The Left in the Syrian Uprising PDF

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19 THE LEFT IN THE SYRIAN UPRISING Ferdinand Arslanian* Introduction: The Left’s predicament Examining the social media and pundits on the Syrian Uprising, one can note a plenitude of assaults on the Syrian ideological Left with regards to its stance on the Uprising. What makes this confusing is tha...

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19 THE LEFT IN THE SYRIAN UPRISING Ferdinand Arslanian*

Introduction: The Left’s predicament Examining the social media and pundits on the Syrian Uprising, one can note a plenitude of assaults on the Syrian ideological Left with regards to its stance on the Uprising. What makes this confusing is that the Syrian conflict has continuously been viewed through the lens of sectarian or identity politics with no reference whatsoever to the Left. To add to the confusion, these assaults take place from both those who oppose the regime and from those who support it. Oppositionists depict the Left as being captivated by anti-imperialist rhetoric and failing to realise that an actual revolution is taking place, while regime supporters perceive the Left as naïve idealists failing to realise that what they are actually romanticising is global Jihad. This reflects the predicament of a marginalised, fractured and outdated political movement in dealing with a complex situation in which an Uprising is taking place against a political regime that while internally highly repressive and based on crony capitalism shares the same ideological roots as the Left and shares an archetypal enemy, ‘Western Imperialism.’ The demonstrative case of the brutal civil war in neighbouring Iraq in the aftermath of the US invasion further intensified this predicament. In dealing with the role of the Syrian Left in the Syrian Uprising, Massouh refers to ‘the Balkanisation of the Syrian Communists’ as a deliberate strategy of the Syrian regime in marginalising and undermining Syria’s communist parties throughout the decades, which explains the unmet expectations of the young protestors that Syria’s left-leaning intelligentsia would unequivocally support the Uprising (Massouh 2014: 58). However, his analysis is confined to the case of the official communist parties and fails to address the whole spectrum of the Syrian Left. Bunni fills this gap by addressing the plethora of left-wing political organisations existing in the Syrian political scene (Bunni 2014). Nevertheless, his analysis is

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restricted to merely mapping these organisations and outlining their political positions without providing any in-depth explanation of their positions or how they’ve developed throughout the conflict. As such, the chapter will make several contributions. First, it will classify the Syrian Left in terms of its positions regarding the Uprising and discuss the development of each political bloc throughout the Syrian conflict. For the purpose of this study, the Left is defined as entailing both Arab nationalist parties and Marxist communist parties with all their ramifications including Ba’thist, Nasserite for the former and Stalinist, Trotskyite and Guevarists parties for the latter, but excluding groups that have shifted completely towards liberal democratic positions. This study will not discuss the case of the traditional Left within the Syrian-Kurdish political scene and will only refer to this brand within the context of the broad political blocs that the Kurdish Left participated in. In terms of their position regarding the Uprising, the Left can be divided into four main political blocs: the loyalists represented in the National Progressive Front dominated by the ruling Ba’th Party; the traditional Left opposition represented by the National Coordination Bureau for Democratic Change (sometimes referred to as the National Coordination Committee – NCC, but hereafter as NCB); the centrists represented by the Front for Change and Liberation; and the Left embedded in the grassroots protest movement. This chapter will discuss the first political bloc briefly and the last three more thoroughly. It will address the predicament of the Syrian Left through a trilemma of regime change, internationalisation and militarisation and explain how each political bloc resolved this trilemma. Finally, it will argue that the Uprising contributed to the transformation of these blocs to better fit the current political situation.

The loyalists: The Ba’th Party and the National Progressive Front The Arab Socialist Ba’th Party has been the ruling party in Syria since 1963 and, up till February 2012, was designated in Article 8 of the Syrian constitution as ‘the leader of state and society’. Ostensibly, the Ba’th Party rules within the framework of the National Progressive Front comprised of various communist and Arab nationalist parties. The NPF was formed by the former president, Hafiz al-Asad, in 1972 as a mechanism for co-opting the ‘progressive opposition’ (Hinnebusch 2002: 66). In reality, the other parties of the NPF are merely decorative while even the Ba’th Party itself has been marginalised within regime institutions in favour of the security services (Ziadeh 2012: 23). One main impact of the Syrian Uprising was that the de facto marginalisation of the Ba’th Party within the ruling institutions of the regime was complemented by a de jure corrosion of its constitutional status with the abolishment of Article 8 in the new constitution of February 2012. Nevertheless, this didn’t affect its standing in the subsequent parliamentary elections – given the staged nature of these elections – as its share of seats remained unchanged (134 out of 250 seats) and well above the 126 seats required for forming a majority in the parliament (Carnegie Middle East, 8 May 2014).

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The Syrian Uprising barely affected the internal cohesion of the party. Nevertheless, some events are worth mentioning. To begin with, a wave of resignations occurred among its members in Daraa during April 2011 in protest of the crackdown taking place in the Governorate. More importantly, the party witnessed internal friction between Farouq al-Sharaa, the country’s vice president, and party hardliners following Sharaa’s ‘democracy speech’ at the national dialogue consultative meeting during July 2011 in which he argued that one party rule has become outdated. Subsequently, Sharaa underwent ‘informal political retirement’ with suspicions against him intensifying following the Arab League’s January 2012 call for Asad to relinquish power to his deputy (Carnegie Middle East, 27 September 2012). The month of July 2012 witnessed a severe blow to the central committee of the party with several members being killed in the bombing of the regime ‘crisis cell’ while others defected (Carnegie Middle East, 17 November 2013). During the following July, a Ba’thist reshuffle took place with the meeting of the central committee in which all members of the political high command (Regional Command), including Sharaa, were ousted with the exception of Asad himself who retained his position as secretary-general of the party (The Independent, 12 July 2013). Another development, indicative of the adaptation of the party to Uprising was the emergence of, the Ba’th Brigades in Aleppo in mid-2012 following the advance of the armed opposition inside the city. The formation of the Ba’th Brigade emerged within the context of the increasing presence of militias fighting alongside the Syrian army; most notably the National Defense Forces (Carnegie Middle East, 13 January 2014). It consisted of volunteering party members estimated to number around 7,000; its task evolved from guarding party’s building towards fighting side by side with the Syrian army (Al-Akhbar, 30 December 2013). As for the other parties in the NDF, it was business as usual as they merely re-iterated the regime discourse of Syria facing an international conspiracy. Many members of these parties acted as regime apologists entering live debates with opposition figures on Satellite TV channels, most notably, Khaled al-Abboud from the Nasserite Socialist Unionist party. Furthermore, the Syrian Communist Party formed its own quasi-militia ‘the Youth of Khaled Bakdash’ inside public universities with the aim of monitoring and suppressing opposition activities among students (The New Arab, 21 March 2015).

The traditional Left opposition: The National Coordination Bureau for the Forces of Democratic Change (NCB) Roots and formation The roots of the NCB can be traced back to the National Democratic Gathering (NDG) formed in 1979 as an opposition coalition comprising Arab nationalist and Marxist splinter groups that had previously defected from the ruling parties of the NPF at different points in time. The NDG participated in the Damascus Spring of the early 2000s and took part in forming the Damascus Declaration (DD) in 2005

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(Ziadeh 2012: 25). The DD represented the widest ever opposition bloc formed against the Syrian regime. Its creation was spearheaded by the liberal Syrian Democratic People’s Party (SDPP), an ex-communist splinter group1 and brought together NDG, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and various Kurdish and Assyrian parties in addition to other individual activists emerging from the Damascus Spring. However, the coalition did not last long. In 2006, the MB suspended their activities within the DD and allied with the, then, recently defected vice president Abdul Haleem Khaddam creating the National Salvation Front. Another schism occurred during the DD’s leadership elections in December 2007, this time between the NDG and the Marxist Left Gathering (MLG),2 from the one side, and the liberals (SDPP) from the other. The main point of difference was related to the strategy of relying on external powers to force change in domestic politics as inspired by the US invasion of Iraq; with the latter advocating and the former opposing. Consequently, the Left defected and the DD was confined to the SDPP and other minor like-minded parties. The defected Left attempted to create a third way between the regime and the DD with many meetings taking place between January 2008 and July 2010 among the NDG, the Marxist Left Gathering (MLG), and left-wing Kurdish parties along with other intellectuals and independent personalities in order to reach a common vision; however, these attempts resulted in failure (Al-Hewar Al-Mutamaden, 4 August 2011). With the outbreak of the Uprising, attempts were made to create an opposition coalition consisting of the four main internal political opposition blocs: the DD, NDG, MLG and the National Kurdish Movement. Nevertheless, it became apparent during the month of June, 2011 that the differences among these blocs were too wide to bridge. The final outcome was a meeting that took place on 25 June consisting mainly of the NDG and MLG parties as well as half of the Kurdish parties, whereas none of the parties affiliated with the DD attended. The outcome of the meeting was the formation of the NCB (Al-Hewar Al-Mutamaden, 4 August 2011). In other words, the Uprising was successful in uniting the different left-wing groups after years of failed attempts. The spokesperson of the NDG (and leader of the Democratic Arab Socialist Union faction), Hasan Abdul Azim, was appointed as the General Coordinator of the NCB with Hussein al-Oudat, an ex-Ba’thist journalist, and Burhan Ghalioun, a Sorbonne professor, as his deputies (NCB, 30 June 2011). The founding document identified the Bureau as comprising Arab nationalist, Marxist, Leftist and Kurdish parties open to the inclusion of all the other political forces, with the objective of achieving a democratic transition through dialogue with the regime. This dialogue was conditional upon the government creating a suitable environment by halting its security/military approach towards the Syrian Uprising (NCB, 30 June 2011). The NCB sought to move beyond its leftist core and to include figures from other social and political strata such as the Democratic Islamic Current and figures and groups from the grassroots protest movement. Table 19.1 depicts the heterogeneous factional composition of the NCB. Most of the groups included in it had, through decades of political repression, been reduced to small groups of intellectuals, even one-man parties or empty skeletons of once vibrant political parties.

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TABLE 19.1 The Political Composition of the NCB

Political Blocs

Political Parties

National Democratic Gathering

Democratic Arab Socialist Union (DASU) Arab Socialist Movement (ASM) Democratic Ba’th Arab Socialist Party (DBASP)* Arab Revolutionary Workers’ Party (ARWP)

Marxist Left Gathering

Communist Action Party (CAP) The Syrian Communist Party – The Political Bureau The Marxist Democratic Gathering The Association of Syrian Communists The Kurdish Left Party in Syria

Kurdish / Syriac Parties

Democratic Union Party (PYD) The Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Party The Kurdish Democratic Party in Syria The Kurdish Yekiti Party**** The Syriac Union **

Others (Grass Root/Independents)

Committees for the Revival of Civil Society 17 April Youth Movement Ma’n movement*** The Islamic Democratic Current

*Joined August **Joined October ***Joined September **** Left August Source: Adapted from the Establishing Document (NCB, 30 June 2011).

The failed quests for opposition legitimacy and unity The first test the NCB faced was the issue of its participating in the July 2011 dialogue consultation meeting initiated by the Syrian regime. The grassroots coordination committees expressed their rejection of dialogue through naming the Friday preceding the meeting as the Friday of ‘No Dialogue’ (Al-Jazeera, 7 July 2011). Similarly, both the DD and the MB rejected dialogue as a matter of principle (Aksalser, 11 July 2011). From its side, the NCB refused attending the meeting due to the absence of what they perceived as a ‘suitable environment for dialogue’ in the light of the continuation of the military/security approach in facing the protest movement. Therefore, the consensus in rejecting dialogue despite differing rationales delayed the rise of tension between the NCB and the other blocs of opposition. Nevertheless, divisions were slowly fermenting among the ‘three rights’ (Islamic, Liberal and Kurdish) as opposed to the NCB’s ‘three lefts’ (Marxist, Arab nationalist and Kurdish) (al-Hewar al-Mutamaden, 4 August 2011), which would come also to be referred to as the external and internal oppositions respectively.

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The month of August 2011 represented a turning point in relations within the opposition. The faltering of the Qaddafi regime in Libya led to a swing in the mood of the protest movement in support of international military intervention, especially within the external opposition. Within this context, a meeting in Istanbul was held on the 23 August with the aim of forming a council similar to the Libyan National Transitional Council (Lund 2012: 3). This took place in parallel to the NCB holding their exile branch meeting in Berlin. The surprise was that Burhan Ghalioun, the exile branch’s deputy coordinator, rather than going to Berlin went to Istanbul with the plan for him to preside over what would become the Syrian National Council (SNC) (Al-Akhbar, 6 October 2011). The final attempt for unification took place at the Doha Consultative Meetings in September attended by the NCB, DD, MB as well as the ‘Istanbul Group.’ Contrasting narratives exist on what actually happened during that meeting, nevertheless, a week later, the Syrian National Council (SNC) was formally announced in Istanbul comprising the Istanbul Group, DD and MB without the NCB (Al-Akhbar, 6 October 2011) (Lund 2012: 46–47). In response, the NCB held their own meeting in Damascus two days after the formal establishment of the SNC. In differentiating their stance from the newly formed SNC, the NCB announced its ‘Three No’s’ slogan of ‘No to international military intervention, No to sectarianism, No to militarisation’, and thus setting out its conditions for any future unification with the SNC. It reaffirmed the cessation of the security solution as a condition for dialogue with the regime (All4Syria, 18 September 2011; Day Press, 18 September 2011). The ‘Dignity and Rights Covenant’ was presented as its political vision for the future of Syria. It addressed general principles of geographical integrity, equal citizenship and civil liberties, called for a democratic presidential system and an economic system that preserves private property while acknowledging the productive and distributive roles of the public sector (NCB, 17 September 2011). Overall, the NCB’s vision was more in line with liberal democracy, with a slightly greater role for the government in the economy, than with espousing any radical political and economic outlooks. With the crystallisation of opposition divisions, the battle for legitimacy among the wings of the protest movement emerged and resulted in the utter and immediate failure of the NCB. Throughout late September and early October, several grassroots opposition groups endorsed the newly formed SNC culminating in naming the Friday of the 7 October as ‘the SNC represents me’ Friday (AlMundaseh, 29 September 2011) (Lund 2012: 28). Relations further deteriorated with Haytham Mannaa, the new deputy general coordinator in exile, waging an attack on the SNC. Mannaa accused the Council of over-representing Islamists and being heavily financed by Western NGOs.3 To make matters worse, the attack was carried out on the Iranian channel al-Alam, further raising suspicions about the political direction of the NCB within opposition circles (Al-Mundaseh, 10 November 2011). In this environment of isolation, the NCB clutched at the Arab League initiative as the final bulwark against the internationalisation of the conflict (Syria Steps, 19

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October 2011). The initiative called for the cessation of violence, the creation of a national unity government, with presidential elections to be held in 2014 in addition to sending a mission from the League to monitor the progress on the ground (Al-Jazeera, 6 September 2011). Tensions with the SNC – which perceived the initiative negatively – were further exacerbated when the Syrian regime accepted the initiative in early November. On its way to a meeting at Arab League headquarters in Cairo, the NCB’s envoys were attacked by a mob of SNC supporters. The protestors scorned them as regime agents, threw eggs at them and physically assaulted them (Al-Akhbar, 11 November 2011). Resentment further reached the internal ranks of the NCB with some dissidents raising accusations against the leaders of abandoning the revolution and being regime agents, leading to the defection of the ‘Freedom and Dignity Gathering’ and the more symbolic defection of activist Marwa al-Ghamian, further severing the few remaining ties with the protest movement (Global Arab Network, 6 November 2011; Ajel, 10 November 2011). The resentment within the protest movement became so widespread that ‘the NCB does not represent me’ was actually one of the suggested names for Friday 11 November, while protestors in Homs raised slogans depicting the NCB as traitors.4 Despite all the dramatics, talks between the two pillars of the Syrian opposition resumed under the auspices of the Arab League and, by the end of the year 2011, the NCB announced reaching a draft agreement with the SNC (NCB, 31 December 2011). It represented a compromise between the two positions on the issue of foreign intervention, where it stated its rejection of foreign military intervention but asserted that ‘Arab intervention does not represent foreign intervention’. However, this compromise did not prove satisfactory to the main body of the SNC and the draft agreement was rejected from their side (Al-Majjala, 4 January 2012). The Arab League initiative proved to be short-lived and the Syrian case was transferred to the UNSC. With the ending of the Arab League mission, the NCB lost the straw that it had clutched and, with its emphasis on pacifism and rejection of internationalisation, it appeared irrelevant to a conflict growing in both militarisation and internationalisation. This situation stimulated a second wave of defections, more far-reaching than the first one, represented mainly by the breakaway group the Democ...