The Early Presidency of Bashar al-Asad

“The New Lion of Damascus” is a very sympathetic biography of Bashar al-Asad by US academic  David Lesch from 2005. The book is based primarily on extensive interviews with Asad, as well as with family members and other insiders. A few prominent civil society critics from the 2000 “Damascus Spring” get a brief look in, but none of the well established regime figures and long time officials of the military and security apparatus do – an interesting gap. As will be seen Lesch identifies this group as the internal opposition to Asad, and given their absence I wonder how much of his analysis of their role was based on ignorance of their views, or if they were consciously excluded. Lesch admits to being charmed by Asad and having a strong personal liking for him. This comes across in the careful and painstaking way Asad is depicted to make him acceptable to Americans (remember 2005 was the height of the “Syria the next target” rhetoric from the US neo cons); a family man, modest, keen on modern music (apparently Phil Collins was his favourite – might explain a lot!), on sports and keeping fit, tech savvy, a hobbyist photographer, married to a beautiful and intelligent former Wall Street investment banker. My suspicion is that Lesch was played to some extent in his interviews and access and did not even notice it.

But what can the book tell us about Asad five years into his Presidency? Well quite a lot. Firstly it is clear that Asad wanted to modernise Syria economically and technologically. He was committed to opening up a free market economy and also fee based education. His model was China, Singapore and he admired Putin. In short Asad wanted a modern economy, Syria integrated into global exchange, wide spread familiarity and access to IT, but not democracy or civil freedom. Asad’s mantra was ‘stability’. In his narrative – and Lesch largely endorses this – Syria is a sectarian and fragmented society – like Lebanon and Iraq – and could fly apart into instability, civil war and chaos very easily if change happened too fast. (Certainly from the perspective of 2016 this looks prescient.) Democracy ‘too soon’ meant instability. Citizens in Asad’s terms , were not mature enough to handle freedom yet.

Asad’s program faced a number of challenges. For one his power base, Lesch argues, was narrow. The old guard, the old Ba’ath party officials and operatives from the 1970s and 1980s who predominated especially in the military and security organs, and had control of networks of corruption and nepotism and had used the state as a vehicle for the accumulation of wealth and power, were none too pleased. They had been struck a blow by the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, where many of them had entrenched themselves, and were being gradually phased out through mandatory retirements and in some cases corruption charges, but they remained powerful and  a threat to Asad. The second point Lesch argues is that Asad was in many ways the front man for the Alawite minority, which he admits had used the Ba’ath party to basically take over the military and security apparatus. That of course means that the very ‘old guard’ Lesch criticises are also Asad's co-religionists, the minority he fronts. Lesch interestingly does not connect these dots, but it suggests that it is more than a personal stake of members of a corrupt, entrenched old guard that slows Asad down, but also that they are the very people he represents. I think this is an important point, which Lesch overlooks and I will return to it below.

Then  there is the challenge of the geopolitical environment. Syria at the time of writing (and still) remains formally at war with Israel and committed to recovering the occupied Golan heights. Lesch is of the view (as am I) that Asad senior and junior were both serious about desiring a peace with Israel, and that while part of the failure to achieve that (as of 2005) was due to their own cautious and careful style of non public diplomacy, much of the failure was also due to Israeli intransigence, arrogance and the ‘on again, off again’ approach to negotiations. In such a strategic climate, Syria as a poor country had to spend an inordinate amount on the armed forces which acted not only as a further block to development financially, but also empowered and provided a power base for the very people that Asad has to be wary of politically. This strategic climate was of course exacerbated by the American occupation of Iraq, which added a further unstable border to the east.

Syria’s main supporter was the USSR in the Cold War and remains Russia. However this support has not come gratis. A large burden on Syria economically is a debt of US$12 billion to Russia, for military equipment supplied during the Soviet period. Apparently Russia insists on repayment, not accepting the Syrian argument that with the demise of the USSR as political entity, the debt should die too. The size of this liability (which of course from Moscow’s perspective remains an asset) also provides a very real material context for the support for Asad displayed by Russia in the recent civil war.

Lesch is totally condemning of the neo conservative anti Syrian lobby and arguments that prevailed in the US at the time of writing. He acknowledges that some cross border incursions and supplies were coming to the Iraqi insurgents from Syria and that some of the Hussein regime's officials had taken sanctuary there, and that this provided a basis for American anger. But he emphasises that American politicians misread the amount of power Asad had; and like the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Harari, these actions in all likelihood occurred without Asad’s approval. These were he suggests, the actions of the ‘old guard’ and Asad could not do anything about them. He was compelled by the limitations of his internal power base, to turn a blind eye. Indeed the limitations of Asad’s power are tellingly illustrated by the account of the extradition of Hussein’s half brother Sabawi al-Hassan. Told by the US that he was in hiding in Syria it took six months to trace him. He had taken sanctuary with an Arab tribe and had to bought by the central government from that tribe to be extradited.

Lesch emphasises the demographic powder keg which constituted Syria as of 2005. Population was growing faster than GDP; the 14 – 25 year old cohort was the biggest single population segment in the country. For them jobs were critical. Lesch, being  a good American liberal, puts his faith in the free market and is critical of the slowness of opening the Syrian economy. Asad wanted to grow a free market sector alongside the state sector however moribund,  to provide stability and avoid social dislocation and mass unemployment. If either strategy failed to produce the employment opportunities required then the future for Syria looked grim. Again from the standpoint of 2016 this looks prescient.

But here we hit the major shortfall in Lesch’s account. He acknowledges that the secular constitution has been used by the minorities to entrench themselves in the state apparatus. He asserts that Syria is fragmented and sectarian. What he never openly admits is that unlike Lebanon and Iraq, the population split is much less extreme in Syria – 75% of the population are Sunni Arabs and 25% are comprised of all the other minorities. The people who are excluded from the state apparatus – who are effectively colonised in their own country – are the majority. And given the birth rate trends cited above, that means it is this majority population which is facing the biggest problem in terms of a viable future being available for their growing young population. When we add this to the fact that the old guard and their clients largely come from the same minority group as Asad, that their power base lies in a bloated military and brutal and all pervasive security apparatus, and that is in their interest to maintain their numbers and power base by perpetuating a state of formal war with Israel, then the possibility of Asad in 2005 having any hope of realising his modernisation plans and plans for peace appeared limited. The current tragic civil war starts to appear as more likely than not, as a structural breakdown of the particular post colonial state that is Syria.

Syria – a postcolonial state

Reading the history of modern Syria, from the French occupation until now, I am struck by the number of continuities in how the state machine operates.

While the population of Syria is about 95% Arab speaking, the population is divided by religious differences. Religious differences are far more critical in the Islamic world than they are in the modern west; the closest parallel is Ulster, and even there distinctions of religion where actually distinction between coloniser and colonised. The situation in the Islamic world is a legacy of the long centuries of Ottoman rule. The Ottomans divided their subjects according to religion, allowing each recognised group the rights to administer themselves according to their own rules and practices. (such a self administering community was known as a millet).As conversion was prohibited, religious groups remained closed and effectively became ethnicities, even though almost always Arabic speaking. In Syria, this has meant that a number of religious minorities exist with very powerful identities. The four main minorities are the Christians, the Alawites ( an offshoot of the Shi’a tradition in Islam), the Druzes (an eclectic and syncretic religion derived from Islam and also neo Platonism) and the Kurds (the one minority with their own distinct language, related to Persian rather than Arabic). Due to the way borders were drawn after WWI when the Allied powers carved up the Ottoman Empire ( a process referred to in British archival documents from the time as ‘The Great Loot”), a Turkish speaking minority, known as Turkmens, also ended up within the Syrian borders. The minorities altogether possibly account for around 30% of the Syrian population – the vast majority being Arabs of the Sunni tradition. (Note that in religion the Kurds are also Sunni Muslims – this is one case where actual linguistic identity overrides religion).

The minorities are mainly located in the west of the country, the Sunni predominantly in the east.  At the time of the French occupation – and until the 1960s – the dominant class in the region were the ‘notables’ – not necessarily aristocrats in the sense of being ennobled or titled - but large landowners living mainly off rents and services from their tenants and exercising political control over the mass of dependent tenants, as is the usual case in pre-capitalist landlord regimes. The notables were overwhelmingly Sunni, and dominated the political life of the region. Once the French granted a constitution in 1930, this class also dominated the parliament and government. Syrian self government was very limited though, as France maintained and overriding power over all decisions. Crucially the army remained under French control.

This is the point at which the similarities become apparent. The French (like all colonial powers) favoured divide and rule policies. They distrusted the majority and relied on the minorities to staff the army and the gendarmerie. Using polices of indirect rule and building on the Ottoman tradition of millet, the minorities developed systems of patronage to penetrate more widely into Syrian society, and in particular into the administration and into commerce.

The other very consistent feature was the French technique of dealing with civil unrest and uprisings, which was to surround the towns concerned and bombard them with artillery and air power into submission. (The last such French bombardment of cities was Damascus in 1945).

The point is that these features have remained as key features of the Syrian state. Syria was granted independence in 1946. Government cabinets initially remained dominated by notables, but the minorities continued to staff the armed forces and the security services. After defeat in the 1948 war with Israel, Syria experienced three military coups in 1949 alone, and parliamentary government only returned in 1954. In 1958, after a attempts by Britain and America to destabilise Syria following its diplomatic recognition of the USSR and purchase of modern weapons, Syria joined with Egypt in the United Arab Republic. This was terminated by another military coup in 1961, followed by parliamentary elections and a coup in 1963, at which point the French era Emergency Law was imposed and has been in force ever since.

The 1963 coup was carried out by an alliance of two strands of nationalist army officers – Nasser supporters and Ba’athists. At this point some understanding of the Ba-ath party is in order. Originally a nationalist body when founded by Michel Aflaq (a Christian) in 1952 the core ideology of the Ba-ath party was a pan Arab nationalism, wanting to fold the states created in the post WWI carve up into a larger Arab nation. The emphasis was on nationality and language as a unifying factor. The full title was Ba’ath Arab Socialist Party, the socialism being more in the line of using government administration and state ownership to modernise Syria. The Ba’athists entered the cabinet for the first time after the 1961 coup. The Ba’athist position was that the unification with Egypt had produced subordination to a much larger and more powerful state, rather than a true unity and Syrian development and interests had been sidelined. Again the Ba’athists participated in the coup two years later, as a way of removing what they saw as the roadblocks to their program in the still notable dominated parliament. Land reform legislation in the early 1960s broke up the large landholdings finally depriving the notables of power and reducing them to class of Sunni farmers and merchants in regional towns in the east.

The Ba’athist party proved attractive to the minorities (except the Kurds of course who were by definition excluded from the Arab nation unless they fully abandoned Kurdish identity)and as various minority politicians and officers moved up through both the party and the state machine, they were able to exercise patronage to bring in more of their communities. In the end the Ba’ath party became – like the French mandate administration – a means to keep the Sunni majority out of power.

For about 12 months after the coup the Ba’ath party experienced internal turmoil and struggle. By 1964 the old guard – including founder Aflaq – were purged. The Ba’athists consolidated their hold on the government, finally taking full power in the coup of 1970 by defence minister Hafez al Assad. Following this coup, the Alawite minority (to which Assad belonged) had consolidated its hold over the administration and especially the armed forces and the security service (the mukhabarat).

At a fundamental level the core French policy of excluding the Sunni majority from power has continued. The other key continuity has been the record of coups. The French had the habit f riding roughshod over the mandate era parliament, thus entrenching an attitude of rather than seeing the executive arm of government being in conflict with the legislative, with the latter seen as a source of problems rather than authority and sovereignty. Rather power, authority and sovereignty derive from control of the state machine, in particular the repressive apparatus.

This has been displayed in the continuity of repression by military violence, especially artillery and air bombardment as under the French. The first instance occurred in 1964 in Hama, although this was mild compared to the brutal and indiscriminate repression that followed the 1982 uprising. What has been seen since 2011 in the current Syrian Civil War has been a continuation of this policy.

The argument I am parsing here, derived from a reading of a number of texts on modern Syrian history) is that like so many other former colonial possessions, Syria is a post colonial state. My understanding of the post colonial thesis is that such states maintain continuity in practice, legislation, recruitment and state ideology with the previous colonial administrations. In their propaganda such states have either suggested they represent a rebirth of pre-colonial traditions (adapted to the modern world of course) or newly created national identities. In reality they continue the colonial project of ruling over and against the majority population, of perpetuating the interests of an elite (not necessarily based on a social class, more commonly an elite of state functionaries, who may become a class through using the state as a means to accumulate). In the post colonial state the interests of a colonising power are replaced with the interests of an elite often more at home culturally and socially in the western world of the former colonisers, than with the majority of the citizens (or more correctly subjects) of the state. Contempt and disdain frequently characterises the attitude of the elites to the majority. Where this elite – as in Syria – is recruited from actual minorities the state comes to represent the old colonial form even more so. In this case the rulers are not only socially distinct by wealth, power and lifestyle, but are also alien to the majority. Syria under the Assad dynasty is a post colonial state machine by means of which a minority exercises power analogous to that exercised in a formal colony by foreign administrators.