Ba'ath Party Regional Congress in June 2005
Despite the crackdown, Bashar al-Asad continued to voice support for political and economic reforms in Syria, as he did at the opening of the long-awaited 10th Ba'ath Party Regional Congress in June 2005. There was a sense among activists inside and outside Syria that the release of the Mehlis report on the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, combined with increased US pressure on the Syrian government, had made President Bashar al-Asad's regime vulnerable. Former Syrian Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam left in 2005 because he feared the government would fall and he's the kind of guy that wants to be on the safe side. Also, he thought he could gain followers if the regime fell, and he had political distance from it. This wave of thinking was pervasive even among many Ba'athists. It was precisely this atmosphere Ba'ath party members were responding to when they pushed an economic and political reform agenda during the 2005 Ba'ath Conference.
President Bashar Assad was initially too insecure to remove regime veterans, but later consolidated his position. In 2005 the country's vice-president Abdul Halim Khaddam, expressed his intention to resign from his position and from the party. The move signalled that the president Bashar Al Assad, was seeking to consolidate his grip on power. "At the previous congress in 2000 there was already talk in the corridors that a change in the leadership was desired. It is highly probable that this will be implemented at this congress", said George Jabbour, a member of Syria's rubber-stamp parliament and an observer delegate at the congress. People close to Mustafa Tlas, the former defence minister, said he would also quit the regional command. Other figures likely to go include the former prime minister Mustafa Miro. Several other members of the regional command, the Syrian party's highest ruling body, announced their resignation in the four-day congress that started on 06 June 2005, the first since Assad succeeded his father Hafez in 2000.
The Congress ended with an announcement of a new, smaller Regional Command (the most powerful decision-making body in Syria) that excluded long-time hard-liner and just-resigned Vice-President Abdul Halid Khaddam. A powerful Alawite cadre of disaffected, former regime heavyweights, including Ali Duba, Ali Zeyout, Ali Haydar, Izzedine Nasser, and (to a lesser degree) Mohammed Khouli (all military or security officers except Nasser) sympathize with Khaddam and shared his view that regime decision-making under Bashar has been disastrous. Khaddam's criticism of Asad as a weak, indecisive, dangerously inexperienced and impulsive leader highlighted a problem that regime power brokers like SMI head Asif Shawkat and brother Maher al-Asad were already aware of: How does an essentially totalitarian regime function with such a vacuum at the center? The issue was more stark now: Do regime pillars (mostly Alawite) stand with Asad and risk possibly losing power completely, or move against him?
The Congress adopted a package of recommendations including a request that the government "review" the emergency law, allow for new political parties, and undertake a series of economic reforms to improve the investment climate, and limit corruption and waste. Almost two years later, the government had accomplished a handful of modest economic reforms, but the review of the emergency law was not on the table and the political parties law remained on hold until "circumstances permit it," according to the Arabic daily Al-Hayat quoting Asad at a meeting of the Ba'ath Party Central Committee.
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