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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 June 2000 Issue No. 486 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 June 2000 Issue No. 486
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Another turn of the wheel
By David Hirst
So the Lion of Damascus is, at last, no more. For some people, he took an unconscionably long time to go. I remember when, back in 1983, Yasser Arafat and his loyalist Fatah guerrillas, holed up in the Lebanese town of Tripoli, were fighting a desperate rearguard action against the Syrian army and its dissident Palestinian protégés. He leaned over his desk and, in a conspiratorial whisper, said: "It's all over. The monster is dead." Stricken with leukemia, Assad apparently did indeed come close to death at that critical time, and on at least one occasion since. In the end, of the now rapidly dwindling gallery of aging Middle Eastern potentates, three were to go in quick succession before he did.
But his passing, so inopportune in its timing, will be fraught with much greater consequences, both immediate and long-term, than that of King Hussein of Jordan, Hassan of Morocco, or Sheikh Issa of Bahrain. These will be first of all domestic. But, given Syria's position at the heart of the Middle East power system, they will become regional and international as well. One thinks first of Lebanon, under Syrian tutelage since 1990 and now liable to grow increasingly restive at its continuation, and then of the Middle East 'peace process', and its long-awaited, but ever elusive, consummation in the shape of a Syrian-Israeli agreement.
Absolute master of Syria for thirty years and one of its 'strong men' for much longer than that, he died without properly providing for his own succession. A survival, like others in the Arab world, from a discredited era of totalitarian systems, one that bucked the global wide trend of democratisation and 'people's power', his regime was held together by a combination of his long-accumulated personal authority and prestige on the one hand and a military-cum-party oligarchy completely beholden to him on the other. But, crucially, Assad was also an Alawite, a member of that small sub-Shi'ite religious minority, representing about 11 per cent of the population in a country whose rulers were traditionally drawn from the Sunni Muslim majority, representing some 57 per cent.
Born, in 1931, in the remote mountain village of Kirdaha, he was among the first of such dirt-poor, provincial peasant children to receive a formal education of any kind. At school he displayed in abundance that characteristic of oppressed minorities everywhere, a great determination, given the chance, to get on in the world. But he would never have made it to where he eventually did had not his own ascent providentially coincided with that of the whole, downtrodden minority to which he belonged. Partly through accident -- the French Mandatory authorities' preference for enrolling minorities into its formidable 'troupes speciales' followed by an endless series military purges, among Sunni Muslim officers, during the early, turbulent years of Syrian independence -- and then by design, Alawite commanders came to dominate the army. Throughout his career, it was primarily on his Alawite co-religionists, in army, security services and other key positions, that Assad relied to preserve what became one of the most stable regimes in the Middle East.
Not that, throughout his long rule, he did not strive to establish himself as an 'all-Syrian' ruler, accepted as much by the country's Sunni majority as by its numerous minorities. If, in practice, he rose to power mainly through Alawite solidarity, he did so, officially, through the Baath Party which he joined at the age of sixteen. Temperamentally, Syria has always been the most devoutly pan-Arab of Arab countries. And of all the revolutionary doctrines swirling through the region during Assad's youth, Baathism, a Syrian invention, was the most pan-Arab too. With 'Arab unity' as its main rallying cry it had little regard for the rights or feelings of minorities, ethnic or sectarian, and treated such distinctions as aberrations to be swept away. At the same time, however, though pan-Arabism was primarily a Sunni Muslim aspiration, Baathism, being also staunchly secularist and socialist, seemed to promise emancipation for all the Arab world's oppressed minorities. That is partly why the provincial Alawites joined in such numbers.
But it was part of Assad's tragedy that, in the building and perpetuation of his regime, he could never truly rise above his minority origins. He never truly won the hearts and minds of the Sunni majority, and in 1981, he sent shock waves throughout the whole community when he ruthlessly crushed a Muslim Brother uprising in the deeply conservative, anti-Baathist, central city of Hama. Through his personal qualities, his mastery of tactics and diplomacy, his infinite patience and sheer durability, he made Syria a force to be reckoned with like no ruler had achieved before him. But these qualities were never sufficient, on their own, for him to achieve his purposes, and, by achieving them, to earn the popularity, among all his people, that would have encouraged him to liberalise, and reduce his dependence on his minority. He did achieve a pan-Syrian apotheosis of sorts, when, in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, he won back the Golan Heights over whose loss he had presided as defense minister in the disastrous war of 1967. But it was a very brief one; Israel wrested it back from him in a furious counter-offensive. Ever since then his rule has been a tale of long, slow decay, of regional and international setbacks -- from the collapse of the Soviet empire to Israel's sudden withdrawal from South Lebanon -- that sapped his strength. He died without that recovery of the Golan in which he had invested so much.
He will leave that to his successors. But undoubtedly peace-seeking will go into abeyance while the successors address themselves to their primary task: which will be to ensure the very survival of the regime. That priority was swiftly made clear when, within hours of his death, the parliament moved to enshrine Bashar Assad as his father's heir.
For years he had been groomed for supreme office, but never constitutionally prepared for it. In fact, constitutionally, he did not qualify at all, since he had not reached the age of 40. So, in a trice, parliament obligingly lowered the minimum age to Bashar's own, 34. Then the Baath party, due to hold its long-postponed Ninth Congress next week nominated him for the president, a one-man candidacy which will then be put to popular referendum.
But will Bashar be up to the job? There have long been doubts whether, for all his reported virtues, his intelligence, knowledge of foreign languages, modern outlook, he also has the toughness, and the guile, to take command in so tough an environment. He has certainly been striving, with apparent success, to make his mark. Brought back in 1995 from London, where he was studying ophthalmology, he took a crash course in military training. At the same time, with his father's blessing, he established himself as the moving spirit behind long overdue reforms, modernisation, efficiency, rejuvenation. Above all, he declared war on the endemic corruption that was eating away at the vitals of this antiquated, centralised, East-European-style, one-party state.
But he found that the 'heads' of corruption were, many of them, drawn from that self-same loyalist old guard on whom his father had so heavily relied these past thirty years. There were signs last week that, in a climate of gathering intrigue and deep foreboding about the whole future of the system, a power struggle was developing between this old guard and Bashar's new one. If that could happen while his father was still alive to hold the ring, how much more serious a turn it could take now that he has gone?
Not immediately, perhaps. There will be an initial impulse, among the Alawites, to close ranks. They realise that the very preservation of the regime, and their own ascendancy in it, depends largely on their own solidarity. So, provisionally at least, the main Alawite generals, and their Sunni Muslim confederates, will accept Bashar as a unifying chief, symbolising their wish to maintain the Assad legacy for as long as possible, and to avoid premature dissension in Alawite ranks.
But in Syria collective military leadership has never been practiced successfully for very long. Intra-Alawite power struggles could all too easily erupt. Only last year Assad had to strike militarily against the well-armed followers, ensconced in the Alawite heartlands, of his dissident, exiled brother Rifaat. For a long time he was the second most powerful man in the country: he still has influence -- and great ambition.
If the Alawites fall out among themselves, there may well come a point when one faction or another of them is tempted to appeal for support from allies within the Sunni majority, thereby reviving the demons of confessional conflict which marked the formative years of the regime.
Syria was once a byword for instability. Without a change of leadership since Assad took full and formal power in 1971, it had about 20 of them between 1945 and then. If there is a cycle in human affairs then a long period of stability, achieved largely through repression, is liable to be followed by its opposite. And that, with unpredictable consequences far beyond Syria itself, could be Pandora Box which Assad's passing has thrown open.
