Syria’s Ruling Party Meets to Make Assad Its Leader

In a mood of somber eulogy, and with a bow to its Arab and socialist roots, Syria’s ruling Baath Party began its first congress in 15 years Saturday and prepared to formally hand over leadership of the country to the untested son of the late President Hafez Assad.

Bashar Assad, 34--a lanky, British-trained eye doctor groomed by his father to succeed him--sat front and center in a wood-paneled auditorium exactly one week after the elder man’s death, as party stalwarts decades his senior lavished praise on him as his father’s living embodiment.

The younger Assad, who is a party member but has never held any position in the organization of 1.5 million members, is expected to be chosen its new secretary-general as early as today. Since he already has been declared commander in chief of the armed forces, the leadership of the party will provide the second leg of the stool that will make him the absolute ruler of this country of 17 million.

Parliament is scheduled to confer the third leg, the presidency, on June 25. The process marks the first time in a post-colonial Arab “republic,” as opposed to monarchy, that power is being passed directly from father to son.

To justify the use of his lineage as a standard for leadership, speakers at the congress took pains to extol the elder Assad as a unique figure and to identify Bashar Assad as his legitimate successor because of the lessons he learned from his father.

“Bashar was brought up in the same house with the same principles and thoughts,” said Suleiman Qaddah, assistant secretary-general of the Baathists.

In addition to the election of Assad as secretary-general, the congress is to elect a new 90-member central committee and a 21-member executive body, which makes day-to-day decisions.

Diplomats in Damascus have said they expect Assad to bring some of his personal allies and more young people in general to the party’s governing structure to rejuvenate it.

The Baath (or Renaissance) Party has been in power in Syria since 1963. It has a constitutionally mandated leading role similar to that of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union. That is why awarding Assad the top party spot is considered as important as making him president and commander in chief.

The 1,038 delegates, mostly middle-aged men in drab suits, filed into the conference center near the Damascus airport Saturday morning and began their proceedings facing a large portrait of the late president above the stage.

Bashar Assad, one of the younger delegates, stood out because of his height and his resemblance to his father. Dressed in a black suit, he strode in without bodyguards, and reporters and photographers were allowed to crowd near him.

Answering a journalist’s question about his priorities for the congress, he replied, “The priorities are theirs,” referring to the other delegates.

As an act of homage to the late president, the delegates began with a minute of silence and recited, rather than sang, their party’s anthem: “One Arab Nation.”

The executive body nominated Assad last week as the party’s only candidate for president.

“We nominated Dr. Bashar in response to a dominant popular will and in affirmation of the policies of the late president,” said Qaddah, who called the late president “the wisest of the wise and the greatest of the great.”

The Baath Party is a socialist, secular organization that strongly supports unity among all Arab nations. It has branches in many Arab states but has long been estranged from the ruling Baath Socialist Party in Iraq, which is headed by President Saddam Hussein. In a gesture of rapprochement, however, the Iraqi Baathists sent a token delegation to the Syrian congress.

Only the first part of the congress was open to journalists.

The speakers on the dais were mostly confirmed leftists who emphasized their view that the government’s role in the economy should remain dominant and that government wages should be raised and employment expanded.

“We are all confident and optimistic that Gen. Bashar Assad will continue the policies of his father,” said Fayez Ismail, head of the Baath-allied Nationalist Unionist Socialist Party.

Wisal Bakdash, a senior official in the Syrian Communist Party, another coalition member, called on Assad to tax the wealthy.

But despite the party’s invocations of its socialist past, the party newspaper said Saturday that Assad will tilt toward change and modernity. In an editorial, Al Baath said Assad will lead Syria “toward a future based on openness, reform, modernization and science.”

The congress at times seemed a throwback to the Soviet era. Members addressed one another as “comrade,” and the proceedings open to the public seemed long-winded and short on spontaneity. In Marxist fashion, a list of greetings was read out to the congress from Communist and leftist parties around the world.

But it was impossible to deny the grief that many of the delegates felt for the loss of Hafez Assad and the hope that they put in Bashar Assad as his successor.

“He hasn’t come to be with us today, but he is watching us from wherever he is, with his great height and his beautiful smile,” said one.

Added Qaddah about Bashar Assad: “It is not just that he learned everything from his father. He is him.”