Since the Ba’ath was from the very beginning committed to “categorically rejecting the capitalist outlook”,38 according to the words of its co-founder Michel Aflaq, the socialist policies enacted after 1963 soon came to have a devastating effect on the economically liberal small-trading class of the urban areas. While the activities of some merchants, such as the import and export of goods, became integrated in nationalized public bodies, other traders were affected by the changing patterns of industrial and agricultural policies and by the exponential growth of bureaucracy. Led by the Ikhwan, strikes broke out in 1964 and 1967 in the souk s of Aleppo, Homs and Damascus, where the powerful Chamber of Commerce demanded the repeal of restrictions on foreign trade and guarantees against further nationalization.39 By the mid-1970s, Assad’s promise of liberalizing the economic system had been only partially fulfilled. Persisting state restrictions on private capital and trade infuriated the small traders and souk merchants who took their anger to the streets. In a deliberate act of defiance, the cooperative stores, which had become a symbol of failed Ba’athist socialist policies, were among the first establishments to be destroyed by members of the Brotherhood during the protests that took place in Aleppo throughout March 1980.40
According to Raymond Hinnebusch, the Syrian Ikhwan had, by the late 1970s, become “the most implacable opponent” of the socialist Ba’athist policies as well as “the forward arm of the endangered urban traders”.41 This was reflected through the Brotherhood’s political programme which, when it was published in 1980, made much room for the defence of values such as the “right of ownership of private property”, “freedom of trade” and “encouragement of private investment in the national economy”.42 In addition, the nature of the language employed was unambiguously tailored to the attention of this social group, with a reference to the public sector suggesting that it should be “purified” of its “laziness and incompetence”.43 For Raymond Hinnebusch, it was thus quite clear that “the pro-capitalist, anti-statist bias of most of [the Muslim Brotherhood’s 1980 political] programme is unmistakable.”44
Interviewed Muslim Brothers, for their part, do not shy away from defending their liberal economic orientation and sometimes go as far as stating that the early “radicalism”45 which foreign observers noticed in Mustapha al-Sibai’s vision for an “Islamic Socialism” was in fact “purely rhetoric”.46
The pro-rural bias of the post-1963 rulers led them to focus on the living conditions of the peasants in the countryside, with policies often applied at the expense of the urban masses. For instance, the decline in cotton production, which can be interpreted as a result of Ba’athist agricultural and industrial policies, combined with the subsequent rise in the price of this commodity, did significant harm to the economic life of small-scale, souk-based urban manufacturers.47 Artisans and petty urban traders were also among the first victims of the socialist programme carried out by Hafiz al-Assad, despite his promise of pursuing more liberal, “redressed” economic policies. Indeed, while the Syrian President had overseen a fourfold increase in public spending between 1970 and 1974, inflation had by 1976 reached a rate of 30 per cent, leaving many urban workers unable to keep up with the rise in daily living costs.48 For instance, while a small apartment in central Damascus might have cost 50,000 Syrian pounds in 1970, it had by 1977 increased eight times in value and would increase tenfold in the next decade.49 The rise in prices in the cities was also a consequence of the regime’s attempt at “ruralising”50 the urban centres by encouraging rural-urban migration. If this provided the Ba’ath with a political stronghold in the cities, it also alienated the traditional urban inhabitants who viewed new arrivals with suspicion. This pattern of socioeconomic transformation led the author Patrick Seale to suggest that “men whose self-esteem was rooted in the old quarters of the cities where life had not changed for generations found themselves devalued and uprooted.”51
The ideological failure of Ba’athism
The severe inflation which hit the Syrian economy during the mid- to late-1970s also symbolized, for many, the failure of the socialist economic policies that had been an important aspect of Ba’athist doctrine since the late 1940s. This was, however, only one of the many ideological contradictions which came to discredit Ba’athism. The rulers, whose ideological heart lay in the prestige of the Arab nation’s historical and cultural heritage,52 utterly failed to live up to their promises of developing a foreign policy genuinely guided by Arab nationalism. The first recognition by the Ba’ath that it would prove difficult to reconcile the national destiny of “Greater Syria”53 with a broader, shared cultural and ideological Arab heritage came to the fore shortly before it took power when, in 1961, it joined the separatist movement leading Syria to quit its short-lived union with Egypt (1958–61). Subsequently, despite repeated attempts to frame Syria’s foreign policy in terms which emphasized the country’s belief in Arab nationalism, through alliances with Egypt and Jordan in the 1967 and 1973 wars against Israel, for example, the foreign policy developed by Ba’athist rulers was predominantly nationalist in its aims. Syria’s historic rivalry with its Iraqi neighbour, despite the ideological (Ba’athist) and ethnic (Arab) similarity of the two regimes’ composition, was a case in point. The relations between the two countries declined so much that, when the Iran-Iraq war broke out in September 1980, Hafiz al-Assad backed the Iranian regime—notwithstanding the many ideological and historical contradictions which Ba’athist support for a religious, Shi’ite-oriented Persian regime could entail.
The Arab nationalist credentials of the regime also became severely tarnished by Hafiz al-Assad’s June 1976 decision to send a 30,000-strong Syrian military force to Lebanon in order to crush the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which had just allied with leftist Lebanese forces in an attempt to break the status quo at the Israeli border. The Syrian army forged a tacit alliance with the pro-Western Lebanese Christian Maronites and idly stood by when their militias, the Kata’ib (Battalions), entered the Tal al-Za’tar camp and slaughtered around 3,000 Palestinians. “Assad’s relations with the Palestinian resistance had long been highly ambivalent: in theory, it was [the Ba’athist regime’s] heart and soul, in practice it was a constant source of trouble,”54 explains Patrick Seale. But many, even inside the Ba’ath Party, criticized the intervention as representing “a complete betrayal of what the Ba’ath stood for”.55 For these critics, “the lion of Arabism was slaughtering Arabism’s sacred cow”.56 Even Salah Eddine al-Bitar, co-founder of the party, asked how it was that Syria, as a “beating heart of Arabism”, could have sided with the Christian isolationists on a course so foreign to its traditions.57
This raises another question, that of the evolution of political elites within the party itself and the effect this had on the nature of the ideology put forward by the rulers of the time. “Ba’athism” itself became rapidly discredited as Salah Eddine al-Bitar and Michel Aflaq, the major intellectual founders of its doctrine, were quickly sidelined when the military members of the Ba’ath took over the direction of the Party after Salah Jadid’s coup in 1966. The two founders fled to Baghdad, where the “old guard” of the Party joined the Iraqi Ba’ath—thereby leaving open and public the ideological and personal struggle which had been taking place within the Syrian Ba’ath. The confrontation became so bitter and embarrassing for the Syrian regime that Hafiz al-Assad was reported to have sent an assassination squad to eliminate Salah Eddine al-Bitar at his home in Paris.58 By the mid-1970s, these internal bloody power struggles coupled with the Ba’athist rulers’ inability to provide the Syrian people with a clear sense of direction had spread an atmosphere of disenchantment with the promises which the Party had made to the masses upon its accession to power.
In addition, under Hafiz al-Assad’s rule the Ba’ath Party itself became a secondary institution, its members and leaders being sidelined from taking part in the regime’s most important decisions. This was a result of the obvious lack of enthusiasm expressed by Ba�
��athist leaders when Hafiz al-Assad took over the regime through an internal coup in November 1970. The Ba’ath Party had, by a heavy majority, favoured General Salah Jadid in its power struggle against Assad, whose more economically liberal “corrective movement” was in a minority inside the Party. Upon his ascent to power, the President thus had to compromise and form a government dominated by the Ba’ath. But when, in 1971, the Party, by thirteen votes against five, refused Hafiz al-Assad’s proposed puppet-candidate for the post of Party Leader, it became clear that the President had to act in order to tame Ba’athist dissidents.59 This was done, but at the expense of the Party itself, now weakened and sidelined from effectively participating in decision-making. From a one-party system, the regime had transformed into a one-man show. For Abdel Halim Khaddam, a former Vice-President of Syria and long-time member of the Ba’ath, the Party itself thus quickly became an additional victim of Hafiz al-Assad’s personal rule.60
Widespread elite corruption also fuelled popular resentment and gave credit to the idea that the domestic situation in Syria was more than a mere consequence of the doctrinal and political failure of Ba’athism; it had its roots in the utter lack of ideological commitment manifested by its rulers. Indeed, according to Abdel Halim Khaddam, “Ba’athism” came to serve as a mere “ideological blanket”,61 used to legitimize the enrichment of specific individuals and communities. One of the regime’s stalwarts, for instance, who served in various economic portfolios in the mid-1970s, was revealingly nicknamed “Mister Five Per Cent”62 in reference to the margins he made through the significant commissions received during his tenure. Patronage, cronyism and corruption spread through the ranks of the army, the Ba’ath, the bureaucracy and the military, leaving Syria’s rulers as well as the ideology they claimed to represent more isolated from society than ever.
By the late 1970s, popular unrest had spread through nearly all major cities in Syria. The reasons for discontent were various and often overlapped, hence the difficulty in singling out one factor. The Alawi background of many Syrian rulers was one reason for popular Sunni discontent—but one among many, and a sufficiently complex one to dedicate a whole chapter to it in this book (see Chapter 4). The anger expressed at the regime Hafiz al-Assad headed was also directed at the rural origins of the new ruling class and at the socialist policies it implemented. It was this explosive sociopolitical setting paved the way for the emergence of a social base for political Islam in Syria. Alienated by the overturning of traditions, many Syrians became increasingly attracted to the Islamic movement which was to pose the most significant challenge yet to the Ba’ath regime.
Urban uprisings
By the end of the 1970s, virtually all of Syria’s urban centres had been touched by unrest to varying degrees. Nowhere was this more significant than in Aleppo and Hama, two major cities combining many of the religious, socioeconomic and political grievances which ultimately pushed their inhabitants towards the streets in mass anti-regime protests led by the Muslim Brotherhood. However, by at least partially meeting the demands of the local elites in most of the cities, the regime managed to retain its grip on the country. The crushing of the Hama revolt of February 1982, where the bloody death toll could have raised the anger of many protesters from Aleppo to Damascus, was instead met with calm and seeming indifference.
In Hama and Aleppo, the situation had been precarious for quite some time as their inhabitants had felt increasingly estranged from the centres of power since the Ba’ath Party’s takeover in 1963. In many ways, the landed Sunni elite of both cities represented the traditional Syrian ruling class which the rural and minority-dominated Ba’athist rulers had aimed to destroy. Everything was thus done to reduce the influence of the Hamawite and Aleppine ruling classes which had long dominated the Syrian political scene through the People’s Party. In practice this meant, for example, that the proportion of Aleppine politicians represented in Syrian cabinets had dropped from 20.3 per cent in 1942–63 to 5 per cent by 1976. Most significantly perhaps, while Aleppo comprised 20 per cent of the Syrian population, the Regional Command of the Ba’ath Party included only four representatives from the city, or 8 per cent of the seats, in 1963–66, and none in 1966–76.63 Under the Ba’ath regime, Aleppo, which had in the post-independence period wielded a considerable political influence, was marginalized from all centres of power. In Hama, the resentment which many of the city’s inhabitants felt towards the regime was more focused on the actual policies implemented. On an economic level, Hama had indeed been targeted by Ba’athist land reforms as the city comprised a high concentration of rural notables who owned much of the vast surrounding areas. This meant that, at the political level, the once influential rich Hamawite families such as the Keilanies and the Barazis had seen their power considerably decrease under the local Ba’athist rulers.64
Politically isolated, the urban inhabitants of Hama and Aleppo had thus also become the primary victims of the economic policy of the Ba’ath regime. As a result of the agricultural policies put forward in the late 1960s, the bulk of cotton production had shifted from being centered in the north-central part of the country to becoming concentrated in north-eastern Syria, leaving many unemployed in the surroundings of the two cities. In addition, the regime’s industrialization policy concentrated on increasing the role of petroleum production in the Syrian economy. This was, however, done at the expense of cotton production, for which the total acreage fell from 220,000 hectares in 1971 to 185,100 in 1976, raising the price of textiles.65 The aggregate effect of these agricultural and industrial policies of the early 1970s was to sharply increase the level of unemployment in Hama and Aleppo, where much of the economy depended upon small-scale manufacturing, to the extent that the author Fred Lawson interpreted the uprisings that swept through both cities in the early 1980s as a violent reaction of the souk traders against the regime’s policies.66 Politically and economically marginalized by the Ba’athist rulers, Hama and Aleppo also came to resent more vocally the secular orientation of the minority-dominated Syrian regime. Both cities had indeed long been bastions of religious conservatism. In Aleppo, religious jamiat such as Abi Dharr were influential and ulama such as Sheikhs Muhammad Abu al-Nasr al-Bayanuni and Zeinedin Khairallah had the popular following needed to mobilize the masses in anti-regime demonstrations. Hama, for its part, was famous for its uncompromising spirit as a result of the violent rebellions led by local sheikhs against the French in 1925–27 and against the secular Ba’athist rulers, most notably in 1964 and 1973. By the late 1970s, the city had become a hotbed of radical Islam where the sermons of local anti-regime Islamist activists such as Marwan Hadid, Said Hawwa and Muhammad al-Hamid were carefully listened to.67 In both Aleppo and Hama, the situation, it seemed, was ripe for social unrest.
By 1980, many of Syria’s urban centres were touched by mass protests, from Jisr al-Shugour to Homs and Deir ez-Zoor. In Hama and Aleppo, however, mass demonstrations were taking place on an unprecedented scale. Significantly, the spark which came to enflame the precarious situation encountered in both cities had religious roots. In Aleppo, a large-scale massacre of Alawi military cadets in June 1979 had triggered a repressive response on the part of the local Ba’athist authorities who had gone as far as imprisoning the Imam of Aleppo’s Grand Mosque for his links to Husni Abu, the regional leader of the jihadist group the Fighting Vanguard (al-Tali’a al-Muqatila) and also happened to be his son-in law. The arrest, which symbolically took place only a few days before the religious celebrations of Eid al-Adha in November 1979, sparked an unprecedented wave of outrage among the Sunni community of Aleppo which quickly moved into the streets of the northern metropolis.68 The protests, organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, lasted for several months before reaching a peak in March 1980 when they were joined by the professional unions asking for the release of political prisoners and by the souk traders, who carried out the longest strike in their history.69 However, despite sporadic violence and occasional attacks on government building
s, the demonstrations at Aleppo remained relatively peaceful.
In Hama, sectarian strife had ensued after a truck driver from the city was murdered by an Alawi peasant from a nearby village, triggering the first wave of mass protests in November 1979. These were followed by a series of other urban demonstrations which culminated in February 1982 in demands from the local leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Fighting Vanguard that the city’s inhabitants stand up violently against the regime. According to Abdel Halim Khaddam, former Vice President of Syria, calls for jihad launched from minarets were then followed by the killing of over seventy Ba’athists by Islamist militants, ushering in a cycle of “irrational and disproportionate revenge”70 which would lead Syria’s elite troops, overwhelmingly Alawi in their composition, to slaughter between 25,000–40,000 of the city’s inhabitants. However, when news of the Hama massacre reached Aleppo in late February 1982, the northern metropolis kept relatively quiet. Was this the result of a “Hama trauma”,71 as suggested by interviewed Syrian Brothers, or were the reasons for the post-1982 relative calm deeper than the fear of large-scale state repression?
Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria Page 8