffee and tea came with every welcoming breath.

They don't see many Canadians in these parts and even fewer of those like my travelling companion, radio reporter Aaron Schachter. Since he is 1) an American and 2) Jewish, you'd think he'd be the sort of person that Syrians hate most.

Call it a socio-political search for the real Syria. We just wanted to go beyond lovely Damascus, and to ditch the leather-jacketed Mukhabarat security agents who seemed to appear out of nowhere at our every stop in the big city.

Back in the capital, the walls have ears. Out here, we drove straight into a welcoming wall of adab.

Adab is another of those Arabic words that makes translators crazy. It can mean courtesy, good manners, good breeding or even the literary arts.

In this context, adab speaks to the time-honoured custom of elevating hospitality to an almost sacred act. The entire Arab world is encoded with the urge to be kind to strangers, but for whatever reason, nowhere more so than Syria.

This is an extremist place after all, extreme in the lengths to which its citizens will go to feed you coffee and cake, or perhaps to settle you in their spare room for a month or two, if you would so honour them.

The bottomless cups of kindness continued through every stop toward the ancient ruins.

When we reach Palmyra, we find an empty government tourist office with postered walls advertising events that have long since passed.

Eventually, a young man is found in the back offices. Fadi Assad, 25, is surprised to see us but wastes no time in proudly producing two brochures about the site, in French and German.

Palmyra appears to have long ago given up on the English press run.

As the requisite coffee boils, we ask in our pidgin Arabic why so few North American visitors ever venture into the region. Assad understands and shrugs sadly.

"Please understand the people here," he says. "Very, very clean heart."

Abu Hassan is summoned. His English is better, honed over decades of showing travellers through the ruins when they came in greater numbers.

He walks us through the ancient colonnade, pointing to the temple of Baal, the agora, the amphitheatre, the granite pillars hauled triumphantly from Egypt when Palmyra's power stood second to none.

Abu Hassan isn't easily diverted from the historical lecture he has perfected in his many tours through the site. But he eventually understands that we're less interested in who once lived here than in why so few come here now.

"I understand," he says. "The outside world seems to love the wrong information. But don't you feel safe? You see how peaceful Syria is? We want you to know we love peace.

"Here, you can walk anywhere, day or night, and feel you are at home."

We find lodging for the night and encounter a Dutch traveller who is utterly at ease with our surreal surroundings. Learning of Schachter's citizenship, he remarks: "American! Hey, you aren't supposed to be here, are you?"

Back in Damascus, we'd put the question of Syria's reputation to a range of folk.

Cabinet minister Bouthaina Shaaban was the first to readily acknowledge "a crisis of public relations."

"In Arab culture," she said, "there is the belief that if you are good, everyone will know you are good. And if you have a right, then the entire world by itself will acknowledge that you have a right.

"Unfortunately, in modern times, this is not necessarily true. We feel there is a huge media campaign against Syria, and there's no response, at least no sufficient response, from our side.

"Whether in our media or our diplomatic relations, we fall short of what we need to do."

Tourism Minister Saadalla Agha al-Kalaa provided the hard numbers. Despite the draw of an estimated 3,000 cultural and archaeological sites — some dating back 12,000 years — Syria draws 77 per cent of its visitors from within the Arab world. Last year's visitors included 300,000 Europeans and just 35,000 Americans. Canadians were so rare that they didn't bother to count us.

"People probably are afraid to come to Syria, but that's because they don't know the truth," said Kalaa, who described Damascus as the true launching pad of Christianity, in the hands of a proselytizing St. Paul.

"Christianity took root in Palestine, but it took off in Damascus," the minister explained. "The reality is that Syria is a very safe country. This safety is something that's a tradition because of the way of life between Christians and Muslims, who live in harmony."

Yet the officious and guarded pose of Syrian border guards can be a hindrance, even if one subtracts politics from the equation.

One taxi driver told of a three-hour delay recently trying to enter from Jordan with a minibus carrying eight Italian travellers. Seven were stamped and welcomed, but the eighth Italian was stalled because her passport listed occupation as "artist."

"We waited and waited to see what the problem was, and finally they admitted they were afraid that `artist' meant `belly dancer,'" the driver said.

"What they hadn't noticed on her passport was the birth date. She was over 70 years old.

"I ran to the van to get her, and when I told her what the problem was, she thought the whole thing was hilarious. She danced her way into the customs office and put a smile on everyone's face. She was quickly approved and we carried on to Damascus."

We are heading westward now, slowing down for what appears to be an army roadblock. No, it's actually a soldier in need of a ride. He plops himself into the backseat. He's in his mid 30s and wears the regalia of an officer — but an officer without transport.

We've heard stories about the neglected state of the Syrian army. In Damascus, one mother fretted about the living conditions of her son, who is doing his compulsory military service.

Two weeks ago, his unit exhausted its supply of drinking water at its desert outpost, she told us. When no replenishments arrived, the soldiers resorted to siphoning the radiators of their jeeps to stay hydrated.

Our officer jumps out at a highway intersection and we decide on a detour to the nearby city of Hama — site of Baathist Syria's most ruthless chapter. If there is fear to be found in Syria, perhaps it is here.

Once a bastion of the revolutionary Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic militants of Hama rose up against the state 23 years ago, only to be crushed by the late president Hafez Assad's scorched-earth retribution, a military raid that left at least 10,000 dead.

Today, some Damascus analysts observe dryly that Assad was simply pursuing in the 1980s what George W. Bush is undertaking now: a zero-tolerance policy toward religious militancy.

But Hama today shows few of its scars to the world. The inner city is a place of devout serenity, where piety is demonstrated publicly in traditional costume — ankle-length dishdashes for the men, black-veiled abiyas for the women.

It seems a city at peace with itself, wholly unfazed by the uncommon sight of Western wanderers in its midst. We are drawn toward an eerie, rhythmic moan from the Orontes River. Closer inspection reveals the sound to be the rattle and hum of some 10 ancient norias — enormous Vitruvian waterwheels that use the energy of the river to raise water into channels and cisterns above.

The technique dates to the time of Christ, and Hama's wheels turn still.

Getting directions in Hama is another matter. Few here see themselves in relation to the points on a compass.

And such is the sense of adqb that, even if a local has no idea where you want to go, he is duty-bound to tell you how to get there.

(In the Arab world, even the landmarks can be transient. Not long ago, a Palestinian gave me these directions: "Keep driving until you see the old man standing beside the road. Then, turn left.")

So, we gleefully lose our way a dozen times, eventually to turn the right corner and draw our collective breath at the sight of Krak des Chevaliers — the fabled Castle of the Knights.

Our odyssey southwest from Hama has taken us through a verdant citrus belt and up into the electrifyingly spring-green mountains that separate Syria from Lebanon. It looks like the Appalachians in May, replete with the babbling brooks.

A Syrian Christian youth in the last mountain village leading to the fortress approaches with surprisingly good English. He, too, invites us for tea.

"Ah, yes, the castle," he says. "You are welcome to our paradise. America? I hate your government, but I love your people. You are welcome."

Church steeples and mosque minarets compete in the skyline beneath the most invincible Crusader castle of them all.

Saladin, the greatest Muslim general ever, is said to have stood here in 1188, surveying the defences of Krak des Chevaliers, only to shrug and walk away. He sacked elsewhere.

What T.E. Lawrence once described as "perhaps the most wholly admirable castle in the world" is in fact a castle within a castle, doubly defended by slabs of medieval masonry 25 metres thick at their base.

Stone for stone, the battlements are so picturesque that one almost expects the cast of Monty Python to rise en masse from high above, vowing to unclog their noses in our general direction.

Inside the fortress's darkened passageways, one finds mounds of basketball-size boulders, still waiting all these centuries later to be loaded into the catapults of war.

It's closing time at the Krak, but an attendant agrees to trade his time for 100 Syrian pounds ($2.30 Canadian) and give us a sunset tour of the empty edifice.

Inside are stables and foundries, a viaduct-fed cistern and olive press and other necessities for a garrison of 2,000 men equipped with enough provisions to endure a five-year siege.

Krak des Chevaliers was never breached, withstanding 12 enemy sieges through a century-and-a-half in Crusader hands.

In the end, the paltry few Christian knights who remained in 1271 were tricked — persuaded to surrender upon reading a forged letter, supposedly from their superiors in Tripoli, saying the cause was lost.

Ayman Abdel Nour, an outspoken Syrian writer whose daily Internet newsletter All4Syria.com was blocked last year by government decree, laughs at how the misunderstandings of the Crusader era echo today in Syria's global image.

"I've read a lot of Crusader history," he says. "Their biggest problem was that the Christian fighters didn't want to fight. They wanted to integrate and live here.

"That's why so many Syrians have red hair — the Crusader blood. And that's why we are so varied today.

"If the world could only see that we have so many different kinds of people here we can't possibly be racist. What would the race be?

"But we don't promote ourselves. We have pride. Instead of saying `Look at us, come see who we really are,' when the world calls us terrorist, we get our backs up."

Additional articles by Mitch Potter

March 20, 2005 at 08:22 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home