Syria's Voices of Change

Since 1952, Turk has been jailed four times. The longest was for nearly 18 years under President Hafez Assad, Bashar Assad's father, who died in 2000. Turk was confined to an underground cell, six feet by six feet, in an intelligence headquarters in Damascus. For 10 years, he says, he didn't see the sun, was allowed "not even a cigarette or cup of tea." After 13 years, his wife was allowed to visit. Books finally followed, and he read 130 in his last five years of internment. (Charles Dickens was one of his favorites.) To pass the time, he collected discolored pieces of rice. Each morning, on a white blanket, he would painstakingly arrange the rice into landscapes or still lifes.

"This regime is too old, and we have to bury it," he said, slowly dragging on a cigarette as though it were his last. "Can we do it now? No. But I'm very optimistic this regime is marching to its demise, and we have to work to make it reach this end."

Turk is the most outspoken among the opposition leaders, but across an increasingly dynamic Damascus, conversation among them is as forthright as at any time in recent memory. Cell phones, the Internet and satellite television have made for a far more aware public, and the extent of repression here pales in comparison with that in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Assad seems determined to rule through acceptance rather than fear, and the cult of leadership that was pervasive under his father has receded.

A popular Syrian nationalist party was legalized in May, and the government is debating whether to repeal a 25-year-old law that decrees the death penalty for membership in the still-powerful Muslim Brotherhood. Five leftist and nationalist parties, meanwhile, have come together in a group called the National Democratic Gathering. Others have begun meeting and organizing -- very tentatively.

Room to maneuver, though, remains uncertain, and the red lines are dangerously blurred.

In an episode shrouded in suspicion, Mashouq Khaznawi, a Kurdish Islamic leader, was abducted in broad daylight this month in Damascus, his colleagues said, sending a chill through opposition circles. The government has denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. Several days later, a prominent activist, Ali Abdullah, was arrested for reading a Brotherhood statement in public.

In the most severe crackdown yet, eight leaders of the Forum of Jamal Atassi, named for a late leftist leader, were arrested in their homes at dawn Tuesday, said Haitham Maleh, a human rights lawyer. The forum, which met on the first Saturday of every month, had brought together activists in what resembled a debating club, coordinated by Atassi's 35-year-old daughter. She was among those detained in the crackdown, which the State Department criticized as a "negative development."

"We have a weak opposition, even if it is growing now," said Yassin Hajj Saleh, 44, an activist who joined the Communist Party at age 16 and was imprisoned in 1980 for 16 years. "It still cannot exert credible pressure on the regime."

Saleh, a handsome man with gray hair, fears sudden change, as do many of the dissidents. In his view, it is a prescription for chaos in a country deeply fragmented between Kurds and Arabs, Sunni Muslims and religious minorities. He hails Abdel Nour, whose efforts he deems crucial in navigating the kind of tumult that haunted Syria's early years of independence after World War II.

"Perhaps the future depends on an alliance between the opposition and some reformers within the Baath Party and the government," Saleh said. "Both have the same opponent" -- an ossified leadership and old guard that remain Abdel Nour's bane.

"I think we need time," Saleh added. "The longer the period of regime weakness, the better for the opposition and the better for the Syrian people. Everyone is afraid of the Iraqi example, even if they hate the regime and want it thrown in the deepest sea."

The U.S. Role

More than anything else, the Iraqi example colors how reformers and dissidents perceive U.S. pressure on Syria.