Animosity Lurks Behind Deep Syria-Lebanon Bond

There is no way that Roderick Ashe would ever make friends with a Syrian. He thinks they’re beneath him. “We have a higher standard of living,” said the unemployed 22-year-old from this small mountain village. “A Syrian can stay in one pair of trousers. They eat nothing but bread and cheese.”

There is no love returned by Ahmed Dandel, 31, a Syrian who moved to the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon 10 years ago and has come to think very little of his neighbors.

“The Syrian, you put him in the sun from morning to evening and he won’t say a word,” said Dandel, who works as a laborer. “The Lebanese, they are always looking for shade. They are dainty.”

Syria and Lebanon may be united by geography and a common enemy in Israel, but theirs is an uneasy bond that has bred anger and mistrust on both sides. The animosity felt on the streets of Lebanon flows directly from an unequal relationship defined by Damascus as it pushes Lebanon’s government, military and economy to serve its own agenda.

When Damascus pulled its troops from Beirut in June, the move was welcomed across Lebanon as a step toward improving relations. But it was also viewed as cosmetic. Syria still has intelligence agents based in the capital; its businesspeople still keep billions of dollars in Lebanese banks; tens of thousands of its troops still patrol large areas of the country; and top Lebanese government and military leaders are still beholden to Syria for their posts.

“Whenever your interest as a Lebanese is not the same as the Syrians’, the Syrians will prevail,” said Boutros Harb, one of the few members of the Lebanese parliament to speak out against Syria. “I am sure, [even] if they withdraw all the troops, they will maintain political control.”

Although no one disputes Syria’s puppet-master role in Lebanon, some analysts say it’s not a one-way street. A whole class of Lebanese has chosen to defer to Syria as a way to achieve power and wealth, chief among them President Emil Lahoud--who, by most accounts, would never have become president without Syria’s support.

Many Lebanese have gotten rich smuggling electronics, tobacco, alcohol and other goods into Syria without paying customs duties or import taxes. Damascus’ financial stake in Lebanon has led to a more stable Syrian currency, and Syria helps finance and arm the resistance militia Hezbollah, which drove Israel out of southern Lebanon last year after 22 years of occupation. Even the estimated 300,000 Syrian laborers living in Lebanon are said to hold down inflation because they work for such low wages.

“Syria cannot but rely on the free system of exchange in Lebanon to finance its activities,” said Marwan Iskandar, an economist based in Beirut. “Lebanon cannot deny that Syria is its neighbor and is its gateway to the Arab world. Who benefits from the relationship depends on what function you talk about.”

This view, however, is not widely shared. Stop anyone on a street corner in Lebanon, and the odds are they will complain that Syrian workers are taking away jobs and that Syrian products are sold so cheap that they have put local producers out of business. (Government officials say the Syrians work in unskilled positions most Lebanese would not take--and that Lebanese producers are just not used to competition.)

Tony Sadak’s concerns are typical. He’s 24 and blames the Syrians for his unemployment. He grew up in Deir Ahmar, a Maronite Christian village, and a few years back opened an auto body shop. Then a Syrian opened a shop nearby and started charging $10 for a day’s work, half what Sadak charged, he said.

“He was so much cheaper I had to close down,” said Sadak, who sits around all day insisting that he has nothing to do. “The problem with the Syrians is they send all their money back to Syria. But I have expenses. I have a family. How can I compete?”

Down the road, within sight of Sadak, Ahmed Mahmoud, 18, and his brother Mohammed, 15, were busy with a chisel and a sledgehammer, working on a house renovation job. The Syrian teenagers said they moved to Lebanon two years ago with their mother. They are paid about $8 a day--twice as much as they would earn in Syria but half what a Lebanese would make.

“I take the Syrians because they are much cheaper than the Lebanese,” said their Lebanese employer, Joseph Qosah. “If I hire Syrians and give them less, it means a lower price for the customer.”

In this region of the Bekaa Valley, it’s easy to see why Syrians can afford to work for so little: They live mostly in burlap tents made from old fertilizer bags and pitched alongside the road.

“It is much cheaper to live here,” said Dandel, who inhabits a small tent camp with about 10 other families from the same village in northern Syria. “When employers come to look for laborers, we are all right here.”

Syria firmly rooted itself in Lebanon during this nation’s 15-year civil war, which pitted different religious and ethnic groups against one another. In 1976, a year after the war began, Syria launched a full-scale invasion with the stated intention of restoring peace. There is, however, some evidence that Syria was also pursuing a self-serving agenda by trying to crush Palestinian forces that had sided with Lebanese nationalists.

By the time the civil war ended, local officials said, Syria had secured its hold on its tiny neighbor. The Taif Agreement, which ended the war, never explicitly called for a Syrian troop withdrawal but instead for a troop “redeployment,” officials said.

After so many years, Syria’s troops in Beirut became a symbol of that nation’s control. But officials, analysts and ordinary citizens say Syria’s reach is far more pervasive, from the toughs who drive around the city in cars with tinted windows to the way elections are held or monetary policy is set. Even as families climb down the rocks of the Mediterranean coast to swim in the sea, the late Syrian President Hafez Assad watches over them.

“What is between Lebanon and Syria was not made by us, but was made by God,” declares a billboard of Assad that towers over the coastline in Beirut.

Added recently in small black letters are the words “And Bashar Continues,” referring to the strongman’s son, who took over a little more than a year ago.

The most obvious way that Syria’s national interests affect Lebanon involves the ongoing conflict with Israel. When the United Nations declared that Israel had pulled back to an accepted border after its withdrawal from southern Lebanon last year, that should have signaled an end to the conflict. It didn’t.

Under pressure from Syria, the Lebanese government refused to station its armed forces along the border. Instead, it turned control of the region over to Hezbollah. Then Hezbollah announced that the armed struggle would continue as long as Israel occupied a 10-square-mile patch of disputed grazing land called Shabaa Farms, seized by Israel along with the Golan Heights in 1967.

Many see this as a pretext by Syria to force Israel to one day return the Golan Heights--and to distract the Syrian public from the country’s serious economic troubles. Many Lebanese and Syrians suggest that Syria can’t afford a direct confrontation with Israel, so it uses Lebanon as its proxy battlefield.

“The regime hides behind Arab national issues,” charged one Syrian official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. “It says we can’t deal with the internal problems until we get back the Golan and free Palestine. If you talk about these ‘little’ internal problems, you are [siding] with Israel and the United States.”

Hezbollah defends the armed struggle as the only way to force Israel to withdraw from Shabaa and release prisoners, but it acknowledges that Syria has managed to piggyback on its cause.

“We have the same interests between Hezbollah and Syria,” said Mahmoud Qoumati, who heads Hezbollah’s political council. “Hezbollah wants to do resistance work without any obstacles in its way, and it’s in Syria’s interest to keep the pressure on.”

Most of the tension that appears on the street exists not because of Shabaa Farms, however, but because of a feeling that Syria uses Lebanon as a safety net for its own problems.

Syrians, for example, are often able to bring consumer goods across the border into Lebanon without paying import duties or taxes. Thanks in part to lower production costs in Syria, they can sell their goods for less than those made locally. At least that’s the perception of businesspeople and consumers.

“They sell chicken 15 cents a kilo cheaper than we do, and they still make money and they don’t go bankrupt,” said Samir Achour, who runs a large poultry farm in southern Lebanon. “This is because there are [in effect] no borders.”

A few years ago, when Lebanon decided to raise its tax on liquor to bolster revenues, Syrian military officers saw a business opportunity.

“The minister of finance committed a blunder when he raised the liquor tax 120%,” said Iskandar, the economist. “Suddenly, Syrian officers started canvassing nightclubs here, delivering smuggled alcohol at much lower prices.”

That led the government to cut its tax, rather than crack down on Syrian officers’ illegal activities, he said.

“This is a relationship between two states where one state dominates the other state fully,” said Farid Khazen, chair of the Department of Political Studies and Public Administration at American University in Beirut. “If Syria decides to influence decisions in Lebanon, there is no way to prevent Syria from doing that.”