The Battle for the Arab Spring
Page 30
Import tariffs and trade restrictions were progressively eased, rendering the streets of Damascus almost unrecognizable in 2010 from what they were in 2000. Gone were the elegant rusting Mercedes of the 1970s, or the ageing Dodges or Chevrolets put to work on the Beirut–Damascus taxi run. Replacing them were fleets of nondescript Kia, Seat, Nissan or Toyota saloons that lower customs tariffs had made cheaper and easier to import. Foreign retail outlets from coffee shops to shoe boutiques were cropping up in well-heeled Damascus neighbourhoods like Abu Romaneh and Malki. A kind of ‘Beirutization’ of the capital was taking place, as Syrians started to look more stylish and less drab than they had done a decade earlier, slowly catching up with their ultra-fashion-conscious Lebanese neighbours.
In the Old City, a UNESCO world heritage site, the Damascus authorities had granted new licences for hotels, restaurants and bars, often tastefully converted from beautiful Damascene houses with their elaborately-decorated interior courtyards and fountains. The white stone edifice of the Four Seasons hotel, funded by Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal and opened in 2005, was now the go-to meeting place for the capital's political and business elite. Tourists were piling into a diverse country dotted with ancient covered markets, mediaeval castles and the stunning ruins of Roman cities. A total of 8.5 million foreigners arrived in Syria in 2010, 40 per cent more than a year earlier and a fourfold increase since 2000. The tourism sector was becoming a genuine success story, and by the end of the decade provided 13 per cent of Syria's jobs and a similar proportion of its GDP.16
Property prices were also on the up in the 2000s, thanks partly to an influx of wealthy Iraqi migrants who had fled the war, but also to greater private investment and to natural population growth as more and more Syrians migrated to the capital looking for work. It bolstered the wealth of the land-owning classes in the major cities, with real-estate development now a serious business for the new elite. Glitzy new projects in out-of-town suburbs like Ya'afour were sold out before they even broke ground; one developer planning a set of ultra-luxury towers on a hillside outside Damascus said in 2010 that wealthy cash buyers close to the regime had already purchased all the as-yet-unbuilt penthouses and wanted more outlets for their money.17
Many landmark infrastructure and property projects had been mired in bureaucracy or infighting for years, but in 2010 local businessmen in Damascus talked with renewed optimism about things moving quicker. A major Gulf investor, Majid al-Futtaim, was about to break ground on an enormous shopping and hotel development that had been on the drawing board for at least five years. Controversially, a casino had even reopened on the outskirts of the capital, though it was hurriedly shut down in April 2011 as the government introduced measures to appease the more conservative Sunni community.
The leading local business families, often based in Damascus or Aleppo, joined forces to form new holding companies that were active in everything from banking to airlines and hotels. One, Souria Holding, was set up by wealthy Sunni shareholders and on the eve of the revolts was building a five-star hotel tower on the site of Damascus's old Baramkeh bus station. Another, Cham Holding, was set up in 2007 and had become Syria's largest company three years later. A joint venture between an investment vehicle controlled by Rami Makhlouf, the president's cousin, and dozens of wealthy Sunni families, it highlighted the two main groups who benefited most from Bashar's economic liberalization – the urban Sunni population and his own Alawite inner circle.
The most prominent of the latter were the family of Bashar's mother, Anisa Makhlouf, who had long put their privileged political status to lucrative commercial use. Their empire continued to expand under Rami and his brother Ihab, who among many other things were believed to control the Real Estate Bank, the shops at Syria's airports, ports and border crossings, the leading mobile phone operator, Syriatel, and a web of other investments, trading interests, oil concessions, land holdings and construction companies. Such was Rami's reputation for industrial-scale graft that Washington had gone as far as specifically labelling him a ‘facilitator of state corruption’ in February 2008.
Sons of senior figures from the Hafez era were also kept within the regime's sprawling network of patronage, oiled by government contracts or quasi-monopolies over particular industries. The system was not too different from Ben Ali's Tunisia, where the Trabelsi family had filled the Makhlouf role of the grasping, mega-rich in-laws who would become lightning conductors for public outrage when popular protests erupted. Unlike under the old regime, the nouveau riche elite in the late 2000s made little effort to hide a wealth that the more capitalistic climate allowed them to flaunt through cars, clothes and houses that were simply not available twenty years earlier. ‘The big difference between Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad is that Hafez used money for political purposes, but Bashar al-Assad uses politics to make money. And this combination is a disaster,’ said Saad Hariri, himself the billionaire politician son of the Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005.18
Yet while the Sunni urban business families and the Alawite elite were reaping the fruits of economic liberalization, others ploughed less fertile soils. Unlike his father, who was born and raised in an impoverished village with no paved roads, Bashar's lack of natural connection with the countryside became dangerously obvious in 2011. He grew up in the capital, studied medicine at an elite university and then went to London in the early 1990s. While many of Hafez al-Assad's close friends and advisors came from disadvantaged rural areas, Bashar's clique were far more urban-focused and internationalized. For much of his rule, Hafez had attempted to rebalance Syria's rural-urban divide, redistributing land from wealthy families to peasants and building infrastructure in the provinces. Yet Bashar effectively left those provinces behind in the free-market reform that favoured the cities and service industries. That bias would have grave repercussions.
Lower customs tariffs and fewer trade restrictions had enriched some but made it harder for locally-made and often inferior Syrian products to compete with imports. Corruption and vested interests prevented sectors with genuine potential, like food processing or textiles, from becoming competitive. Tourism was booming, but all taxis from Damascus International Airport were monopolized by a single company. Divides between urban and rural living standards widened. According to government figures, the average household in Damascus spent a total of $773 per month in 2009, almost double the $439 in rural parts of the Deir ez-Zour province, one of the more restive in 2011. A Damascus household allocated 35 per cent of its spending on food-related items, but in rural areas of the Aleppo province that figure was above 60 per cent. While the overall proportions spent on food had come down since 2004, the variations between the regions had become markedly deeper.19
Agriculture and water management remained inefficient and riddled with corruption, a disastrous state of affairs in a country whose population had more than trebled between 1970 and 2010 but which had suffered four successive years of drought from 2006.20 Agriculture had comprised a third of national output at the Ba'athist coup in 1963, a quarter when Bashar came to power in 2000, and just 16 per cent ten years later.21 And the provinces were essentially left in the hands of incompetent, often repressive local governors who saw their constituency as little more than a fiefdom for personal enrichment, an attitude that contributed so much to the outbreak of unrest in 2011.
The economic restructuring of the 2000s had not been a panacea for much of the population. Although inflation had fallen from an official rate of 15.2 per cent in 2008 to 4.5 per cent in 2010, price rises were still outpacing income growth for most people. A government poll of 15,000 families in 2009 found that the average monthly salary was just $194 in the private sector and $257 in the public sector. Soaring house prices benefited those who already owned land or property, but made it virtually impossible for young Syrians to rent or buy apartments in the cities, forcing many to delay their marriage plans. Government reforms tried to replace universal subsidies with ta
rgeted handouts to poor families, but were open to manipulation and caused unease. ‘If diesel became any more expensive, then I'd start burning wood to heat my house,’ said one Damascus shopkeeper in 2006.22 ‘The government tells us that electricity prices are the lowest in the region, but they forget to add that are our salaries are also the lowest.’ Economic malaise was not the central cause of the Syrian uprising, but the skewed liberalization of the 2000s left some with much to lose and others with everything to gain.
Meanwhile, diplomats or analysts of Syria's foreign policy perennially described it as being ‘at a crossroads’, which was precisely the perception that its president wished to nurture. He fostered ties with Iran while never turning his back completely on Europe; he kept alive hopes of peace with Israel but supplied and supported Hezbollah and several Palestinian factions that rejected the 1993 peace deal with Israel; he shared intelligence on Islamic militants with Washington but also facilitated the insurgency in post-Saddam Iraq. It was a construction where no one was a pure ally and no one a pure enemy, but anyone could be pushed into either camp depending on the circumstances. When 2011 came around, regional and international powers had to weigh up their actions on Syria by playing out the myriad possible implications elsewhere.
Although the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq had transformed regional dynamics and brought war to Syria's doorstep, Bashar's greatest crisis had come in Lebanon. Even after the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990, Damascus controlled a pervasive intelligence apparatus and maintained thousands of troops in the country, while Syria's military-political elite continued to milk corrupt networks of Lebanese politicians and businessmen. This was despite international pressure on Assad to reduce his military presence in Lebanon after Israel, which had first sent in troops to southern Lebanon in 1982, had withdrawn just weeks before Bashar came to power in the summer of 2000.
The Syrian leader overplayed his hand in the autumn of 2004, when against the better advice of many, including some of his inner circle, he rode roughshod over what little sovereignty Lebanon had by forcing through a constitutional amendment that extended the term of the pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud. It prompted the United States and France to co-sponsor a UN resolution calling for the withdrawal of all foreign forces and the disarming of militias, including Hezbollah.23
Bashar's uncompromising approach put him at loggerheads with Rafik Hariri, the billionaire Sunni businessman who resigned as Lebanon's prime minister in October 2004 after the extension of Lahoud's term and, on Valentine's Day 2005, was killed by a colossal bomb on the Beirut seafront. Nightly vigils around his tomb snowballed into huge anti-Syrian protests, and amid intense pressure Bashar was forced to withdraw his remaining troops over the following months in what amounted to a humiliating defeat.
He became increasingly isolated. The UN launched a high-profile international investigation into Hariri's death, which Damascus denied ordering. Bashar's relations with the Al Sauds, who were close to Hariri, were severely damaged. The Syrian vice president and a stalwart of the Assad inner circle, Abdelhalim Khaddam, defected and fled to Paris. Bush's Freedom Agenda had put regime change on Washington's lips. A spree of assassinations in Lebanon started to kill off anti-Syrian politicians and journalists.
Bashar's fortunes were partly revived by time – simply playing the long game and grinding down his adversaries – and partly by the six-week war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. Hezbollah's performance earned it popular admiration around the Arab world, some of which rubbed off on its Syrian and Iranian backers and allowed Damascus to portray itself as one of the few Arab governments still offering concrete resistance to Israel. Throughout that summer, street vendors in the Syrian capital did a roaring trade in posters, banners, flags and T-shirts portraying Bashar and his father alongside the grinning, bespectacled face of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader. Assad claimed that sentiment explained why Western-allied leaders in Tunis or Cairo were under such pressure. ‘We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries, but in spite of that Syria is stable,’ he said in January 2011. ‘Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.‘24
Over a decade in power, the unlikely Syrian president had been through a string of internal and external tests that were stern by any standards. Yet on the eve of the Arab Spring, Bashar held a stronger deck of domestic and international cards than any other Arab republican leader. His liberalization of the business environment had benefited the country's powerful Sunni merchant families and enriched a crony elite loath to lose its perks. Damascus had a powerful ally in Hezbollah, a major force in Lebanon's parliament, the most potent military group in that country and a thorn in Israel's side. Syria's continued hosting of several Palestinian groups that rejected peace with Israel kept alive its tired claim of being a hub of resistance to the Jewish state. Bashar nurtured a friendship with Tehran while never entirely alienating the Europeans or the Americans. The fragmented domestic opposition, including the Islamists, had been militarily crushed, jailed, co-opted or exiled.
Syrians were also mindful of the sectarian violence that had ripped apart their Lebanese and Iraqi neighbours, then the Arab world's only two democratic states, and many valued the stability offered by the Assads against the threat of communal strife. The country may be home to a Sunni Arab majority, but its patchwork of ethnic and religious minorities fear that the fall of the Assads may also spell the end of the secular ideals that have governed Syria for fifty years, perhaps bringing political Islam to power. That struggle over the role of religion in state and society could pit not just Islamists against secularists, but Christian and Alawite against Muslim, Kurd against Arab. A protracted rebellion in Syria might well suck in Iraq and Lebanon, themselves divided along sectarian lines and over government support for Assad.
With so much at risk, and with Syria initially so quiet, how did Assad find himself confronting open and armed revolt only months after boasting that his foreign policy would keep him immune?
The Delayed Uprising
At first it seemed as if there might be no Arab Spring in Syria, let alone a battle for its aftermath. Within days and even hours of Mubarak's departure on 11 February, the ongoing protests in Libya, Yemen and Bahrain shifted up a gear. Syria, by comparison, seemed quiet. A ‘Day of Rage’ organized through Facebook for 4 February was a non-event, a combination of fear and lacklustre enthusiasm keeping people at home. Syrians might have been glued to television screens showing the celebrations in Bourguiba Avenue or Tahrir Square, but they were not going out en masse in pursuit of the same goal.
Yet the Arab Spring had clearly changed the atmosphere. When a man was reportedly insulted and beaten by traffic police near Damascus's ancient roofed market of Souk al-Hamidiyah on 17 February, an angry crowd of about 1,500 people gathered. Men stood on cars and balconies of nearby apartment buildings chanting slogans like ‘Thieves, thieves,’ and ‘The Syrian people will not be humiliated’.25 Although nothing in comparison to the open revolt that was now going on in Libya or Bahrain, this was still highly unusual by Syrian standards. It also carried ominous echoes of Mohammed Bouazizi, the street vendor allegedly slapped by a policewoman in December 2010. It was a spark, but for now it was successfully extinguished by the minister of the interior, who arrived in a car to calm the crowd and take away the offending officer.
If the authorities had adopted a similarly non-confrontational approach a month later, in the town of Deraa, then perhaps the Arab Spring might have turned out differently for Bashar. It was not too late by early March, though it soon would be. For if Tunisia's revolt could trace its roots to Sidi Bouzid and Libya's to Benghazi, then Syria's uprising was conceived in an undistinguished southern town close to the Jordanian border. The Deraa revolt began after a handful of local boys, some no more than ten years old, were arrested by police for daubing walls with graffiti that included what had become the slogan of the Arab Spring: ‘The people want the fall o
f the regime’. According to their own accounts, the children were beaten and tortured by the local security services.26
After failing to secure their release, hundreds of Deraa residents took to the streets to voice their anger at the children's treatment. They also aired grievances over other local issues, demanding the removal of the provincial governor and the notorious head of local security. On 18 March, the security forces opened fire and killed several demonstrators, further enraging sentiment and escalating the protests. Bashar dispatched a delegation from Damascus to meet local representatives in an effort to calm the situation, as well as firing the governor and releasing the mistreated children, but the conflict had now started to rotate through a familiar and vicious circle. Protests were met with a deadly response, therefore sparking even greater protests, and so on, until divisions became irreconcilable.
The focus of the demonstrators’ chants quickly escalated from local issues, like the removal of an unpopular governor, to call for an end to emergency law, to finally demand the ouster of Assad. The local Ba'ath party offices were smashed and a statue of Hafez al-Assad was torn down as protesters attacked the symbols of the regime – a huge escalation that would draw much harsher punishment in Syria than it would have done in Egypt or Tunisia. By the last week of April, activists claimed that 130 people had been killed in Deraa alone, while Syrian state media said attacks by protesters had killed seventeen security personnel.27