Syrian President Assad’s Hard Sell: Peace : Mideast: For a quarter of a century, the dictator has taught his people to hate, fight and destroy Israel. Persuading them to embrace peace may be his toughest challenge of all.

Four-year-old Faiz Suleimani was playing with his toy pistols, pretending to kill Israelis, when his president appeared recently on the television set in the family’s sitting room with a historic message of peace.

The Suleimanis had crowded around to hear it. Like millions of other Syrians, they were riveted to the set through the day, while Syrian leader Hafez Assad met with President Clinton in a marathon summit in Geneva.

Their government had promised that the session would be a turning point in the quest for Mideast peace. And by nightfall on Jan. 16, Syria’s tough military leader delivered.

For the first time in a quarter of a century of emergency rule, Assad offered the possibility of peace to them and to Israel, a sworn enemy that, until that day, he had taught his people to hate, fight and destroy.

Like most Syrians, the Suleimanis were stunned.

True, they said, Assad’s message brought new hope to a nation where many believe in only the vaguest concept of peace. For them, it was little more than a dream, this thought of life without costly armies and official states of war, a life free from poverty, international isolation and the need for authoritarian rule.

But for the Suleimanis and most of Syria’s 14 million people--an entire generation that has lived since birth under a dictatorship that justified itself for 24 years through the belligerence of a more-powerful neighbor--embracing that peace is quite another matter.

“When I was like this kid, I had nightmares about the Israelis,” explained Abdul Razak Suleimani, Faiz’s 32-year-old uncle and a former Syrian army commando. “My mother said, ‘Don’t worry. When you grow up, the problem between Israel and Syria will be finished.’ But then I grew up. I went into the army. I was shot in the leg. I watched many friends die. These are not easy things to forget.”

In Assad’s Syria, nothing is. It is one of the most highly structured, strictly controlled societies on the globe.

Here, a sophisticated regime has employed propaganda, censorship and occasional imprisonment to teach its citizens what to think, where to go and how to behave.

Through it all, Syrian society has remained largely loyal, accepting almost universally the sacrifices that the regime has demanded.

In place of the freedoms it denied, Assad’s leadership provided a quarter of a century of unbroken stability--this in a land where coups, countercoups, rampant crime and bloodshed preceded the 1970 military coup that brought his regime to power.

And in exchange for mandatory military duty for all men and the vast military spending that has left much of the nation poor, Assad built an army strong enough to keep its enemies at bay.

But as the Suleimani family demonstrated on the day Assad offered a new era of peace, selling that prospect to his own people now may well be the Syrian leader’s most difficult challenge.

He must do it at a time when the Syrians’ expectations for economic and political reform are growing for the first time since he took power.

And to fulfill what Syrian and Western analysts say is among Assad’s chief motivations to seek peace, the aging Syrian leader must do so in such a way that he retains enough power to install a hand-chosen successor; until he was killed in a car accident Friday, most believe that individual was the eldest of Assad’s four sons, Basil.

The regime insists that selling the peace to the Syrian masses, to simple families such as the Suleimanis, will be no more difficult than it has been to motivate them for war. Like everything else, it will flow from Assad’s universally acknowledged cunning and calculation.

“First, Israel must withdraw from every inch of the Golan Heights,” said Mohammed Salman, Assad’s information minister, referring to the strategic plateau Israel has occupied since the 1967 War. “When Israel will withdraw from the occupied territories, certainly there will be some change for Syria.”

The return of the Golan, Assad’s key demand in return for his offer to negotiate peace with Israel, clearly is a goal both strategic and personal for Assad.

Assad was Syria’s defense minister when the Israelis overran and occupied the Golan 27 years ago. And most veteran diplomats and Syrian intellectuals in Damascus said Assad is driven to recover the land before he dies.

But those same sources added that the issue of Assad’s successor, combined with the Syrian leader’s personal need to solve Syria’s growing economic disparities and mounting fiscal woes in his final years of life, is at least as strong a motivator for peace as the Golan.

The most difficult of the problems Assad must attempt to solve is Syria’s complex, often confounding national economy, which diplomats, intellectuals and families such as the Suleimanis said is inseparable from the issue of peace.

If the Golan is Assad’s emotional selling point for peace, the promise of prosperity is the practical one for his people.

At the heart of Syria’s economic nightmare is its huge defense budget, Assad’s massive spending on a vast military-civilian security apparatus. Western diplomats say it consumes more than half the national budget.

In the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union--which was Assad’s longtime ally and supplied billions of dollars in military hardware and training--Syria’s defense costs have ballooned.

Many Syrians hope that the regime will reroute these sums into health, education and public services, many of which are strained by Syria’s mushrooming population.

Already, electricity is strictly rationed in Damascus. Hospitals and schools are overcrowded; basic government services are plagued by long delays.

Syria has one of the world’s highest population growth rates; its population is expected to double in just 20 years, draining the public sector even more and threatening any regime that attempts to manage it.

These are demographic realities well-known to Assad, who sensed the imminent collapse of his Soviet benefactors and three years ago launched a bold initiative to strengthen Syria’s small private sector, diplomats in Damascus said.

Assad’s recent, historic peace offer came at a time when Western and Syrian economists say the regime has been walking a tightrope between its traditional, Soviet-style socialism--which guarantees all basic needs of its people--and its post-Soviet, free-market reform.

It came at a time when, most economists and intellectuals agreed, those reforms have created a growing disparity between rich and poor, dotting Damascus’ gritty skyline with conspicuous new symbols of wealth that have served only to raise the ambitions of Syria’s poorer masses.

On the day Assad offered Israel his olive branch, for example, there were few signs of the regime’s liberalization policies in the lives of the Suleimanis.

In a downtown district where late-model Corvettes and $100,000 luxury sedans jostle with horse-drawn carts hauling gasoline through mounting traffic jams, the Suleimanis still drive the battered Pontiac Silver Streak the family bought new in 1948.

Only through permanent peace, families such as the Suleimanis concluded, can that gap be bridged.

The regime is also gradually releasing some control over the nation’s mass media and giving Syrians their first taste of the West.

In the last two years, the regime has permitted hotels and foreign residents to install satellite dishes; American videotapes are now widely available in Damascus.

Information Minister Salman confirmed that these samplings of Western culture will become a feast of information later this year when the government offers cable television for the first time.

But Salman insisted that the allure of the West and its open democracies will not turn the Syrians against their deeply entrenched government.

“Of course, there is no kind of regime in the world that satisfies all,” he said.

“But the Syrian citizen knows well his country, his state and his government. The Syrian people are very organized. Every part of society is organized.”