Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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news. In the Syrian Arab Republic, only the blind did not know the features of the air force general who had made himself president in 1970, Hafez al-Assad.
Waiting as I so often would for Syrian government officials to come to work or keep appointments, I studied Assad’s picture. He seemed more like a trusted uncle than Big Brother. The thin, smiling face did not convey the ruthlessness he had shown his enemies on the occasions when his rule had been threatened. He had held power longer than any Syrian leader since the French army sailed home in 1946. From the time of its first military coup d’état in 1949, Syria had had eleven heads of state until Assad ended a terrible period of turmoil that saw thousands of people killed and taken into prisons. Yet not even he, who had ruled so long and maintained an army that spent most of his government’s budget, could make border officials appear at their posts.
There was nowhere to sit on the public side of the counter, and those who wanted to leave or enter Syria stood patiently waiting for the border police, for the immigration cards, for the stamps in their passports that would let them in or out. After about fifteen minutes, two men in border police uniforms came in and sat at their desks. One picked up a telephone, and the other said to the crowd, “Na’am,” Yes. Several people began to shout in Arabic, asking for immigration cards to fill in. He threw a stack of cards on the counter, and we all grabbed at them, trying to fill them in as quickly as possible to be first in for a visa.
Two Americans trying to leave the country handed the policeman their passports and immigration cards. He handed the documents back and told them to see someone upstairs. Meanwhile, he laboriously wrote the passport details of each person in a large ledger, having some difficulty with the passports not in Arabic. After ten minutes, the two Americans returned, saying there was no one upstairs. I began translating for them. The policeman said they would have to wait. “For what?” I asked. “They just want to leave.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, putting the other passports to one side and processing their papers on the spot.
When my turn came, I was surprised to discover that the Ministry of Information’s telex authorising my visa, a formality required for all writers and journalists, had actually arrived. In years past, entering Syria at Jdaideh from Lebanon and at Deraa from Jordan, I had had to wait hours, even overnight, sending messages to the Ministry by taxi, bribing officials for the use of a telephone to track down an official at home, all for a telex that had been promised before my departure. That the Ministry’s message had reached Bab al-Hawa, a border post farther from Damascus than either Jdaideh or Deraa, was nothing short of miraculous. I thought, rather naïvely, that this boded well for the rest of the journey. More forms, more details taken down, payment of 24 SL for the visa, and I was stamped in.
I left to show my suitcases to the Customs officer, who spoke English. I showed him my American passport, and he asked what I had in my bags. I told him clothes, books and a typewriter. He said, fine. Unusually, he did not bother to open the bags and waved a cordial good-bye.
I walked about a hundred yards across a barren wasteland, near a row of freight company sheds, to the exit gate. A few taxis, painted yellow as all taxis in Syria had been by government decree a few years earlier, were parked beyond the barrier. I asked the driver of an old Mercedes to take me to Latakia. We discussed the fare, and he asked a policeman to raise the barrier so he could pick up my bags from Customs. Unlike in Turkey, the Syrian police had no objection. With the bags safely in the back seat, we started our drive south. A few miles down the road, the driver explained that Latakia was a long way, and he wanted to be back in his village near Bab al-Hawa before dark. I asked whether he would prefer to take me to Aleppo. We discussed this for some time, deciding to go to the Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo. I believed the Baron’s would be full for the Easter weekend, but I could have a cup of tea and a wash there, before taking another taxi to Latakia.
The driver took me through miles of open countryside, over treeless hills, past villages whose mud houses were shaped like beehives, past other villages made of cinder blocks, past fields now green in spring, past women in long, black dresses cutting grass by hand to feed their animals. Along the roadside, there were occasional ad hoc customs checks, armed, plain-clothes men in Land Rovers parked at intervals, stopping cars at random to make quick searches. Anyone with contraband cooking oil, soap powder or fruit that he had managed to smuggle in from Turkey was liable to a summary beating and to have his goods confiscated.
In less than an hour, we reached the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city that had grown well beyond its historic boundaries over the previous thirty years. Tall stone apartment blocks surrounded the old city. Deforming a skyline of minarets and domes was a large, new, empty cube of a hotel. It had been rushed to completion for the Mediterranean Games due to take place there that September. According to the driver, it was the new Méridien, an opinion contradicted later by Aleppins who told me it was the new Intercontinental. When it finally opened, it was neither a Meridien nor an Intercontinental, but a Pullman.
We drove through the suburbs from the east towards the city centre, to an area called Bab al-Farraj, where a large statue of President Hafez al-Assad stood in the middle of a large plaza under construction. From the plaza, we turned right up Rue Baron to the Baron’s Hotel. When it was built in 1909, the Baron’s was on the outskirts of the city facing open countryside. Now, it was miles inside Aleppo, and the only trees nearby were in its own grounds. The Baron’s was a pleasant change from the Atahan in Antioch. The Atahan, built in the 1950s, was part of a dull structure of shops and offices along a narrow shopping street. The Baron’s had been built in the last, perhaps only, great age of Levantine hotels. When it opened, it had only one floor, with reception rooms at the front and bedrooms at the back. In 1911, a second floor was added, and some time later, a third. Made of large, finely cut stones, with Oriental designs carved into the stonework, it had gracefully arched windows and a wide terrace all around. The Baron’s remained an old-fashioned hotel, with sitting-rooms for people to entertain guests, a dark lobby which was little more than an entryway to the bar, salons, dining-room and the large stone staircase up to the rooms. It was rather like a men’s club, but for the occasional presence of women. “Everybody seems to have stayed at the Baron’s,” James Morris joked in his Market of Seleucia about his stay there in 1956, “from T. E. Lawrence to the Queen of Sheba, and it has some of the subdued self-assurance of one of the really great hotels.”
Because of the Easter holiday, the hotel was fuller and livelier than I had ever seen it. The receptionist, an Armenian named Alishan, told me, much to my surprise, there was a room. “Only one room,” he said. “Everyone is here from Damascus for the holiday.”
Ahmed, the Baron’s tall and amusing major-domo, carried my bags to a room at the back on the first floor. In the corner, the bedroom had windows on two sides, affording a fine view of two of the seediest night clubs in Aleppo, if not the world. “You stay long time, Mr Charles?” Ahmed asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll find some girls,” he laughed, “then you stay.”
Downstairs, I sat in the salon to the right of the front door. The room, last decorated forty or more years before, belonged to an earlier era. I would not have been surprised to see Noël Coward sitting at the upright piano against the wall. Thick curtains surrounded the high windows over the front terrace. Inside the wall opposite the windows, a glass case displayed mementos of the Baron’s early days: photographs of the new hotel in 1911 with a horse and carriage in front, a copy of the bill for an English archaeologist named T. E. Lawrence, and a book of Lawrence’s letters turned to a page with his return address as “Hotel Baron, Aleppo.” On each wall hung a large French print in a flowery gold frame. Beneath the prints were captions like, “Gentil Bernard Lisant Son Poème: L’Art d’Aimer” and “Cresset Composant Son Poème: Ververt.” Each print portrayed an idealised scene of French men and women frozen in time, their clothes, posture and composition speaking of another age, just as the well-dressed Syrians on sofas below the pictures belonged to an earlier era. If I had drawn a picture of the salon itself, I would have given it the caption, “Des Families Chrétiennes Chez Eux: L’Hôtel Baron.”
Two Christian families, apparently from Damascus, were receiving their Aleppo relations on sofas and