In Syria, Assad’s Words Speak Louder Than Deeds : Mideast: Damascus wants leader’s desire for peace taken on faith. But Israel, others demand action.

The library was bursting out of the old house, so Suheil Zakkar built a large hall upstairs and laid in more books. There are more than 30,000 in all, a musty gilt, leather and ink shrine to the eras when Arabs fashioned an alphabet to set down their violent and lovely tales and liberated Jerusalem.

Zakkar, Syria’s premier historian, spends most of his hours at a cramped desk in the shadow of his towering shelves, writing a new history of the Crusades in 26 volumes, this one through Arab eyes. It has been funded personally by Syrian President Hafez Assad. Next, Assad is commissioning a history of Damascus, believed to be the world’s oldest inhabited city.

Zakkar spends his days recording and preserving a civilization. He leaves it to his tough-minded political benefactors to fashion the future. Destiny weaves a fine web of the two.

“There was a man named Hajib who in pre-Islamic history asked for wheat from the Persians. And when they said, ‘How will you pay?’ he said, ‘I cannot give you more than my word’ and (made) a small wooden bow. And the Persian emperor gave him what he needed. It took years after that, and Hajib died. But after those years, the tribe repaid the wheat,” Zakkar recounted.

“Today, when President Assad said we are going to make peace with Israel, we have nothing to give but his word,” he said. “They say that isn’t enough. What shall we give them? Shall we give them Damascus as a hostage? If they want peace, they have to trust us. Let them try, and they will not lose. But let them not try, and they will surely lose.”

As U.S. analysts sought to pinpoint new landmarks for Middle East peace forged by Assad’s crucial meeting recently with President Clinton, it was rough going. The stubborn Syrian leader had repeated his demand for a full return of Syria’s occupied Golan Heights and balked at publicly condemning a recent wave of terrorist acts in neighboring Israel.

He again declined to offer gestures proving he was serious about peace--he made no offers to meet with Israeli officials, declined all talk of an Israeli Embassy in Damascus and refused even to send envoys to last week’s Middle East economic summit with Israeli leaders.

But in Damascus, the aging Assad’s meaning was clear: In unequivocal terms, he had offered peace in exchange for occupied territory. He had defined peace as a strategic objective. Now, in the Syrian view that reaches back as far as history, it is up to Israel to take him, and this nation, at his word.

“When Syria said we want peace, the expectation in Syria is this statement should be believed,” said Yehya Aridi, a political analyst close to Assad and a former professor at Washington’s Georgetown University.

Yet it is equally clear that Syria’s peace will come on its own terms, in its own time.

“There was an example for us when (PLO Chairman Yasser) Arafat and the Israelis went to Washington. They shook hands. They embraced even,” Aridi said. “Do you feel Arafat has achieved peace now? How many Palestinians are happy with what has happened? Very, very few. Those who have an interest in Arafat getting them money. Does peace mean having money? There’s something more valuable than that. There is dignity. There is the honor of the person. There is a saying in Arabic, ‘Land is honor.’

“We have lived a long time like this, and we can live a long time longer,” Aridi said.

“This land,” he added, “is the first piece of Earth to have seen the sun. It is the cradle of civilization. The first alphabet was found here. It is the home of prophets. For this reason, we do no accept to be insulted. We do not accept to lose our dignity. And we have no need to make you feel comfortable. When we believe we are older than history, we can wait for a long, long time.”

After the recent peace treaty signings by Jordan and the Palestinians, U.S. officials had hoped, with Clinton’s intervention, to speed Syria to the peace table too. But by all indications, Syria is in no hurry. Far from eager to join the rush toward treaties with Israel, Syria is both the key to an enduring peace in the Middle East and the one nation most likely to stand in the way of its rapid realization.

“Assad has been talking the same game for 20 years. It’s remarkable how consistent he’s been. So nobody should hold out hope for bold new gestures,” said a diplomat in the Syrian capital in the wake of Clinton’s visit. “Assad has made the decision to seek peace, but at the moment, he has nothing compelling him to seek anything but the best possible deal.”

Analysts here say Syria is ready to make peace on its own terms, but because of a number of factors, it cannot be expected to join Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization in signing a quick treaty, or one that compromises Damascus’ basic demand for a full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

First, Syria doesn’t face the same economic imperatives--a crushing need for foreign debt relief, a cutoff in financing from the Arab Gulf states, rising joblessness--that pushed Arafat and Jordan’s King Hussein into Israel’s arms.

The demise several years ago of its former benefactor, the Soviet Union, backed Syria into abandoning its hope of ever defeating Israel militarily. But Syria has moved rapidly to forge new ties with the West and take a path toward economic self-sufficiency, with encouraging results.

While imports have doubled over the past six years, the Syrian pound has remained stable with a substantial increase in agricultural and industrial production that has fueled new exports.

After years of importing food, Syria five years ago began exporting farm goods, nearly doubling production of cotton and quadrupling citrus production. Since 1988, petroleum production has grown by 150%, with 60% of it exported to foreign markets.

A fledgling private sector--still vastly overshadowed by the lumbering state industries fostered under decades of Arab Baathist socialism--is opening factories and developing markets abroad for Syrian goods, mainly garments and foodstuffs.

Commercial exchange with neighboring Lebanon--a virtual captive with 40,000 Syrian troops stationed there--has grown from $50 million to $500 million a year since 1990.

“We are the last Middle Eastern country that needs economic aid, and yet we have continuous hopes that the U.S. will have an honest stand toward us,” said Elias Nejma, an economics professor at Damascus University and member of Parliament.

Syria has made it clear that it hopes the United States will lift the crippling restrictions on aid and investment that stem from Syria’s designation as a nation that supports international terrorism and drug-dealing.

But Nejma said Syria was in no hurry to join last week’s economic summit in Casablanca, Morocco, where Arab nations--except Syria and Lebanon--met to begin forging a new, joint economic future. “They’re asking us to cooperate with Israel even before we cooperate with ourselves as Arabs,” Nejma complained. “It is a mere maneuver to submit the economies of the Middle East to the Israeli economy.”

There is an even more basic reason why Assad is in no hurry for peace: Over the past 25 years, he has built his empire on confrontation with Israel.

In the name of uniting the nation against a common enemy, Assad has ruthlessly stifled dissent at home, quelling unrest within Syria’s diverse Christian and Muslim ethnic communities and brutally putting down Islamic fundamentalist opposition. He has built a well-equipped army of 400,000 and an accompanying security apparatus that now forms the underpinnings of his regime.

What happens when there is no more enemy?

“I think it’s clear they have learned some lessons from the disintegration of the Soviet Union after the Cold War, and their intent is not to let that happen,” one Western envoy said. “That’s a big unknown even in Assad’s mind: what forces peace would set off. And that’s probably accounting for some of his caution.”

Government officials privately admit they are worried that Syria could see the same wave of Islamic fundamentalism that has mounted a vocal opposition to peace with Israel in Egypt, Jordan and the Gaza Strip.

Assad, they say, believes he can head off such opposition only by winning the whole of the Golan Heights back from Israeli occupation, a belief that in his mind renders a partial Israeli withdrawal, or a withdrawal leaving in place Israeli settlements, completely unacceptable at home.

“To tell his people we made peace with Israel without half the Golan, he won’t be accepted as a leader, the stability we have will not last very long,” said one Baath Arab Socialist Party official, who also made a reference to Assad’s quelling of Islamic fervor in 1982 by virtually destroying the city of Hama. “All those difficult years are still in the back of our minds. They (the Islamists) don’t have a slogan to attract the people, but if you give them a subject like this, any concessions on the Golan Heights, they will ignite their engine again. This is the fear of all of us.”

Perhaps equally threatening are the demands of the generals who have built their own empires in Syria through three decades of war. “The strongest voice resisting peace right now comes from the people in the military and security apparatus who have been making fortunes (from confrontation with Israel),” one Western diplomat said.

Yet Western analysts here say there are indications that Assad is preparing himself to meet Israel’s inevitable demand that the Syrian army be shrunk. In August and September, the government announced the retirement of 15 army generals, together with a number of other important job shuffles that included the appointment of a new chief of the air force and a new intelligence chief.

“One way of looking at it is that Assad is moving out the Old Guard, preparing for the day when the downsizing has to happen,” an envoy in Damascus said. “Even going so far as to eventually cut the army in half, it’s not impossible. He could do it, and he could get away with it, as long as Assad is Assad. And now we are seeing indications that he is already beginning to do it.”

Perhaps just as troublesome, many analysts say, will be the inevitable demands for political change that could accompany an end to the standoff with Israel.

At Damascus University, students and academics quietly debated the outcome of Clinton’s trip, and many were looking further ahead than a simple end to hostilities.

“The price of war has been very heavy, and it must be said that we hope for a change in the level of political life. We will expect democracy if peace comes,” one young professor said, lowering his voice and surveying the sidewalk around him as he spoke.

“The government has always said the enemy, Israel, is there, and it’s necessary to fight it together. It is a pretext . . . “ he said. “And when peace arrives, it will be necessary for us to search for democracy. The government will stay after peace, I am sure. But they must find another strategy of governing. The politics of terror, we have to finish with all that.”

Zakkar, for his part, said he is an advocate of peace but will take his enmity for Israel with him to his grave: “I am ready to make peace, but I am not ready to make friends. And I will not do it. I am accepting peace, and no more. And let time do its business.”