"Syria: a Monopoly on Democracy," by Aita from Le Monde Dipl.

The following article by Samir Aita in Le Monde Diplomatique is excellent. The same issue of Le Monde Diplo also has an interesting article, entitled, "Constructive instability," by Walid Charara that puts Syria into over-arching US policy. The lead sentence of the article is:

The United States seems stubbornly determined to extend its current high-risk strategy of democratic destabilisation to the entire Middle East.

One comment on Walid Charara's article: I think even the neo-conservatives are beginning to trim their sails on "regime change" in Syria. They do not want more Islamism in the region. The Iraq example has scared them, and they seem to be backing away from an early propensity to promote regime-change at any cost, even if it meant a period of chaos. Their "damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead," mentality is giving way to a more cautious "change Syria's behavior" approach. This is in line with Secretary Rice's formulation.

The evidence of for this change of heart comes from Richard Perle, the dean of neo-cons, who recently was quoted in al-Sharq al-Awsat to say that that "We do not support a change in Syria that would transform it from a secular dictatorship into a religious dictatorship." Here is the article: ريتشارد بيرل لـ«الشرق الأوسط»: لن ندعم تغييرا في سورية ينقلها من ديكتاتورية علمانية إلى ديكتاتورية دينية (Thanks to Camille-Alexandre)

Here is Samir's article:

Syria: a Monopoly on Democracy
BY SAMIR AITA
Le Monde diplomatique
English language edition
July 2005

After 40 years the dominant role played by Syria's Ba’ath party is under threat. The crisis has been aggravated by events in neighbouring Lebanon from which Damascus has had to withdraw its troops, but its real causes are internal.

It is a long time since political debate in Syria has been so open. Everything is up for discussion — particularly the United States’ invasion of Iraq and the resistance it has met; and the promised post-Saddam democracy, now bogged down in ethnic and religious complexities. Syrians want more political rights, freedom and reform, but without US-inspired “constructive instability”. They understand that before there can be democracy there must be a state; but they want a state that isn’t dominated by a corrupt government or by US tanks. The mood in the country has become sombre, particularly since the collapse of the French alliance and the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.

It is worth recalling how Syria was built upon a democratic compromise after the first world war. France wanted to divide the country into separate states along religious and regional lines (Damascus, Aleppo, the Alawites, the Druze). The various political elites joined to achieve total unification (1936-42). They overrode popular opposition and conceded the creation of an independent Lebanon, including four districts that had previously depended on Damascus, to avoid the creation of an intractable confessional Lebanese state, with a Maronite majority, on Syria's borders. The democratic compromise took into account the strong regionalism that existed, particularly around Damascus and Aleppo, and opened the way to a range of political parties which, though populist, had no religious or regional ideology. The Ba'ath party emerged from this process.

Throughout the six decades since independence, the people of Syria experienced only a dozen years of real political freedom. This period was broken by a series of coups (1949-1953) that resulted from the struggle for influence among western powers, and by the union with Nasser’s Egypt (1958-1961), forced through by Syria’s leaders. Syria's awakening democratic tradition had proved itself capable of energy and originality: Syria's political parties and some members of the armed forces had assembled at Homs in 1953 to “thank” the dictator Adib Shishakli (1949-53) and, uniquely for an Arab country at the time, to organise free elections in which the Muslim Brotherhood and the communists each secured a seat. But the young democracy was not immune from anti-colonial and social unrest, external cold war rivalries and particularly from the politicisation of the army.

However, despite these problems, the period saw the creation of the main institutions of the Syrian state (in 1953 it was the first Arab country to establish a central bank), high rates of economic growth and the democratisation of education and health.

Few Syrians today, particularly the young, know much about this period. They grew up in the shadow of Hafez al-Assad, who established a stable and authoritarian regime in 1970 when his “correction movement” ousted a rival Ba'athist military regime that had taken power through a military coup six years earlier. Assad used part of the country’s Alawite community to assert his domination (1).

Stability under Assad came at a price. At first the regime allowed some latitude to the urban bourgeoisie and included a few political parties in a National Progressive Front. Then came the 1973 October war with Israel (also known as the Ramadan or Yom Kippur war). Syria came through this ordeal in a spirit of national unity, but that unity fractured in 1976 with Assad's intervention in Lebanon against the Palestinian resistance and its leftwing allies. The regime harshly repressed demands to end the state of emergency (2) that came from a movement rooted in civil society, including professional unions (lawyers, engineers, etc) and political parties outside the front, whose members rotted for decades in prison.

The situation deteriorated further when Syria was shaken by a wave of attacks by radical Islamists, supported by the rival Iraqi Ba'ath party under Saddam Hussein. Syria came close to civil war with the massacres at Palmyra (1980) and Hama (1982). The Sunni bourgeoisie went on strike but then, in Damascus, decided to compromise rather than destroy the nation.

Syria was plunged into darkness. The long black years were marked by family rivalries within the Assad clan, particularly involving the president’s brother Rifaat, and by confrontations with the US, France and Britain. Syria supported the Iranian revolution of 1979 and built an alliance with the Soviet Union. Despite a unanimous Arab boycott of Egypt, which had unilaterally made peace with Israel at Camp David in 1979, Syria remained isolated from its neighbours. But the regime survived, even after the defeat of the army when Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982 and managed to establish itself as a leading player in Lebanese politics.

A first turning point came in 1986. Bankruptcy forced the government to promote agricultural production, even offering financial support to former landowners damaged by agrarian reform. Private companies benefited from the liberalisation of foreign trade. The regime secured the country’s food supply and restored its relationship with the middle classes. At the same time, although formally rejecting any assistance from international financial institutions, the regime voluntarily introduced a structural adjustment programme of the sort favoured by the International Monetary Fund. Soon all that remained of Syrian socialism was its single party and its state bureaucracy.

There was another turning point in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin wall, when Syria made an unpopular U-turn by joining the coalition against Saddam. It seemed a glorious new dawn. The 1989 Taif accord brought peace to Lebanon and international acceptance of Syrian control. Negotiations began with Israel for the return to Syrian sovereignty of the Golan Heights, which Israel had occupied since the Six Day war of 1967. Thanks to the first liberalisation reforms and oil exports, economic growth accelerated.

But this slight improvement did not last. Syrian agencies in Lebanon and a section of the nomenklatura got involved in the questionable business deals on which the Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri built his reconstruction policy. And the Middle East peace process stalled when Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Barak, went back on a deal that Assad had hoped to make his lasting legacy: Assad had gone to Geneva in March 2000 in a final determined attempt to reach a deal with US president Bill Clinton. The failure of that meeting came as a huge shock. Maybe the US and Israel had decided that the “lion” of Damascus was too old to make peace; or maybe they reckoned that the perpetuation of instability served their interests better.

Assad died soon after, in June 2000. A quick rewrite of the constitution allowed his son, Bashar, to succeed him as president, despite his youth. The international community turned a blind eye. US secretary of state Madeleine Albright attended Assad's funeral and approved the succession; the French president, Jacques Chirac, did the same. Bashar's inaugural speech roused hopes, particularly among Syrians and Lebanese, that things were finally about to change for the better. People began to dream of restored freedoms, of economic reforms bringing work and prosperity, and of a new international image.

But, five years on, nothing much has changed. The new president had to deal with the fall-out from 9/11. The Syrian regime, which escaped the Islamist jihadism experienced by its neighbours, regarded the US conquest of Iraq less as the removal of a rival than as the destruction of one of its few secular Arab neighbours. Like other states bordering Iraq, Syria profited from sanctions-busting. It joined France, Belgium and Germany in opposing the United Nations Security Council endorsement of the US war. Faced with the fait accompli, it hoped, like France and Germany, to take a stabilising role in Baghdad, particularly since it had maintained links with Iraq’s Ba'athist, as well as tribal and religious, leaders.

But the Bush administration wasn’t interested. Its battle was ideological. It increased pressure on Syria, particularly with the adoption by Congress in November 2003 of the Syria Accountability Act (3). In May 2003 Colin Powell had said that the Syrian regime had its fingers in three different pies — Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine — and the US would cut them off. In reality the US didn’t much care about democracy in Syria and never applied the sanctions the act provided against members of the regime. Instead, the Syrian state and economy were destabilised when President Bush imposed commercial sanctions, and accused the principal public bank, which held most of Syria's currency reserves, of money-laundering. The Syrian government remained convinced that the US was mainly interested in the rise of Islamist hostility in Iraq and among the populations of its allies, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, origin of the 9/11 attackers. It vainly offered the US a series of proposals and goodwill gestures in areas that included security.

The real shock came when Bashar al-Assad’s ally, France, made a spectacular reversal in its Lebanon policy. In June 2004 Chirac made a suggestion to Bush: a Security Council resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon. This brought events in Lebanon to a head, precipitating this year's “cedar revolution” and the departure of the Syrian army.

It is still difficult to be certain of the reasons for the French change of policy. Was it the result of a reassessment of developments in Iraq? Or a commercial dispute with the Syrian power system over a gas contract? Was it to do with some special relationship with Rafik Hariri? Or did Chirac have deeper reservations about his protégé?

Chirac may initially have dreamed of emulating the role played by François Mitterand in post-Franco Spain, by mentoring Syria’s economic and democratic transformation. He had greeted Bashar with great ceremony in 1999, long before he became president. There were further visits in 2001 and 2002. Chirac had also lent explicit support to administrative and legal reforms and to the EU-Syria Association Agreement (Syria is the last Mediterranean country to sign such a free trade agreement with Europe).

But this reform deal was doomed from the start: by excluding the political arena, it ignored the fundamental nature of the regime. For in Syria, as in almost all Arab countries, the power system has become a separate institution from the state. Centred on the presidency and intelligence chiefs, it can only function by weakening the state and leaving ministers and administration a limited margin for manoeuvre. Political life is reduced to a single party, used by the regime as an instrument of hegemony in its internal struggles. Reform remains impossible while this fundamental dichotomy persists. In Syria, it was the power system that put Bashar in place and continues to hold him hostage. Unwittingly, Hafez al-Assad had set a trap for his son.

Withdrawal from Lebanon has been a major blow to Syria’s position in the region, and it has exposed the system to public scrutiny: people at all levels of Syrian society are now openly questioning the entire system. Bashar al-Assad’s investiture has reopened political debate, although that may not have been his intention. In 2001 there was a short-lived “Damascus spring”, with calls to lift the state of emergency and restore freedoms. But the government soon cracked down, particularly when the Ba'ath party itself joined the criticism.

The next three years ended hopes that economic reform might accelerate, in the absence of meaningful political and institutional changes (the famous Chinese model). In an attempt to resolve the crisis, Bashar al-Assad called a party congress this June, promising a qualitative leap forward in reform. There was a renewed sense of hope. For constitutional change is a necessary precondition for ending both the Ba'ath monopoly over "the state and society” (article 8) and the “socialist” character of the economy, commonly understood as state capitalism (article 13). Opposition groups have sought to create alliances within the Ba'ath party and also within the Muslim Brotherhood, provided that both are prepared to accept secularism and democracy and acknowledge past mistakes, so that things can move forward from the sombre past. National reconciliation is crucial.

The party congress had mixed results. It was preceded by a symbolic crackdown on Syria's last democratic discussion group, the Atassi Forum (named after a former Ba'ath political personality who refused to play along with Hafez al-Assad) and serious attempts to seduce the business community. Discussions inside the congress dealt with most of the points raised by Syria's internal debate: the state of emergency, public freedoms, the separation of powers between state institutions, the nature of the economy, the status of Syria's Kurds. The congress also sacked the party’s old guard. But it disappointed expectations on three essential points: the principle of alternation of the political system, the reform of the state and the process of national reconciliation. Worse, the heads of the security services were brought into the party leadership and any dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood was ruled out of question.

It is still too early to analyse the long-term effects of this process, especially since the US has an interest in keeping the current, much-weakened regime in power. Any rapid democratic and secular transformation would go against US interests and be at odds with the confessional and ethnic concept of stateless “democracy” emerging in Iraq and Lebanon. Even so, many Syrians continue to believe that such a transformation remains possible. It already has a symbol: jasmine.

Samir Aita is an economist and chairman of A Concept mafhoum,
http://www.mafhoum.com

Translated by Donald Hounam


Notes:
(1) The Alawites, to which the Assad family belong, are a Muslim sect, an offshoot of Twelver Shi'ism; they are 11% of Syria’s population and mostly live in the mountains of the same name.
(2) The state of emergency, which is still in force, dates to 1962. It was reactivated by order no 2 of the coup of 8 March 1963.
(3) This act enabled the US president, should he feel it necessary, to introduce sanctions to meet any danger that Syria continued to present in the administration’s eyes.
(4) Since 1980 membership of the Muslim Brotherhood has been punishable under Syrian law by death.