The Syrian wave

Everybody wants a piece of the power pie
The wave of public protests that has gripped Syria was bound to happen some day because there is a systemic problem with its polity. Forget the so-called ‘Arab awakening’ cliché; this revolt has been caused by those, who have been denied a large slice of power by the ruling Bath party. Since its assumption of power in 1963, the Bathists have concentrated power in two instruments: the army and the party itself.
The problem is that both these institutions have been excessively dominated by the minorities, particularly the Alawites and the rural lower-middle class at the expense of the Sunni majority and the traditional elite comprising the urban merchant bourgeoisie and the landlords. It is these segments of the Syrian society that have been excluded from power which are the source of discontent, past and present. And they remain in search of opportunities and issues that can be exploited to overthrow the Bathist regime.
A look at the history of Bathist rule shows that this opposition has caused at least five waves of mass movements in the past. It failed on all these occasions due to three factors: divisions within its ranks, unity in the Bath party and loyalty of the army in suppressing the protests.
The first wave of protest started in the very year the Bath party came into power. The Arab world was awash with Gamal Nasser’s pan-Arabism and the Syrian opposition demanded a reunion with Egypt on Nasser’s terms, however, the regime was able to weather the storm due to the discords within the opposition.
The second wave of public disturbances erupted the next year, when the Bathists in line with their socialist programme initiated land reforms, nationalised banks and industries and established state control over foreign and domestic trade. These policies hit the ‘urban establishment’ which caused an upsurge in major cities including Hama, where government buildings were particularly targeted. This put the fledgling Bathist regime in a tight corner, yet it survived by adopting a two-pronged strategy of carrots and sticks, and since then this has been the general strategy of the Syrian state in curbing such crises. The Bathist state’s socialist bearings provided a lot of fuel to the Islamist groups such as Ikhwan-al-Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood), Islamic Liberation Party and Kataib Muhammad (PBUH) [Muhammad’s (PBUH) Brigade] to criticise it so the carrots offered included the promulgation of a new constitution promising Islam as a source of legislation, political freedoms and the right to private property. This conciliated the Islamists, who have generally belonged to the urban mercantile bourgeoisie but those who continued to resist were silenced by the military might.
The third wave of protests rattled the Bathists in mid-1967. The opposition was waiting for an opportunity which the government provided of its own folly, when an article was published in an army magazine demanding an end to feudalism, capitalism, colonialism and religion and suggesting that these be replaced by an “absolute belief in man’s ability”. Denouncing the regime as “socialist and Godless,” the Islamists took to streets, and could only be pacified after the state branded the writer as a “CIA agent,” had him tried and imprisoned but subsequently released, once the furore subsided.
The fourth wave of protests started in urban centres of Damascus, Hama and Homs by Islamists with Ikhwan at the forefront in early 1973, on the eve of a new proposed constitution, when the protestors demanded that Islam be designated as the state religion and challenged the absolute control of the Bath party over the state apparatus as well as its role as the sole guardian of the society. The incumbent President Bashar al Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, who had come in power in 1971, adopted a conciliatory approach towards the angry ‘urban establishment’ by promising that the constitution would make it mandatory for the president to be a Muslim.
The Islamic revolution in Iran spurred the fifth wave of protests in June 1979 spearheaded by Islamist radicals, when fifty military cadets were murdered in cold blood in Aleppo. By the spring of 1980, the protests had grown into an insurgency in northern Syria through the courtesy of Ikhwan, nonetheless Hafez Assad managed it by discrediting Ikhwan for having covert links with the US and dubbed the whole protest movement, the handiwork of a “foreign conspiracy” that was hatched at a secret meeting in the then West Germany, in May 1979.
Since March 2011, we have been witnessing the sixth way of public protests, which look like a repetition of the dramas in the past. The flashpoints are the same urban centres of Homs, Hama, etc. which reflect yet another struggle on the part of the ‘urban establishment’ and the traditional elite to snatch the power lost to the Bathists, half-a-century ago. Bashar has also followed the same old strategy to tackle the crisis: on one hand, he has blamed the ‘Islamists’ and ‘terrorists’ for fomenting violence whereas on the other hand, he has pointed finger at Washington for inciting the ‘armed groups’ because of Syrian support to anti-Israeli groups such as the Lebanese Hizbullah and the Palestinian Hamas.
His allegations against the ‘foreign hand’ are not totally baseless. The fact is that most of the opposition groups are headquartered in the West. For example, the Reform Party in Washington, the Islamist Movement for Justice and Development in London and the former Syrian vice-president Abdul Halim Khaddam in Paris. Moreover, the largest group of the opposition parties and at the same time the most active one against Bashar – the Syrian National Council, was founded about three months ago in Turkey, a key Muslim ally of the West.
To appease the opposition, Bashar has promised a new constitution by the end of this year and parliamentary elections in next February, however, the opposition is not taking the bait. The use of the military force has failed to silence the opposition because the Syrian regime has no answer to the cyber tools employed by the opposition to garner worldwide support in its favour through Facebook, twitter, etc. that have already brought down entrenched authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The degree of international backing enjoyed by the opposition in the cyber world can be imagined from the fact that only one Facebook group called “the Syrian Revolution 2011” has over forty thousand fans.
The outcome of the ongoing tussle between the Bathists and the opposition will be won by the one who will prove more resilient in the end. Even if Bashar survives this wave of protests, chances of which seem slim, new waves of unrest will continue to haunt him till he agrees to a more equitable distribution of power among all those interest groups that have stakes in political power.

The writer is an academic and a journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]