Syria

Great Friday

banner reads: was the martyr Hatem Hana, a Christian, also a Salafi?

Yesterday President Bashaar al-Asad lifted the Emergency Law, dissolved the notorious State Security Courts, and legalised peaceful protests.

After the president’s decree, a lawyer asked permission to hold a protest in Hasakeh. He was detained by security forces.

Today – ‘Great Friday’ – large, peaceful, unarmed protests were held in all regions of the country. Police, army and militia used tear gas, electric rods and live ammunition against the people. At least 75 sons and daughters of Syria were murdered. Regime forces prevented some of the wounded from receiving medical help. Other wounded have been arrested from their hospital beds. (Here are ugly scenes in Homs).

Damascus is under lockdown, mukhabarat clustering on every corner. Someone I know tried to cross the city today for entirely apolitical reasons. During the journey he was taken off the bus (with everyone else) and marched to a police station where he was questioned and his details recorded. But protests and gunfire still roared from the suburbs as far into the city’s heart as Meedan.

Words are one thing, actions another. The president’s words have no meaning at all.

The words of the newly-formed, grass-roots Local Coordination Committees, on the other hand, seem to hold great meaning:

Freedom and dignity cannot be achieved except through peaceful democratic change. All prisoners of conscience must be freed. The existing security apparatus has to be dismantled and replaced by one with with specific jurisdiction and which operates according to law.

At this pivotal moment Syria is divided – many individual Syrians are divided – between hope and fear. Minorities in particular fear what might come next: a dispensation in which secular freedoms may be limited, and worse, the misguided ‘revenge’ of those who blame entire communities – the Alawis specifically – for real and imagined regime crimes. Prominent Alawis who have nothing to do with the regime have received mysterious, threatening phonecalls (which could of course come from the secret police). It reminds them of the seventies and early eighties when they were targetted by Muslim Brotherhood terrorists. Many Sunnis, meanwhile, remember the massacre of 20,000 in Hama, 1982, not as a brutal, unforgiveable overreaction to a terrorist group but as a calculated attack on Sunnis as a community.

So the sectarian danger is real. And it isn’t helped by such outside figures as the viciously sectarian shaikh Yusuf Qaradawi, al-Jazeera’s favourite, who so eloquently supported the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya yet opposed the revolution in Shia-majority Bahrain, going so far as to cheer on the Saudi occupiers and the Khalifa family’s ridiculous ‘foreign conspiracy’ narrative. Sermonising on Syria, Qaradawi described Bashaar as a prisoner of his sect, and Syria as a nation of Sunnis unjustly ruled over by Alawis.

Not only does this story exacerbate sectarian tensions in Syria, it simply isn’t true. Baathist rule has not sought to impose Alawi identity on the country in the way, for instance, Saddam Hussain cast Iraq in heroic Sunni terms. Syrian school religious education is traditionalist Sunni in emphasis. Although the highest ranks of the military and intelligence services are overwhelmingly Alawi, the broader regime constitutes an alliance of all Syria’s sects. Most Alawis are no more favoured by the regime than anybody else. Many Alawis have suffered at the hands of the regime. Many have been imprisoned, tortured or killed.

The regime’s strategy has previously been to keep all communities happy by co-opting each one’s elite. Now this has come unstuck. The ordinary people are marching, angry with the corrupt of all sects. This could be a sign that sectarianism’s grip is loosening from Syrian society.

Syrians worry about democracy. Of course they do. The neighbouring ‘democracies’, after all, are torn across violent sectarian faultlines. But it need not be the same in Syria. Neither Iraq nor Lebanon won democracy through unarmed popular uprising. Iraq was destroyed by sanctions, invasion and occupation before ‘democracy’ was established. Lebanon is a sectarian democracy because it was created so by France. Neither country (in the contemporary period) built a sense of national identity through a common national struggle.

The security forces have lost over 40 men since the uprising began. The families of some soldiers claim their dead were killed for refusing to fire at protestors. Families of dead soldiers in the north west, however, blame infiltrators, Hariri-backed Salafis or men allied to former (and exiled) vice president Khaddam. Near Banyas, commanders were ambushed and killed with their families, their bodies mutilated. Opposition figure Mahmoud Issa was arrested after telling al-Jazeera that he knew who’d killed the officers.

I don’t know who killed them, but let’s imagine it was Salafis, or vengeful relatives of dead protestors. Still it would be wrong to associate the whole uprising with these criminals. That’s the sort of illogic to keep people in their cage. The protestors in their vast majority are chanting for freedom and national unity.

Not every ‘Allahu Akbar’ has a Salafi agenda behind it. For most protestors, it’s an uttered response to oppression. What they’re saying is, God is greater than tear gas, batons and bullets. It’s a way for them to master the fear of death. I watch them on the youtube videos, chanting Freedom as they march, then Allahu Akbar when the fire falls on them. It makes perfect sense.

Next, whether we like it or not, most Syrians are profoundly religious (spiritual is another matter), and will express themselves religiously. This in itself is fine, so long as the religious understand that for democracy to work they must allow minorities and secularists to express themselves too, to live in safety and conviviality with those around them.

How long should Syria wait for change? Half a century of one-party rule hasn’t solved the sect problem. It has in fact worsened. Curing sectarianism by dictatorship is like solving emotional problems with hasheesh – it might temporarily avert a crisis but only by numbing the patient and freezing his neurosis in place. In the long term, failure to address the problem feeds it. The talking cure is the best solution – for sectarianism as for emotional problems (and sectarianism is an emotional problem).

If Bashaar had made good his (implied) promise of political reform eleven years ago, we’d be in a stronger position now. If Syria had had a reasonably free press, if NGOs, activists and non-sectarian political parties had been permitted to operate freely, then there’d have been a debate, which would have allowed people to let off steam, and would have allowed political organisation beyond the mosques, on practical rather than mythic-symbolic issues.

Two snippets of news today: Kurds in Qamishli and Amouda chanted “The Syrian People Are One. Arabs and Kurds are Brothers.” The imam of a Banyas mosque told a journalist, “There is no problem between Alawites and Sunnis. The problem is loyalty to the regime.”

Meanwhile, video proof emerged of an armed gang terrorising Syria – not Salafis, Lebanese, or Americans, but pro-regime shabeeha militia.

It’s become academic to discuss whether or not the uprising is justified. It’s happening. History is on the move.

I remember Maadamiya very well. It’s a fairly poor western suburb of Damascus, friendly, and it’s where my wife and I ‘wrote the book’ for our marriage. The following snippet is from al-Jazeera’s live blog.

A doctor from Madamia, a Damascus suburb, tells a journalist working with Al Jazeera:

“There are four people killed and about 50 wounded and we cannot take them to the public or private hospitals. At Daraya hospital security were shooting and arresting people. So I have been treating people inside homes. It is very hard to treat the wounds because many have been shot in the head.

“I can tell you now, the situation in Madamia will never be calm. Today is an historical day for the country. There is now a new strategy to kill all the protesters, not even arrest them.”

source

April 23, 2011 0

Syria : unforgivable

and there are many more

April 12, 2011 0

Syria : one of the original “conspirators”

One of the kids from Deraa who scribbled a forbidden word

and whose arrest and beatings sparked the rebellion

April 7, 2011 0

My country, bladi

April 4, 2011 0

Is Assad Capable of Reform?

By VOLKER PERTHES
Published: March 30, 2011

BERLIN — In a brief address before Syria’s Parliament on Wednesday, President Bashar al-Assad declared that he was still for reform, but insisted that the first priority was to combat a “conspiracy” that was responsible for the bloody protests in his country. The speech came the day after the president dismissed his cabinet.

The speech was bound to disappoint those who had expected Assad to at least lift the emergency status and announce a new law on political parties. Changing the ministers is a meaningless gesture unless it’s followed by real reform. Assad mentioned the emergency law and the party law but insisted that he would not act under pressure — “haste comes at the expense of the quality of reforms.”

It’s a refrain that Syrians have heard too often. The idea of a new party law in particular has come up whenever the regime was under pressure — for example in 2000, after Assad took power, or in 2005, after Syria’s forced withdrawal from Lebanon. But the time has never been right.

I remember a meeting I had five years ago with Faisal Kalthoum, a professor of law and at the time a confidant to Assad, who proudly told me about a draft party law he and other members of a special committee had just finalized. (Kalthoum, who regarded himself as a reformer, later became governor of Dara’a and was in that position until he was fired after the first bloody crackdown.)

The new law, he told me at that time, would allow parties of various tendencies to be established. But there was no intention, he added when I asked, to change the Constitution, particularly Article 8, which states that the Baath Party is the “leading party in the society and the state.” In other words, parties could be freely constituted so long as they did not challenge the Baath’s monopoly on power. It is hardly necessary to add that Assad did not enact the law. The situation, other officials told me in subsequent years, “wasn’t yet considered ripe” for such a reform.

I would be positively astonished if Assad was prepared today not only to enact that law, but also to lift the state of emergency and rescind Article 8. He could make history with such moves, probably setting the stage for a step-by-step political liberalization in Syria — for which, I assume, a small window of time still exists. But I doubt he will do it.

This is mainly because Assad, in contrast to the image of him that some Western leaders have developed, is not a reformer. He can better be described as a modernizer. When he inherited power from his father in 2000 he set out to modernize the system — the economic and technological foundation as well as the political, security and bureaucratic elite on which he bases his power.

He allowed archaic economic and trade regulations to be shelved, private banks to operate, foreign investments to come in, mobile-phone companies to operate. And, starting with regional party leaders and governors, then ministers, and finally the top echelons of the security apparatus, he managed within only a couple of years to remove his father’s old guard and replace it with people loyal to himself.

In doing so, he gave Syria a more modern face and made some things work more efficiently, but he also made sure that the basic system — which relies on the heavy hand of the security services, on personal ties, and on a form of tolerated corruption that allows loyalists to enrich themselves — remained intact.

Initially, after his assumption of power, Assad encouraged a somewhat freer political debate. But in 2001, after a short-lived “Damascus Spring,” the regime cracked down on many of the intellectuals who had thought that it was really the beginning of a political opening. Many have been arrested repeatedly over the past decade.

To be fair, Assad has not relied only on repression and cronies. Unlike Hosni Mubarak or Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the relatively young Syrian leader did gain some real popularity. The regional situation has helped him, as he quite frankly admitted in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. He was extremely critical of the U.S. invasion in Iraq, rightly warned of chaos after an externally enforced regime change there, and gained a reputation for saying no to the United States.

He was compelled to withdraw his forces from Lebanon, but managed to make the best of it by opening up the economy in Syria, thereby reducing the reliance of Syrian businessmen on Lebanon, and gradually rebuilding Syrian political influence in Lebanon.

He denounced American and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, while making clear that Syria would not block a peace treaty with Israel. All this made him for a time one of the most popular heads of state in the Arab world, and, to the extent that it can be judged, at home.

This apparent popularity may have led him and his advisers to ignore the fact that even in Syria, many people were angry with a repressive regime, bad governance and blatant corruption.

In Syria, as in other Arab countries, there is a widely shared feeling, particularly among those between 20 and 30, that the regime denies them dignity and a fair chance to participate in politics and the economy. Offering cosmetic reforms now is likely to be too little too late.

Assad may find that while it was relatively easy to deal with intellectuals and activists, it is far harder to restrain an entire generation.

Volker Perthes is director of SWP, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, and author of several works on Syria and the Arab world.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 31, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune.

April 2, 2011 0

Syrian Revolution(the best video ever)الثورة السورية أحلى فيديو

Note : the state of emergency has been lifted but there remains much more to be done

March 27, 2011 1

Daraa

March 24, 2011 0

Even anti-western Syria is not immune to revolution

President Assad claims his country is stable, but unrest is gathering pace – and any uprising will be more like Libya’s

Comments (101)

- David Hirst
- The Guardian, Tuesday 22 March 2011
- Article history

Dara'a revolution youth union branch destroyed by protesters

The Ba’ath affiliated Revolution Youth Union’s Dera’a branch – destroyed by protesters on March 21. Photograph: Hussein Malla/AP

In whichever countries it has already broken out – from Yemen, whose President Saleh is suffering new, perhaps even terminal reverses, to Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi defies the military “crusaders” from the west – the Arab democratic revolution pursues its seemingly inexorable, if chequered, course. But is it yet another country’s turn now? Of all Arab regimes, none more resembles those of former presidents Mubarak and Ben Ali than President Assad and the ruling Ba’athists of Syria; and, after their fall, his 51-year-old “republican monarchy” looked the next most logically in line of candidates to succumb to the Arab uprising.

Yet Assad himself begged to differ. “We are not Egyptians or Tunisians,” he said; Syria might have “more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries” but it was “stable”. And outwardly it did remain an island of calm, even as pro-democracy turbulence rocked other Arab countries from the Atlantic to the Gulf. But last week things suddenly changed. A series of small-scale and isolated but audacious protests developed into much larger ones after Friday prayers in a string of Syrian cities.

One, in the southern city of Dera’a, was particularly serious. It had been triggered by the arrest of 15 schoolchildren accused of scrawling anti-government graffiti on city walls, among them that trademark slogan – “the people want the overthrow of the regime” – of the uprisings elsewhere. It was a peaceful gathering but the security services opened fire, killing three. The next day a much larger, angrier crowd – estimated to number as many as 20,000 – turned out for the burial of the previous days’ victims.

Given the weakness and divergences of the traditional Syrian opposition, and sectarian and ethnic divisions in society at large, there are doubts whether these scattered outbreaks will coalesce into a cohesive, full-scale uprising.

Yet with the Dera’a disturbances now into their fourth consecutive day, this disparate opposition is clearly developing a serious momentum on the streets. There is a growing feeling that it could escalate into something much bigger and more decisive, with the regime’s own reactions – now consisting of the usual brute force with a novel, nervous admixture of conciliation – constituting the key factor as to whether it does or not.

If it does, Syria will, strategically speaking, become a kind of first. For decades Arabs have fallen into two main camps: on the one hand the so-called moderate regimes, pillars of the western-supported, Israel-indulging “stability” in the region; or on the other, the so-called radical or resistance camp – Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Americans and Arab “moderates” have forever sought to lure the Ba’athist regime into their camp, to tame it, or even bring it down. But so far it has been to their own camp that all the uprisings – and already fallen or grievously threatened dominoes – have been confined. Indeed, according to Assad, it is precisely because Syria was never a member of it that it would be spared an uprising of its own. His regime was chiefly stable, he said, because it was the true embodiment of the Arabs and Syrians’ “ideology, belief and cause” – essentially the struggle against Israel and western powers standing behind it. It thereby boasted a “patriotic legitimacy” that all other regimes lacked.

But this argument, advanced by a despot in favour of his own survival, appears almost as delusional as those advanced by others – such as the al-Qaida of Colonel Gaddafi’s bizarre imagining. The patriotic card clearly counts for little with the Syrian public. It is just a diversion from the real issues at stake.

And these are essentially the same as those that have moved Arabs everywhere else. Assad may be more personally popular than some of his counterparts but his apparatus of repression, led by members of his own family, is fiercer than Mubarak or Ben Ali’s ever was. “A Syria free of tyranny, emergency laws and special tribunals,” protesters shouted. The Assads are also as monopolistically corrupt as the Mubaraks were; protesters cursed Rami Makhlouf, Assad’s cousin and chief of the crony capitalists around him, and in Dera’a they burned down a branch of the cellphone company he owns. In this one-party state the million-strong Ba’ath party has owned the political process longer, more pervasively and more profitably than did Mubarak’s National Democratic party; in Dera’a they also burned down its local headquarters.

The regime has been trying to buy goodwill with bribes to keep key constituencies in line. But as for the people’s demands for freedom and democracy – there is so far almost no promise of that. Indeed, Assad has frankly asserted that he didn’t envisage such fundamental reforms before “the next generation”.

That doesn’t augur well for dialogue, reconciliation, or a smooth transition of power. So if uprising there is to be, it will be more like Libya’s. Never would the army and police leaderships abandon the political leadership as they did in Egypt and Tunisia. For them all, so incestuously linked, overthrow is simply not an option. For the regime they most resemble, and whose fate most surely haunts them, is that of the late Saddam Hussein and their brother-Ba’athists in Baghdad.

March 23, 2011 0