SYRIA'S BROKEN SPRING: A DAMASCUS REPORT

Armenian News Network / Groong
June 23, 2011

By Vicken Cheterian


A seething revolt across much of Syria is being met with ferocious
repression by the Ba'athist government's security forces. But so far,
the two cities where close to half of Syria's population lives -
Damascus and Aleppo - are relatively calm. In this evolving situation,
what are the prospects for Syria's regime and people? Vicken Cheterian
reports and reflects.

A visit to Damascus, at a time when so much of the rest of Syria is
burning, offers a striking contrast to the images of the country
presented in international broadcasting media. The Syrian capital
appears calm, traffic is as busy as ever, the shops are open, and
people follow their daily preoccupations. Everyday life also seems to
proceed as normal in the city's far-flung suburbs such as Harasta;
while late at night in the newly developed area of Jermana where many
Iraqi "brothers" live (in Syria they are not called "refugees"), the
shops are open, fruit-vendors call to their clients on street-corners,
and traffic is dense.

The visitor has to look carefully for signs of the unusual. The only
tourists at the popular Hamidiyeh markets and the Umayyad mosque, for
example, are Iranian pilgrims. But the most amazing thing is that
everyone talks about politics without fear of the notorious mukhabarat
(secret police). There have been protests here too, especially after
Friday prayers. And one foreign resident of the city says that
"recently we see fewer posters of Bashar [al-Assad] in shop windows".

If these are indicators of tension and change, Damascus - the capital
of a country in rebellion - has remained largely tranquil. Yet in the
surrounding countryside (reef dimashq) are towns and villages (Duma,
Daraya, Madimya, Zabadani, among many others) where for weeks now the
population has been in revolt against the security agencies, and where
demonstrations, clashes and casualties have become routine.

Indeed, the entire Syrian countryside and many of its towns - from
Deraa in the south (the initial spark of conflagration in mid-March
2011) to Tal Kalakh on the border with Lebanon; Latakia and Banyas on
the Mediterranean coast; Homs, Ar-Rastan, Hama in the west; Jisr
al-Shaghour in the north; Hasakeh and Qameshli in the Kurdish
northeast; and Deir ez-Zor in the east - are a theatre of
confrontations, where fire and sword is drawing a new political
reality. In this context, Aleppo and Damascus, the two major urban
centres where close to half Syria's population live, are ("to a degree
of embarrassment", according to the same non-Syrian observer) so far
the exception to the pattern; though it is notable that a demonstrator
was killed in Aleppo on 17 June, another sign of the revolt spreading.


The security response

Jabal Qasyoon is a mountain overlooking Damascus, and a tourist
trap. On a fine afternoon I take a taxi to the summit, where I sip
oriental coffee and enjoy the peaceful view of the ancient city
below. The weather is pleasant so I decide to walk back down to the
city centre. As soon as I turn towards the road and start going
downhill, a soldier emerges from the woods and orders me not to walk
on this, left side of the road. Without question I obey, and cross to
the opposite side, which in any case offers a better view from the
ahla talle hillside to the al-Muhajerjirin neighbourhood to the city's
northwest. The hill is full of heavily armed soldiers, well hidden
within the bushes and trees. A Syrian friend later tells me that such
a heavy military presence on the hill is new.

Soon, the alert visitor will also notice similar quiet but definite
changes: special military forces next to the usual police guards
outside Damascus's government ministries, carrying Kalashnikovs and
wearing protective jackets, armed security agents in civilian clothes
in various corners of the city. In the Mezze district to the west of
the city centre where high-rise apartments house army officers and
their families, a new concrete wall surrounds the neighbourhood,
guarded by soldiers.

Once Aleppo and Damascus join the revolt, the end of the Ba'athist
regime and the Assad dynasty would be assured. In the meantime,
observers of Syrian politics are trying to explain this paradox of
revolt in the Syrian countryside alongside relative calm in the two
cities. Three explanation suggest themselves:

* the Syrian regime has concentrated its most loyal troops and elite
  forces in and around those two cities, the ultimate centres of
  political power in the country

* the economic reforms under Bashar al-Assad since he came to power in
  2000 after the death of his father Hafez al-Assad have favoured
  Damascus and Aleppo, and further marginalised a number of provincial
  cities where the rebellion of 2011 is at its most vehement

* a large part of the urban population no longer fears the regime's
  repression, yet fears what might come with its downfall. "We do not
  want another Iraq or another Lebanon here", says one trader. Many in
  Damascus - conscious that Syria, unlike Tunisia and Egypt, belongs
  to the same neighbourhood as Iraq and Lebanon - worry that the
  easing of tough security will lead to confessional conflict.

Syria is going through an uprising of socially marginalised regions,
suffering from the absence of institutions and services, where the
most obvious state presence has been the security agencies.


The regime's resources

Syria is undergoing an uprising of the inhabitants of socially
marginalised regions that suffer from the absence of institutions and
services, and where the most obvious - if not the sole - evidence of
the state's presence is the security agencies.

The context of this revolt is the weakness as well as the strength of
the state. The Syrian regime portrays its major assets as opposition
to great-power politics and support for anti-Israeli resistance. Its
true chief resource is the fact that parts of the population still see
it as a guarantee of stability and security. But this resource is
fragile, and eroding under the pressure of the current violent
confrontation.

The revolt that started in Deraa is, despite ferocious repression
using live bullets, spreading rather than dying down. Several towns
and cities remain under siege, with telecommunications shut down,
highways blocked, and the country isolated from the outside world. A
key question is how long such a situation can persist before the
merchant class sees the regime as part of the problem rather than the
solution; and whether, to avert this outcome, the Syrian authorities
can learn how to use their most valuable (if now damaged) resource -
the fact that they have come to represent stability and a defence
against chaos?

"I do not care about who rules, or the type of regime" a Syrian friend
who supports the status quo told me. "What I care about is that when
my children go to school or university, I do not worry about their
safety." But today, he is worried about his family's immediate safety.

Three months into the revolt, the regime seems at a loss. Bashar
al-Assad's third speech since it began, on 20 June 2011, offered
little if anything new. "The authorities have fewer and fewer
choices", says a Damascus observer. "First, they tried to suffocate
the incipient movement with heavy repression. That has clearly
failed. Then the president announced reforms, the end to the state of
emergency, but he said he would do reforms his way, according to his
rhythm. This was taken very badly by the public, and the rebellion
only spread further."

Another analyst adds: "Neither repression nor the promise of reforms
can calm the situation. Dialogue is declared, but dialogue with whom?
We do not see it happening. How can it give any results?" When asked
what the authorities can offer to the population to defuse the
situation, the response is: "The only promise the president can give
is to be the leader of a political transition". But as Bashar's latest
speech confirms, the regime is managing the situation day by day -
mixing repression here, the promise of dialogue there.

This is unsustainable over the long term. The security forces are
over-stretched, and massive operations need resources. The state
treasury cannot forever ensure such funding, especially as it has made
costly economic concessions in other areas to appease popular anger:
increased salaries and decreases in the price of diesel, even as
Syria's economy is in trouble and state revenues in free-fall.

The oil sector that covered the foreign-trade deficit in the
1980s-1990s is in decline; in 2008, Syria started importing oil. The
traditional industries such as textiles are in crisis because of
foreign competition. Syria's rapprochement with Turkey seems to have
hurt domestic production as markets are flooded with cheaper Turkish
products, and now also Chinese products. Agriculture, which employs
30% of the workforce, is suffering a fifth year of drought.

In 2010, the United Nations's World Food Programme appealed for
humanitarian emergency aid to some 300,000 people in the northeastern
jazeera region (Hasake, Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor); hundreds of thousands
have left their land in those regions and moved to such places as the
Damascus countryside, Homs, and Deraa - thus increasing the pressure
on jobs and housing there. After decades of failed policies and the
marginalisation of provincial economy, short-term subsidies appear a
desperate measure.

The only feasible way out of the economic crisis has been to rely on
tourism, and on foreign investments to modernise industry and
services. Those two sectors are hit by the current security situation,
while international sanctions will further reduce the availability of
hard currency. The central bank is demanding that private banks raise
their deposit from $30 million to $300 million, an act of desperation
which could lead to further capital flight.


The view from Damascus

The Syrian media projects a single, official, one-sided narrative of
what is happening in the country. This alleges a foreign conspiracy
aimed at weakening Syria's mumanea (rejectionist) stance against
western dictates in regional affairs; rejects compromise on the
Palestinian cause; and supports Hizbollah's anti-Israeli resistance,
and alliance with Iran. The conspiracy is fuelled by foreign money and
promoted by a media campaign run by satellite Arab televisions such as
al-Jazeera. Syrian television shows footage of security officers
hospitalised after receiving gunshot wounds from "armed bands", and
funerals of officers killed during confrontations.

I watched a programme on Dunya television, a talk-show featuring Jamal
Mahmoud, professor of political science at Damascus
University. Nothing in the professor's exposition or analysis differed
from those in the official media. But two elements in the interview
were noteworthy.

The professor expected "a decisive action from President Bashar Assad"
to put an end to the rebellion - though he was vague about the
details, and the journalist not insistent. He also said that: "To exit
the crisis, all forces should insist on national unity". I was curious
to know to whom this appeal was addressed (the various political
parties, regions, social classes?) This time the professor followed up
with more precision: he called on all the confessional groups to
unite! In other words, after four decades of Ba'athist, self-declared
"secular" rule, the political actors of the country are confessional
groups - just as in the Ottoman millet system.


The rebellion's heart

It is hard to grasp the nature of the Syrian rebellion from
Damascus. What is clear after more than three months is the absence of
a "Tahrir Square" equivalent. "It seems that there are several local
dynamics at work", the same foreign resident says, "and each dynamic
has its own logic."

A specific example is Deraa, where the brutal behaviour of the
authorities against children drawing graffiti on school walls
(mimicking the slogan "the people want the fall of the regime") led to
protests that escalated into the uprising. But each town - Latakia,
Banyas, Homs, and Hama - seems to have its own local
grievances. "There are no deaths recorded in the Kurdish regions", an
informant in Syria says. "From the beginning of the movement, Kurds
received what they were demanding for so long. They are still
demonstrating but not putting all their weight behind the movement,
and the authorities are not repressing them brutally, which shows that
they can do it if they want. The Kurdish front is not opened yet."

Another dynamic is that the Syrian rebellion is conditioned by the
Friday prayers and the demonstrations that follow. These
demonstrations are largely peaceful; no insurgency exists to push its
followers into the line of fire of armed security forces. The brutal
repression leads to funeral processions on Saturday and Sunday, which
turn into new demonstrations of defiance. More than anything, the
violent conduct of the regime is conditioning the nature of the
rebellion: leaderless, lacking coordination, and itself increasingly
combative.

The demonstrations around the country are largely peaceful, but there
seem (unsurprising in the circumstances) to be numerous incidents of
armed resistance when the security forces encircle an entire village
or city, and behave as if they in major counterinsurgency mode. They
begin by closing all communications (including internet, telephone,
and electricity as well as water); then open fire from a distance on
people in the streets; and end by entering the settlement to carry out
house-to-house search and mass arrests. A degree of armed opposition
using rudimentary weapons is inevitable in some cases. The overall
result, according to the exiled Syrian Observatory of Human Rights as
of mid-June 2011, is that over 1,139 civilians and 212 military have
been killed since the outbreak of the revolt.

The political opposition abroad seems to have little influence on the
rebellion inside the country. The same can be said of the well-known
dissidents of the Damascus declaration (2005), who were imprisoned and
harassed by the regime. The Syrian revolt is leaderless. This very
fact poses a dilemma to the regime, for there are no figureheads to
arrest nor to invite to dialogue.


The prospects

The question of whether and how far what is happening in Syria can be
understood as a confessional conflict is clearly vital. At present at
least the answer is clearly no, though Jamal Mahmoud's words can be
taken as a coded expression of the possibility.

The situation is complicated. The authorities are imposing mass
retribution on entire regions that express disobedience, regardless of
their confessional belonging. This in turn reinforces local and
broader dynamics of rebellion, in some of which (as in the more
generic social realities) confessional thinking and identification may
be very much present.

Everywhere in Damascus, it is possible to hear that the fall of the
regime would create a Christian exodus resembling the Iraqi one, or
that the regime is dominated by Alawis. A dissident-writer in Damascus
said: "Syria was ruled for forty years in the name of Alawis, but if
you go to their villages you see in what poverty they are living in."
He also said that people hoped that the national army would take a
different position to the security agencies, and refuse to shoot at
civilians - but that so far this distinction has not been evident.

The collapse of the Soviet Union showed that the conditions in which a
regime falls will to a great extent determine what kind of political
system will take its place: Russia experienced near state collapse
with catastrophic consequences, while Poland's political transition
was organised through the "round-table". Syria changed irrevocably on
15 March 2011 - but its future trajectory will depend on the way the
transition of power takes place.

The Ba'athist regime that has ruled for decades has emptied Syria's
other, notional political parties of their content: even the Ba'ath is
not a real political party in the absence of any competition, and the
so-called "National Progressive Front" is mute in face of the current
crisis. The last time the trade unions organised a demonstration for
workers' rights was before the Ba'ath took power. That was in
1963. Almost fifty years on, the security-regime is feeling the strain
of popular pressure in conditions where meaningful national
institutions are lacking; the army seems unable to play an independent
role; and forceful repression prevents the Syrian people from creating
a united, Tahrir-Square-type movement.

The central question remains whether the Syrian rebellion will have
enough time to replace the state-security apparatus, before a more
destructive implosion. In these conditions, the future of Syrian
politics is uncertain.


http://www.opendemocracy.net/vicken-cheterian/syria%25E2%2580%2599s-broken-spring-damascus-report

--
Vicken Cheterian is a journalist and political analyst who works for
the non-profit governance organisation CIMERA, based in Geneva. He is
the author of War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia's Troubled
Frontier (C Hurst / Columbia University Press, 2009), and From
Perestroika to Rainbow Revolutions: Reform and Revolution After
Socialism (C Hurst, 2011)