The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  Many could neither read or write, let alone access a computer or use Twitter. They wanted things to change, but suffocated under inflation that meant food and fuel prices were sometimes double what they were a year earlier. The economy, already barely functional, had collapsed further amid the unrest. Tourism and construction had ground to a halt. By September, the IMF had estimated that Yemen's GDP would shrink by 2.5 per cent in 2011. Yemen was already running a budget deficit of more than $2 billion in 2010 and inflation of over 11 per cent that would rise to somewhere closer to 30 per cent in 2011.24 Oxfam, a charity that works in the world's most needy countries, had warned in November 2010 that Yemen was on the verge of a food crisis even before prices shot up again in 2011.25

  Considering the billions of dollars in aid promised to support transitions in North Africa, Yemen – of much greater security and trade importance, and in more urgent need than any other Arab nation – has been chronically neglected. The West's financial crisis is likely to hinder what financial and technical support it can provide to the country, while a further breakdown in law and order will restrict the delivery of humanitarian aid. The success of international schemes that have tried to coordinate assistance, including the Friends of Yemen group, formed in 2010 by a group of Arab and Western countries seeking to channel development aid to the country, has been decidedly mixed. Instead, Saudi Arabia will continue to be Yemen's paymaster, dispensing official and unofficial largesse to those whose allegiance they wish to maintain.

  That financial dependence will also hinder any serious efforts to reform the economy, which cannot even begin until the political crises are at least partially solved. Like other oil-poor Arab countries, any new democratically elected government will be caught between measures to win popular support, pleasing its international patrons – in this case Riyadh – and taking painful long-term decisions to restructure the economy. Attempting to curb the role of qat, for instance, will be complicated by the fact that it provides the main source of income for some 14 per cent of the population. Trying to ban it would be not only disastrously unpopular and impossible to enforce, but it would also put thousands out of work.26 In 2010 the government had agreed a $370 million IMF loan designed to accompany a programme of economic and fiscal reforms, including reductions to fuel subsidies, higher taxes and streamlined expenditure.27 But most of these attempts to repair public finances were either never enacted or postponed in 2011.

  By 2010 it was no secret that a perfect storm of crises loomed on the horizon. At the heart of Yemen's problem is the weakness of its state. Across this sprawling and beautiful land are dotted the relics of great and ancient civilizations, from the desert skyscrapers of Shibam to the postcard-perfect old city of Sana'a, yet you can drive for hours without seeing any sign of central government. Off the main road that links Sana'a to Aden, the streets are unpaved and children run around barefoot when they should be at school. Tribal and local allegiances outweigh loyalty to the central state, leading to a tragic situation where money and weapons, not political ideas, are the currency of power.

  As the peaceful youth demonstrators discovered, their country's socio-political structure is a world away from that of Tunisia, even though the two countries share grievances such as widespread unemployment, rampant corruption and a lack of change at the top. The prospect of any all-encompassing solution to Yemen's problems is bleak, and the battles raging within the country could take decades to play out. Even though another Saleh comeback is certainly not beyond this most Machiavellian of Arab leaders, his promised departure was a first step in a longer-term revolution that the Arab Spring may yet prove to have triggered. Among the positive aspects of tribal society is the tradition of settling local disputes through dialogue and compromise. Rescuing Yemen will require an enormous amount of both – as it will in Syria, which by the time Saleh signed the power transfer deal in November was in open rebellion.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Struggle for Syria

  Conspiracies are like germs, after all, multiplying every moment, everywhere. They cannot be eliminated, but we can strengthen the immunity of our bodies in order to protect ourselves against them. It doesn't require much analysis, based on what we heard from others and witnessed in the media, to prove that there is indeed a conspiracy. We should not waste time discussing it or being frightened by it.

  – Bashar al-Assad, in a speech to Damascus University on 20 June 20111

  Close to dawn on 16 November 2011, a band of armed men mounted a daring raid on an Air Force Intelligence building on the outskirts of Damascus. It was the most audacious attack yet by the so-called Free Syrian Army, a group formed several months earlier by a rebel colonel who claimed to command 15,000 former members of the armed forces.2 Operating in the confused shadows of the wider uprising against the Syrian regime, they were filling their ranks with rising numbers of defected soldiers and smuggling in weapons across Syria's porous borders. The armed insurgency was becoming bolder, and the target of its latest attack could hardly have been more symbolic.

  More than half a century earlier, a twenty-year-old Hafez al-Assad had been selected as a trainee pilot in the embryonic Syrian Air Force, beginning his career by flying British- and US-made propeller planes in the skies above north-west Syria and winning a prize for aerobatics when he graduated top of his class in 1955.3 A few years later, Assad was stationed in Cairo during Syria's short-lived union with Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt, where he and four of his colleagues formed a secret committee of conspirators whose characteristics would be central to the future of the country.

  All five were enthusiastic members of the Ba'ath, or ‘Resurrection’ party, formed in Damascus in 1947 around a secular, socialist Arab nationalism that aimed to rid Arab lands of foreign interference. They also hailed from minority communities. Three of them, including the future president himself, were Alawites, members of a sect whose opaque origins are usually traced back to a pupil of the eleventh Shi'ite Muslim imam, and who believe that Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohamed, was the truest embodiment of God on earth.4 Then, as now, Syria was a country with a Sunni Arab majority and an overlapping mosaic of ethnic and religious minorities that included not just Alawites but also Kurds, Druze, Christians, Turkomen and Ismailis, another offshoot of Shi'ite Islam to which the other two members of Assad's secret committee belonged.

  The Ba'ath party's secularizing ideas were particularly appealing to these minority communities, who risked being treated as second-class citizens in any conservative, Sunni-dominated state. They had largely been protected under the French mandate, which ran from 1920 until 1946 and had seen the old bilad ash-Sham, or Greater Syria – comprised of modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and parts of Iraq – greatly diminished in size and then hewn into several distinct regions. In the west, the Alawites were granted a semi-autonomous state of some 278,000 people, while another slice of old Syrian territory was added to the Maronite Christian enclave of Mount Lebanon, creating the borders of present-day Lebanon.

  Syrian independence in 1947 had given way to an unstable republican regime characterized by frequent coups. Back from Cairo in 1962, Assad's committee developed a network of allies and patrons that mounted their own takeover in March 1963, shortly after their Ba'athist counterparts in Baghdad had achieved the same feat. The coup propelled the ambitious young Assad into the leadership of the Air Force, a base from which he plotted a personal ascendance that culminated in 1970 with his appointment as president. Two years later, the other four members of his original Cairo committee were either dead, exiled or incarcerated.5 Throughout the next three decades, Assad maintained an often unforgiving grip on power using three elements – the military-security complex, the Ba'ath party apparatus and a new Alawite elite – that were still at the core of the regime that his son and successor, Bashar, inherited in 2000 and fought to maintain in 2011 and beyond.

  More was at stake in Syria than in any other country touched by the Arab Spring, a fact th
at mitigated both against the outbreak of protest and against a peaceful or speedy resolution once demonstrations had begun. A country of 24 million people located right at the sensitive heart of the Middle East, Syria borders Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Iraq and what happens in Damascus has long rippled far and wide. Syria's geography complicates its uprising, entangling all sides in a mesh of domestic and international conundrums that augur poorly for a resolution of the sort that saw Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali flee into exile after just weeks of protests, or Libya's Muammar Gaddafi die at the hands of foreign-backed rebels. The final result in Syria may eventually be the same, but the path towards it will be longer, bloodier and fraught with more danger for Syria and all its neighbours. The clues to why Bashar al-Assad was still in power by early 2012 lie in the make-up of the country which he inherited from his father and in its place at the nexus of the Middle East's most intractable conflicts.

  From Father to Son

  When he emerged as sole leader in 1970, Hafez al-Assad realized that striking a balance between Islam and Ba'athism, and between the various minorities and the Sunni majority, would be vital to managing Syria. The Ba'ath party's founders, one Sunni Muslim and one Greek Orthodox Christian, believed that all Arabs should stand on an equal footing, and considered Islam more of a cultural commonality than an all-guiding force.6 This was reflected in the draft of Assad's new constitution, which in 1973 ignited protests by conservative Sunnis because it contained no clause requiring the president to be a Muslim. Islam was never recognized as the religion of state, but Assad amended the document after obtaining a fatwa from a Lebanese Shi'ite cleric stating that Alawites were indeed of the Islamic faith – even though they were regarded as quasi-heretics by many other Muslims for shunning most mainstream beliefs and practices.7, 8

  The constitution also noted that Syria would be a ‘planned socialist economy’, enshrining the round of nationalization that had already followed the 1963 Ba'athist coup. Private banks were shut down, the nascent Syrian stock exchange was closed and restrictions were placed on private-sector activities. The wealthy Sunni trading families that had historically dominated the economy suffered heavily, prompting many to move abroad, although Assad introduced some conciliatory measures when he became president, allowing trade and travel with Lebanon and reassuring businessmen and merchants in the cities.9 Nonetheless, Syria effectively became a monolithic command economy, run on five-year plans and reliant on modest oil production for state income.

  Less than a decade after taking power, Assad faced what would be the regime's greatest domestic challenge prior to 2011. The secular tenets of Ba'athism were anathema to Syria's Muslim Brothers, whose early leaders were inspired by the eponymous Egyptian group and who were a rising political force in the post-independence years. A young Assad was even beaten up and knifed by a group of their supporters in 1948, adding a personal layer of enmity to his wider ideological conflict with the Islamists.

  The Brotherhood was banned after the 1963 coup, but some elements organized underground resistance networks in conservative cities like Aleppo and Hama and, from the late 1970s, more radical groups began a campaign of suicide bombings, attacks on symbols of the regime and assassinations that included an attempt on the president's life. The insurgency prompted a vicious crackdown, led by Assad's brother, Rifaat, which reached its zenith in the Hama massacre of spring 1982, when government forces surrounded and shelled Syria's third-largest city in a month-long assault that left many thousands dead and razed historic districts where Islamist fighters had dug themselves in. The episode subsequently became taboo, banned from open discussion and referred to by the people of Hama simply as al-ahdath, or ‘the incidents’. But it had certainly not been forgotten.

  Assad's foreign policy, later passed down to his son, also revolved around maintaining domestic power. It tended to be more reactive than proactive, taking out insurance policies and hedging its bets to never entirely alienate any major external power. Although Syria had no comprehensive peace deal with Israel, the two countries had signed a ceasefire in 1974 after Assad had failed to regain the mountainous Golan Heights region, in Syria's extreme south-west, in the 1973 war. It left the two countries in a purgatory state of no peace, no war that would endure through several rounds of failed peace talks, including US-mediated negotiations that broke down just before Assad's death.

  Damascus treated its other western neighbour, Lebanon, as a province in which it could act with almost total impunity, dispatching troops into the country in 1976, soon after the eruption of the Lebanese civil war, where they would remain for nearly three decades. As the conflict deepened, drawing in Israel and other foreign interests, Damascus cultivated numerous Lebanese allies. The most powerful of them would be Hezbollah, a Shi'ite resistance group created in the early 1980s with Iranian ideological and military backing and which at the end of the civil war in 1990 was the only Lebanese armed faction allowed to keep its weapons as a means of national resistance to ongoing Israeli occupation. Although the Syrian president had no desire to see an Islamic state established in Lebanon – a goal that was theoretically among Hezbollah's aims – his relationship with the Shi'ite group would prove an invaluable bequest to his son.

  Hafez al-Assad died, aged sixty-nine, on 10 June 2000. A few days later, tens of thousands of people gathered in the streets of Damascus to mark his funeral. Three men stood together in the crowds of mourners, sporting dark suits, five o'clock shadows and sunglasses in the manner of mafia dons paying their respects to a deceased padrino. The tallest of them was the thirty-four-year-old Bashar al-Assad, the second son of the late Syrian president, who would soon be elected secretary-general of the ruling Ba'ath party and receive 97 per cent support in a referendum to endorse him as leader.

  At Bashar's side was his younger brother, Maher, rising quickly through the ranks of the elite Republican Guard and already gaining notoriety as a military commander. And standing nearby was a moustachioed older man, Assef Shawkat, who had risen to prominence through marrying Bushra al-Assad, Bashar and Maher's older sister and their father's favourite. By then, Shawkat was rising to the top of Syria's military intelligence apparatus and was considered one of the most influential men in the country.

  Bashar was one of the new generation of Arab leaders that assumed power at the turn of the millennium. Yet unlike King Mohammed of Morocco and King Abdullah of Jordan, who had both succeeded their fathers in 1999 and were also in their mid-thirties, the young Syrian president was not a member of a royal family. He was the first and possibly the last Arab republican leader to inherit the presidency, a feat which Gamal Mubarak and Saif al-Islam Gaddafi were prevented from achieving by the events of 2011. Even so, Bashar al-Assad was never meant to rule Syria. Any plans that his father had to hand down power to his eldest son, Basil, were derailed in 1994 when he was killed in a car crash. The accident brought the more bookish Bashar home from London, where he was training as an eye-doctor, to spend the next six years being groomed as the future leader while his father assiduously worked to persuade both the wider public and his own generation of senior party and military officials, now in their sixties and seventies, to accept that hereditary rule was in their best interests.

  Bashar kept on many of the old inner clique but he also sought a break from the past, trying to dilute the crushing cult of personality that had surrounded his father and allowing more generous political and media freedoms in a period that became known as the Damascus Spring. Activists were pardoned, political salons flourished and opposition figures began cautiously proposing reforms such as the lifting of the emergency law, which had been in place since 1963. Hostility from the powerful old guard and entrenched interests nipped the spring in its buds, however, starkly illustrating the limits of change for the new president.

  Even the introduction of publicly-available internet, which only took place in 2000, had drawn opposition from hardliners who (rightly) feared it would erode the state's control over information
. Bashar was a vocal proponent of the internet, and during his grooming period had been chairman of the Syrian Computer Society, a vehicle that helped establish his image as a reform-minded successor. But although he allowed a freer private-sector media than his father, selectively granting licences to new private-sector magazines and newspapers, Syria was nonetheless ranked a miserable 173 out of 178 countries in the 2010 Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders.10

  With serious political reform seemingly off the agenda, Assad adopted a ‘Chinese model’ that sought to allow economic liberalization without eroding the regime's monopoly on power. Syria's crude production was now on the wane, public finances needed preparing for the end of oil, and easing long-standing restrictions on trade and business would benefit some of the key pillars of his regime.11 To implement his ambitious reforms, which one prominent Syrian banker likened to ‘re-engineering a whole country’, Bashar brought in a clutch of Western-educated technocrats that included Abdullah Dardari, who as deputy prime minister and head of the State Planning Commission would earn a reputation as the champion of free-market reform.12 New faces also appeared at the Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade, the state-owned Industrial Bank and the Ministry of Tourism.13 Another key figure in this technocratic clique was the first lady, Asma al-Assad, born and raised in west London, who had worked at Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan and was enrolled to study an MBA at Harvard when she married the new Syrian president.

  When Hafez al-Assad died in 2000 there was not a single ATM in Syria.14 But five years later, private banks and insurance companies were finally allowed to reopen after a decades-long hiatus during which much of the Syrian business community had routed its transactions through Lebanon, Dubai or Cyprus. There was so much demand for their services that bank managers in Damascus recounted tales of customers turning up at newly opened branches hauling bags of cash that contained their life savings. In 2009, a long-planned stock exchange finally began trading and was generally considered a success, with the majority of share offerings healthily oversubscribed.15