They called him the Lion of Damascus, the Bismarck of the Mid dle East, the Fox and - for his habit of listening more than he spoke - the Sphinx.

However, President Hafez alAssad of Syria, who died this weekend from a heart attack at the age of 69, most liked to compare himself to Salahedin, the 12th century Kurd who defeated the Crusaders, and whose crypt lies in the Omma yad Mosque a few kilometres from President Assad's palace.

Assad died without fulfilling the goal he pursued for 33 years - the restitution of the Syrian Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967.

In the eyes of many Arabs, Hafez al-Assad will go down in history as a great man. Even the Western lea ders who paid tribute to him yesterday recognised that the air force officer from a poor family in north-western Syria achieved what 11 presidents and 20 coups between 1946 and 1970 failed to do - he brought stability to Syria.

His 30-year rule was repressive, often cruel, but as in most police states, Damascus was a place where you could walk the streets at night without fear, where, as long as one took no interest in politics, one could get on with life in relative tranquillity.

With 17 different intelligence services, known as mokhabarat, to watch every citizen's movements, there was little likelihood of crime, even less chance of political unrest.

When the Muslim Brothers staged an uprising in Hama in 1982, Assad's troops killed an estimated 10,000 people and destroyed the city. It was Assad's pan-Arab, secular Ba'ath Party against the fundamentalists. "These so-called Muslims will pay the price," he said in a radio speech which underlined his ruthlessness. His annihilation of the Hama rebels became a model for other Arab leaders facing similar movements.

Assad's Syria was no respecter of human rights. Although groups such as Amnesty International reported a dramatic improvement over the past decade, it was not uncommon for enemies - real or perceived - literally to rot in prison.

Salah Jedid, the leader overthrown by Assad in 1970, was jailed for 24 years. There were east German torture machines to make recalcitrant plotters talk, and sources in Damascus speak of helicopters dropping dissidents' bodies in the desert no man's land between Syria and Iraq, to be eaten by wild dogs.

All means were used to quash threats to the rule of Hafez alAs sad, yet unlike the neighbouring but enemy Ba'athist regime in Iraq, terror in Syria was not an end in itself. It was not used gratuitously. Perhaps that is why so many of Assad's subjects seemed to love him almost as much as they feared him.

Assad's other claim to greatness, in Arab eyes, was his iron will, his consistency in standing up to the US and Israel, his constant, unwavering demand for a "global comprehensive peace [between Israel and Arabs] based on UN resolutions". Unlike Egypt, the PLO and Jordan, he never gave in to the desire to ingratiate himself with Western leaders. Unlike Sadat, Ara fat and King Hussein, he was not willing to make what he saw as humiliating concessions. Assad interpreted the 1991 Madrid formula of "land for peace" literally.

Why should Arabs be expected to relinquish land, he asked me and my colleagues when we interviewed him in 1992. "There is no moral, legal or political justification for the Arabs to offer their land to Israel simply to obtain Israel's agreement for peace," he said then.

Assad regarded the Arabs who made a separate peace with Israel as traitors. Too bad for the Palestinians if they never regained Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. They had broken ranks, he felt, and they paid for it. On the fate of his Golan Heights, "there is no possibility of compromise", he told me.

"Nobody in Syria could give up one inch of land in the Golan. Every Syrian believes deep in his heart that whoever yields a part of his land is a traitor."

The Israelis and the US miscalculated, believing that Assad's age, severe diabetes and desire to regain the Golan before dying would make him relinquish key demands, including access to the sea of Galilee.

When he met President Clinton in Geneva in March, he reminded the US leader that as a child he had played on the shores of Galilee. For Assad, there was no better proof that the lake was also Syrian.

Syrian-Israeli negotiations broke down in January, and it will fall to Assad's son Bashar to resume them. The Israelis and Americans may be hoping that the inexperienced Bashar will be a soft touch, but it would be politically disastrous for Bashar al-Assad to accept less than his father would.

Hafez al-Assad's negotiating technique was not unlike that of the lion, whose name he took. He would keep his prey waiting for days - a former US Secretary of State Warren Christopher once threw his attache case on the ground in fury. Once they were in his presence, Assad would keep guests talking for hours - four or five at a stretch was not unusual - then move in for the kill when his interlocutors were weary.

Throughout the session, always filmed by a hidden camera, sugary tea and coffee were served. Diplomats in Damascus joked that however ill the Syrian president was, no one in the diplomatic corps could match the strength of his bladder.

Assad cared very much what would happen to his country after his death. Emile Lahoud, the President of Lebanon, was talking on the telephone to Assad when he died at midday on Saturday.

"He was telling me, `It is our fate to build a safe future for our children'," Mr Lahoud said. There was a silence when the phone dropped. Lahoud rang back 15 minutes later and Bashar answered, telling him his father was dead.

No Syrian will forget the death in 1994 of Bashar's older brother Bassel. A handsome, athletic, outgoing army officer, Bassel had been groomed for the succession since childhood. Speeding to Damascus airport in fog in his red Ferrari, he crashed into a traffic island.

As Assad climbed the steps of the aircraft taking Bassel's body to the family village of Qordaha, he looked like a broken man, but when he stuck his head out of the pilot's window and raised both hands in a victory salute, the crowd of mourners cheered. They understood him: Assad would continue; his regime would continue; Syria would not crumble.

Within months, photographs of the shy, homely Bashar, a British-trained opthamologist with a passion for computers, began to appear all over Syria. He became an army colonel, and was to have been named vice-president in an extra ordinary session of the Ba'ath Party on June 17th. Yesterday, the vice president, Abdel-Halim Khaddam, named him chief of the armed for ces after promoting him from colonel to lieutenant-general.

On the day of his father's death, the Syrian parliament met to change the constitution to allow him to succeed his father. Previously, the minimum age for a Syrian president was 40; now it is Bashar's age, 34.

Assad may have transformed his family, from the tiny Alawite minority, into a dynasty. North Korea is perhaps the only other place where a dictator has passed power on uninterrupted to his son. In neighbouring Iraq, Saddam Hussein plans to do the same thing.

That Western governments - including France and Britain - enthusiastically embraced Bashar during his recent trips to Europe shows how little the West really cares about democracy in the Middle East.

Stability, not democracy. But will nice Bashar al-Assad be able to deliver the commodity so fiercely preserved by his father? Potential challenges exist - first and foremost Bashar's black sheep Uncle Rifa'at, whose militia had a shoot-out with presidential guards earlier this year in the seaport of Lattakia.

Then there are the majority Sun ni Muslim army officers who have been set aside in recent years, the politicians charged with corruption in a campaign led by Bashar. Turkey and Israel, whose military alliance so disturbed Hafez al-Assad, might have an interest in stirring up trouble, to silence Syrian claims to land occupied by both countries.

Last but not least there is Lebanon - "the sister country", Assad always called it. With tacit Western support won through his anti-Iraq stance after the 1990 Kuwait invasion, Assad snr snuffed out an 18-month rebellion by the Maronite Gen Michel Aoun in 1990.

Lebanon remains a Syrian satellite, with 20,000 Syrian troops and millions of Syrian "guest workers".

Bashar has told close Lebanese friends that he will never leave Lebanon at the demand of a few Maronite Catholics. However, three weeks after Israel withdrew its troops from the south, Syria's justification for remaining has never looked so tenuous. Perhaps Bashar's greatest asset is the dread of chaos instilled in Lebanese and Syrians by the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war.

He inherits an introverted, backward Syria, a country put on ice for 30 years to perpetuate his father's rule, a sort of Soviet Moscow on the Euphrates. Bashar al-Assad wants to give it mobile phones, the Internet and peace with Israel.

The future of the Middle East could depend on him.