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/ 5 AGAINST THE CURRENT Syria • • Michael Leunig • • • • • • • • • • • • Uprising and Reactionism • Firas Massouh • ............................................. • • The Syrian government has border towns but mainly based in Hama and Homs, • • with joint European-Turkish-Qatari-Saudi support, Syria:...

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Syria: Uprising and Reactionism Firas Massouh

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AGAINST THE CURRENT Michael Leunig

Syria: Uprising and Reactionism Firas Massouh

Firas Massouh is a doctoral candidate in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. He is writing his thesis on the Shu'u-biyyah, a non-Arab literary movement in the early Abba-sid period.

12 2011–01 2012 Nº 115

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Syria Uprising and Reactionism Firas Massouh .............................................

The Syrian government has encouraged the conflation of activism with Islamic movement to keep citizens in a state of fear and obedience

border towns but mainly based in Hama and Homs, with joint European-Turkish-Qatari-Saudi support, to instil fear and sectarian divide within Syrian society, in order to pave the way for an AmericanIsraeli plot that aims to both crush the HezbollahSyria-Iran resistance triad and to commence phase two of the Sykes-Picot Agreement’.

‘I dare you to come back. I will then show you what the Syrian security and armed forces will do to you!’ she wrote heatedly; her threat as frenzied as I imagined her face to look like when she typed her words on my Facebook page. ‘I promise that I will not let you step foot in Syria as long as I'm still alive. You're just one of “them” and the last thing this country needs is more people like you’, she concluded.

‘Salafi’ is a designation in Syrian parlance that denotes Wahhabi-like Islamic fundamentalism. Microcosmically, the Salafi ‘conspiracy’ is personified by the neighbour who may be known to have Islamist tendencies; the neighbour with the long beard; the neighbour who wears the niqab. I have always sensed a fear in my cousin’s voice when she spoke to me about the ills of Sunni Muslim society. Hers is the type of Islamophobia that has been prevalent for a few decades in Syrian society and is not surprising given her Christian upbringing in the city of Homs, Syria’s third largest city and home to many Sunni neighbourhoods with traditionalist values. Anti-regime demonstrations tended to come out of these neighbourhoods, frequently taking to the streets directly following Friday prayer. Unfortunately this damaged the secular image that the demonstrators were trying to paint of the uprising. To my cousin and many Syrians from minority communities, the Asads ‘protect us from the “Salafis”’. Her views are representative of what Syrians call a ‘minority complex;’ a ‘better the devil you know’ kind of perverse empathy with the regime; a Stockholm Syndrome-like social paralysis that has made minority communities all too ready to believe the regime’s caveat: ‘it’s either us or chaos’.

My cousin’s abusive words were written in response to a joke that Syrian activists had been circulating, and which I shared on my page, around the time of the riots in England in August this year. The joke was ‘England is asking the Syrian regime to send over some of its armed personnel in order to sort out the rioters. No, England. Our army and security forces are here to torture and kill us. Get your own state thugs!’ To insinuate that ‘our army and security forces’ are just out there to ‘torture and kill us’ seemed to provoke my cousin beyond anything I had posted before. Soon after her rant came the justification for it, wrapped in what I perceived to be an insincere apology. ‘I am sorry for my language … but you don’t live here; you simply don’t know what it’s like’ she wrote. ‘If the regime had done anything wrong, if it had indeed targeted the innocent, then I would be the first to go out and demonstrate. But the truth is that there are armed gangs and they are responsible for killing and maiming dozens of our security officers and soldiers. I just don’t understand how you can allow yourself to conspire against Syria by supporting them’. My cousin’s fear of the current Syrian uprising is fuelled by the line-up of so-called political analysts who appear on Syrian state television and who have spared no one the charge of ‘conspiracy’ against Syria. One such ‘analyst’ has described events in Syria as ‘an attempt by masked and armed Salafi gangsters, scattered around Syria’s

When Hafez, Asad the father, came to power in 1970 he brought an end to the volatility, manifested in a succession of coups, that had characterised Syrian politics since the country won independence from French colonisation in 1946. However, he did not achieve this through modernisation and service provision, but rather, as Anthony Shadid writes, by inculcating ‘a suffocating cult of personality, buttressed by fear, often the most visceral sort’. Hafez understood that every niche of society would have to be under his control in order to ensure real security for his avowedly secular regime. He belonged to

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the Alawite sect, a heterodox Muslim group which accounts for 11 percent of the population and clearly understood the sectarian dynamics of his country. He was careful to maintain good relations with his Ba’thist comrades, many of whom were members of the majority Sunni sect, giving them ministerial positions in his cabinet. He was also swift in forging strong alliances with Syria’s Sunni merchant class. However, it was the promulgation of a new constitution in 1973 that saw Syria’s transformation from Ba’th State to ‘Asad’s Syria’. While the new constitution guaranteed the leading role of the Ba’th Party in both state and society, it granted Hafez ultimate power in all domains. Ba’th ideals were on their way to becoming the thin veneer that has barely covered the Asads’ familial domination over Syria’s affairs in the last four decades. By bringing more members of his family and sect to the centre of power, Hafez was able to appoint individuals he could trust to positions in the military and intelligence services. Allegiance, he thought, was best fostered on familial and sectarian grounds. This has often been criticised by Alawite opponents of Asad as a dangerous manoeuvre which was bound to elicit popular hostility against the sect. Indeed, the capricious powers of the mukhabarat intelligence and the favouritism enjoyed by Alawites in official appointments aggravated the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group deprived of all legitimate outlets for political activity and which regarded the Alawites as socially inferior heretics. The regime also faced criticism from secular nonIslamist intellectuals who were arrested, along with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, by the thousands. The climax of this campaign was a three-week military operation in the city of Hama in 1982, when the Asad army, under the command of his now exiled younger brother Rif’at, fought armed Islamists, flattening much of the city’s historic centre in the process. This chapter in the country’s history claimed 30,000 lives, according to some human rights groups, and was, until more recently, seldom discussed in Syria. Everybody understood the regime’s message: ‘if you go against us then we will crush you’. But beneath that there lay another, far more cunning and effective message in terms of coaxing support from minority communities: ‘only we can protect you from the Islamist bogeyman’.

After inheriting power from his father in 2000, Bashar al-Asad proclaimed his desire to instigate political reforms and to allow intellectual freedom; he allowed a brief opening, coined ‘the Damascus Spring’, which he then crushed. He seemed to oscillate between presenting himself as a president with ‘an everyman quality, frequenting restaurants and driving his own car’, as Shadid argues, and preserving power in the hands of his family. Bashar would be responsible for introducing economic liberalisation and making cosmetic changes to the intelligence apparatus,

while simultaneously maintaining an ‘imperial sense of power’ through constant nepotism, corruption, and repression of political freedoms and independent journalism. The superficial makeover brought on by Asad the son came through his support for Rami Makhlouf, Bashar’s maternal cousin, a media tycoon and regime propagandist par excellence. Since the uprising began, Al Dunia, a television channel owned by Makhlouf and watched by millions of Syrians, has bombarded its viewers with footage of badly staged drive-by shootings and poorly choreographed police chases, claiming to have captured weapons and foiled Islamic terrorist plots, and presenting scenarios and evidence so laughable it is the kind of channel that led a Syrian journalist years ago to quip that the Syrian press even lies about the weather. The revelations of regime apologists, which link the current uprising to a global Islamic Jihad and neo-Ottomanism/neocolonialism with an American-Israeli blessing, points to the way in which the spectre of the 1982 Hama episode is invoked through the regime’s attempts to brutalise its opponents, while simultaneously rallying support from minorities. The regime can be seen to present a textbook case of psychopathological behavior. It exhibits the full spectrum of symptoms, from delusions about its persecution and denial and distortion of reality, to the splitting of its impulses, and the enlisting of support from its codependent friends for its distorted view. In conjunction, these modes of behaviour permit the regime to effectively rearrange external experiences in order to eliminate the need to cope with reality. The result on the ground is that of a paranoid regime that has dismissed the rightful demands of its citizens, implemented a scorched earth policy against peaceful demonstrators, and utilised every means necessary to manipulate its population in order to hold on to its powers and privileges. Alawite activist Samar Yazbeck stresses that ‘Syria is ruled by a family linked to people of every faith ... The regime has been able to high-jack the emotions of minority communities, and destroy the name of the Alawite religion, as it engaged in things foreign to the faith … But many of us are opponents, in jail, in exile, or banned from travel. The regime is playing with sectarianism to terrify minorities’. It is now evident that, for many Syrians, the regime has finally been exposed and the old lies no longer have any currency.

I recently spoke to a young activist named Ahmad from a Sunni neighbourhood in Homs. Ahmad has participated in many demonstrations, fearlessly videotaping their proceedings and chanting anti-regime songs. Like more than three-quarters of Syria’s population, Ahmad has not known a Syria other than ‘Asad’s Syria’. ‘We have had enough of this tyrannical family’, he told me. ‘We just want to live with dignity, and we started doing that the first day we demonstrated’. Commenting on the sectarian dynamics of the uprising he reported that the protestors are a mix of Sunni, Christian, and Alawite youth, ‘only a small minority of whom are seriously religious, while many of them are moderates or even secular’. He stressed that ‘the mosques were strategic points for launching demonstrations and were regarded as immune from the trespassing of security officers’. ‘The protest movement is non-sectarian and peaceful’, he says. ‘No one is armed now except for defectors from the army. The demonstrators want to keep it peaceful but … there are tanks in the streets … regime thugs kill and beat and rape whoever they get their hands on. We have lost more than 5,000 martyrs since March and now need the protection the defectors provide.’

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Syria: Uprising and Reactionism Firas Massouh

12 2011–01 2012 Nº 115

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When the uprising began, the demonstrators demanded political reforms, the reinstatement of civil rights and the lifting of the despised emergency law. In Der’aa, the regime responded by putting the entire city under siege, cutting off electricity, food and water supplies, and killing hundreds of activists. Demonstrations erupted in other cities in solidarity with Der’aa, and as the Syrian regime’s military campaign expanded, killing thousands in the cities of Homs, Hama, Latakia, and Idlib, so too did the demands of the protest movement. The demonstrators took up the slogan ‘al-sha’b yureed isqat al-nizam’ (‘the people want to overthrow the regime’), and by June were demanding ‘the execution of the president’. Beneath these developments in the demonstrators’ rhetoric, reflecting the metamorphosis from a disparate grass roots movement for reform, to a

nation-wide uprising lies a series of competing forces—political, social, theological and philological, which nonetheless share the conviction that all things come into being through strife necessarily. There is an almost Heraclitean flux of differing impulses at play, which are threatening to pull Syria apart in multiple directions. In a sense the regime is dead; the demonstrators have made clear their willingness to adopt Kierkegaard’s notion that ‘the tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins’....