I had anticipated feeling a certain chill during my time in Syria, and even in Jordan, but in Syria it was even colder than I expected. While there I had avoided web-writing anything critical about the state of Syria, assuming at least the possibility that these things are monitored. Probably not, but I wasn�t interested in the risk.
It may have been my first night in Damascus when I was walking in the Old City and on a busy corner saw a policeman rousting a merchant who had piled some goods into a wheelbarrow. Moments later a small truck pulled up, and several additional officers got out. They surrounded the guy, tossed his wares on the street, threw his wheelbarrow up into the truck and drove off. The guy , unlicensed I guess, sat down in the street, staring at his stuff and looking angry. Street justice Syrian style, I guess.
One day I approached a couple of officers to ask directions. One of them snatched the travel book out of my hands and flipped it upside down, apparently to see if anything would fall out. He pushed it back at me, waved his arm dismissively and said something angrily in Arabic that I think was close to �get out of here!� Later I told some people of this incident, who were amazed that I would ask a policeman for directions; they told me to stay away from the police unless I had a specific criminal complaint. Another day I walked down a side street and saw a couple of police with automatic guns, and a third plainclothes one also with his weapon. The third one was standing in the middle of the street, and joking with the others who were on the sidewalk. He looked like anybody else you might find on the street, but heavily armed. My guess is that he was covering for another guy who was at lunch, maybe. In any event I didn�t like it and got off that street.
I have earlier written about the incident where plainclothes police surrounded me because I had been taking pictures where I should not have been. I didn�t say it then, but I will now: they were a bunch of thugs, and to handle the situation the way they did was just idiotic, bullying intimidation.
A curious thing I found was that I could easily get people to talk about Syria generally, about Lebanon, America, family, money � almost anything. But I could almost never get people to talk about their police, and never about their political leaders. They just ducked those subjects. I thought the police, but the way, had the most attractive real estate. In taxis I would pass by large green plots of land, very well manicured, and protected heavily by uniformed and armed police. The taxi drivers would acknowledge that they were police stations but would offer up nothing else, unlike any other topic that might come up.
There are a lot of cops, most with their automatic rifles. With a very low crime rate, I have to question why there are so many of them. I think that they probably justify themselves by exploiting the Islamist threat, and the chance that Israel might invade at any moment. I suspect though that it�s simply a bureaucratic fixture of power, one that sustains itself on fear.
There are also large and small pictures of Assad Sr. and Assad Jr. everywhere. I saw them plastered on buildings, often large enough to cover up a good part of the building wall. Mostly, they are visually tasteless. They�re in restaurants, banks, hotels and shops. I suspect that people put them up to preemptively avoid trouble with the authorities. I found it curious that most often the pictures of Assad the father were more numerous and more prominent than the son�s. That, along with my perception of the people�s reluctance to talk about him, and the current pullout of intelligence and military personnel from Lebanon (which must be a huge embarrassment to him) make me skeptical of how secure his grip on power is.
There were quite a few uniformed traffic enforcement men, who stand around with long batons, and look like they have no idea what to do. Occasionally, I would see one lazily waving his baton to the oncoming traffic, but much more often than not they were standing around doing nothing. These guys were really not too much unlike other men I saw in Syria, in that I have never seen so many people doing not much of anything. (Exceptions were in the souqs and the government bank, which were buzzing).
It was pretty apparent to me that this country is really stagnant, certainly in economic and political respects, and I didn�t see anything that would lead me to believe that things are getting better. It�s lethargy is really sort of tragic. Maybe it�s true that you get what you deserve, but there is an intellectual energy, and nobility to these people that leads me to believe otherwise. One can hope�