Assad’s Legacy

The Tutsis and the Taliban

Before pondering on Syria’s future, predicting what lies ahead for the exhausted Syrians, it is helpful to ascertain how Syria arrived at its immobilized condition. Dramatic headlines of atrocities, in which the narratives do not always correspond to the headlines and do not accurately characterize the Assad regimes, cannot explain the rise and fall of the Baathist Party and its Alawite leadership. For commercial reasons, the media has simplified Syrian history of the last 50 years. The public is not given history; the public is served stories of “dark crimes,” tragic ends,” “horrifying truths,” and “murderous rampage.” You tube viewing governs reports.

The decades of Assad regimes, their rise and abrupt fall, beg a brief analysis. Assad rule and Baathist Party operation were more than glaring headlines. A narrative, different from the easily accepted, explains why Bashar al-Assad quickly packed his bags and sought a new life in wintry Moscow, and how a former al-Nusra leader catapulted into the vacated leadership.

Who is Syria, what was she?
From polished media accounts and opinions of one-sided political experts, removing the Assad regime is the first step for obtaining a unified and democratic nation. Entering a political vacuum, where a previously united Syria is fractured, 1/3 of its population floats in the ether, and institutions have names and uncertain functions is more a misstep than a first step. The Assad dynasty unified a Syria that the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement artificially created for France. Before 2011, functioning governmental, economic, and social institutions existed.

Unlike several Middle East nations, theocracy and kingdom rule were abolished. Similar to other Middle East nations, freedoms and democracy were lacking. The Bashar al-Assad government needed changes in its operating environment and not replacement to a broken system. It needed international institutions to assist in advancing the economy and not impediments that injured the people. It needed foreign governments to subdue internal and external hostility and not heighten discontent. Battling the external amplifies the control of the internal. Reducing the former reduces the latter. Syria of the Assads had prominence, essentials with which to work, and a base for further development. Post-Assad reaches back to 1946, starts from confusion, and enters an unknown.

History shows the Assads as leaders that were battered by events, fearful of consequences, and mistrustful of citizenry. History shows the United States and its allies failed to understand the problems that Syria faced, treated the country as another battleground in geopolitical wars, and were hypocritical and uncaring for the Syrian people.

A February 1993 Atlantic article, Syria: Identity Crisis, describes the major problem facing all Syrian governments.

In the center was Damascus, which together with the cities of Homs and Hama constituted the heartland of the Sunni Arab majority. In the south was Jabal Druze ("Druze Mountain"), where lived a remote community of heterodox Muslims who were resistant to Damascene rule and had close links across the border with Transjordan. In the north was Aleppo, a cosmopolitan bazaar and trading center containing large numbers of Kurds, Arab Christians, Armenians, Circassians, and Jews, all of whom felt allegiance more to Mosul and Baghdad (both now in Iraq) than to Damascus. And in the west, contiguous to Lebanon, was the mountain stronghold of Latakia, dominated by the Alawites, the most oppressed and recalcitrant of French Syria's Arab minorities, who were destined to have a dramatic effect on postcolonial Syria.

Freya Stark, a British diplomat, said of the French mandate, "I haven't yet come across one spark of national feeling: it is all sects and hatreds and religions."

The Baathists gain power.
Identity and tribal rivalries were not the principal problems facing the new Syria. Separation between the ownership of land and the cultivator, of, “He who owns does not work, and he who works does not own,” maintained liberal and oligarchic regimes. From Raymond Hinnebusch, Syria: Revolution from Above, (2001), Routledge, p.20.

An estimated three thousand families owned half of the land in Syria. The middle class owned the majority of small to medium properties. Some two-thirds of peasants were landless. Agricultural revenues were highly skewed – the top two percent of the population received 50 percent of the income, while the middle class (merchants or middle landowning groups), which was 18 percent of the population, earned 25 percent of agricultural revenues. The bottom 80 percent received the remainder.

The Ba'ath Party emerged from the economic disparities and political turmoil that continually gripped the newly formed Syria. An ideological mix of pan-Arabism, Arab socialism, and anti-imperialism heralded a single unified state for the Arab world. After a brief and failed flirtation with pan-Arabism, where Syrians shared their Arab heritage and the nation joined (1958-1961) with Abdel Nasser’s Egypt in the United Arab Republic, the Ba'ath Party came to absolute power. Its 1963 military coup, the March 8 Revolution, harvested the most significant reason for the eventual rise and fall of the Assad regimes. The Atlantic explains: “But more significant than its ideology was the ethnic makeup of the corps of officers now in control: because of the assiduous French recruitment of minorities—especially Alawites—into the Troupes Speciales du Levant, the Alawites had, without anyone's noticing, gradually taken over the military from within. Though Alawites constituted just 12 percent of the Syrian population, they now dominated the corps of young officers.” A policy of staffing the armed forces with Alawite relatives and friends close to the members of a later established Military Committee increased the domination.

Alawite officer, Hafez al-Assad, achieved recognition by his participation in the 1963 Syrian coup d'état, from which he emerged, at the age of 33, commander of the Syrian Air Force. Another coup, in 1966, gave Hafez al-Assad the defense minister position, changed the leadership of the Ba’ath Party to a more radically leftist position, and its ideology to an extreme socialist economic program. Due to his Alawite friends gaining a commanding position in the military, Hafez al-Assad quickly rose in the Ba’athist government’s military. His next step to authoritarian power came from an uncharacteristic and unprepared quirk —refusal to follow Syrian army orders and help the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in its battle with the Jordanian government, which brought a dismissal from his post. From Raymond Hinnebusch, Syria: Revolution from Above, (2001), Routledge, p.56.

The duality of power came to a head as a result of “Black September” of 1970 when the radicals ordered military intervention in Jordan in defence of Palestinian fedayeen under attack by King Hussein. When Asad, deterred by US and Israeli threats, refused to commit air power in support of Syrian tanks, allowing Jordan to rout them, and then ordered a series of military transfers neutralising the last military supporters of the radicals, the party leadership called an emergency party congress and dismissed him and his ally, Chief of Staff Mustafa Tlas, from their posts. Asad responded with a military coup deposing the radicals and bringing his own faction to sole power.

The 1970 coup soon brought a centralized presidential system with Hafez al-Assad as absolute authority. From another perspective, it gave Syria its first stable government after achieving independence.

The new president was not a late twentieth century Kemal Ataturk, leading his backward country into the twenty-first century. Nor was he a fumbling tyrant, enriching only himself, his cronies, and a sycophant family. Sometimes, there is no alternative to making deals in order to gain trusted support and bring finances and investment to a weakened country. Corruption there is, but a small corruption that beings large dividends is often the cost of doing business…in all countries.

From day one of his power, real, possessed, and rationalized motives guided President Hafez al-Assad. The Alawites who controlled the nation were still a minority; creeping freedoms meant ultimate freedoms; ultimate freedoms meant his eventual replacement; and, from past experiences, replaced Syrian governments meant displaced lives.

Islamic control in daily life of most citizens possessed Assad. Looking south toward other Arab regimes, he saw theocratic regimes, where Sunni Islam dominated the people and Christians prayed in silence. An immediate challenge to the Ba’ath government had occurred in 1964 in Hama. Rebels received encouragement from the Imam of the Sultan Mosque and received finances from the city's more traditional merchants. The revolt almost toppled the Ba'athist regime. To Assad, allowing Islamic officials into majority positions meant trouble for all religions and reduction of the Alawites to second-class citizens.

The January 31, 1973 Constitution removed the requirement that the president of Syria must be a Muslim. Disturbing events, which occurred afterwards, increased Assad’s alarm. Angry demonstrations by the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, Homs, and Aleppo portrayed Assad as the "enemy of Allah and called for a jihad against his rule.” Assad relented and restored the presidential requirement.

Islamist resistance to the Assad government grew in 1979-1981.

After the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Muslim groups instigated uprisings and riots in Aleppo, Homs and Hama. The Muslim Brotherhood attempted to topple the Assad regime with targeted killings, guerrilla warfare and large-scale uprisings. Between 1979 and 1981, Muslim Brotherhood militants killed over 300 Assad supporters in Aleppo alone; Syrian forces responded by killing 2000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In February 1982, a month-long siege by the army suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood attacks on the government and the uprising in the city of Hama. An estimated 10 000 to 25 000 civilians were killed.

For his entire rule, Assad highlighted the regime’s constant state of war with Israel. This fixation allowed him to rationalize a perpetual state of emergency, which limited press freedom and permitted political dissidents to be tried in security courts that operated outside the regular judicial system.

The fall of the Assad dynasty related to the same factors that permitted its rise. Alawite control of the officer corps and a motivated Alawite soldiery, willing to sacrifice themselves to protect their gains, enabled the Assads to control a divided population. No well-motivated organization, or any that had sufficient external assistance, existed as a viable contender for power. In 2011, Bashar Assad still had a credible army, the Republican Guard (an armored division) and the Fourth Armored Division under the direct command of his brother, Maher Assad, and special forces units of roughly 15,000 personnel, a sufficient and reliable support that was able to subdue localized oppositions.

The militant opposition that arose in 2011 was brutally repressed. The Syrian Free Army, founded during 2011 by defected officers from the government forces and composed of a coalition of decentralized Syrian opposition rebel groups were contained until…until they received assistance from Turkey, ISIS entered the country, al-Nusra came to life, and a U.S. supported Kurdish YPG opened another battle front. The multitude of battlefronts, external assistance to the rebels, and motivated and “unafraid to die” Islamic groups overwhelmed the limited number of Syrians committed to preserve the government. Attrition by battle casualties and decreased morale in the Alawite enlisted personnel left military regiments with insufficient fighters. Russian airpower, Iranian advisors and weapons, and Hezbollah foot soldiers filled the void and claimed victory. After the battleground cleared, the victors were apparent — Russian airpower, Iranian advisors and Hezbollah foot soldiers. After the victors departed, no motivated military force, willing to fight for a predominantly Alawite regime was left. HTS just had to wait for its day and the sun shined brightly for the rebels on that day.

All types of arguments, evidence, accusations, facts, rumors, and charges concerning the Assad regimes may have some truth. However, they arrive from agendas and contradict on another. The truth is whatever anyone wants to believe. Several parameters have prominence and provide a more balanced judgement.

Economic and social statistics deny the assertion that the Assads “starved the people” while only enriching a few. Except for a brief period, when “Syria's economic boom collapsed as a result of the rapid fall of world oil prices, lower export revenues, drought affecting agricultural production, and falling worker remittances, UNICEF statistics show that Gross Domestic product (GDP) grew substantially during Hafez al-Assad’s rule and rapidly during Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Electricity generation, a good indication of a regime’s attention to an essential for its people and its industry, monotonically increased during the Bashar years.

Positive trend in under-five mortality rate in the Syrian Arab Republic is shown from the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation. Mortality rate in 2010 was about the same as Algeria and Indonesia, and much better than India (29.1/1000).

Similar to almost all other nations that emerged from the British and French World War I agreements, which modeled Middle East and East African boundaries to their advantage, and similar to the new nations that arose after World War II, Syria had its ethnic rivalries, authoritarian governments, brutal repressions and civil war. Regard, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Koreas, Libya, Sudan, Egypt, Somalia, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria. No pardoning excuse for the decades of repression in Syria; just a note that name any country in any hemisphere and you will find periods of repression, and mayhem, with the United States subjugation of indigenous Indians, enslavement of African Blacks and wars on peoples from the Artic to the Antarctic, and from New York and around the world to San Francisco, leading the marauders. Selective attention to the Assads’ repressions ignore the magnitudes greater repressions occurring in the West Bank and Gaza, in Myanmar, in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other places. Selective attention is hypocritical and provides excuses for all human rights violations.

The Tutsis and the Taliban
The domination of Syria by an Alawite minority (14 percent of the population) is not unique. It has a mirror image in Rwanda. In that African nation, a minority Tutsis (12 percent of the population) seized power due to their domination of the military. The minority Tutsis have controlled the government for decades in a single party system, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and with one authoritarian leader, Paul Kagame. Freedom House annual report summarizes the Kagame regime.

While the regime has maintained stability and economic growth, it has also suppressed political dissent through pervasive surveillance, intimidation, arbitrary detention, torture, and renditions or suspected assassinations of exiled dissidents.

Paul Kagame and the RPF are unchallenged and for good reason ─ the government has given the people the economic and social progress they desire. Glaring reasons for the survival of Kagame’s Rwanda government and the fall of Assad’s Syrian government include the facts that U.S. has not contradicted the Tutsi regime in Rwanda and not supported those who want to replace Kagame and has never supported the Alawite regime in Syria and provided sustenance to those who opposed Assad.

Assad’s successor government also has a “look alike.”
The Taliban’s revival and swift takeover of Afghanistan resembles the blitz that Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) accomplished in Syria. Similar to the Taliban presenting itself as a “new Taliban,” as a more tolerant religious identity, HTS has presented itself as a “makeover” from the violent and intolerant al-Nusra. In the incipient years of the new Afghanistan government, the “new Taliban” has not shown much difference from the “old Taliban.” Peace and security, reduction of corruption, improvements in primary school education and ease of travel throughout the country have resulted from the Taliban having more control than before the U.S. invasion. The more significant elements that characterize the Taliban have returned — deterioration in the rights of women and severe restrictions on political and media freedoms.

In the French film, Valmont, womanizer Valmont asks his female alter ego, “Can a man who has continually seduced women change?” She answers. “Yes, he can change, he can become worse.” Can HTS, a successor to the al-Nusra front change for the better, or will it eventually become worse?

Conclusion
If Syrians had the opportunity to choose between the Syria of 2010 and the knowledge that the civil war would lead to the Syria of 2024, between a united and sustained Syria with a basic economy and limited freedoms and autocratic control and a Syria of 600,000 killed, five million internally displaced, two million as refugees, and an economy in shambles, which Syria would they have chosen? Is this another, “We had to let them destroy themselves in order for them to save themselves,” or, “To have them live in peace, we had to encourage them to split into pieces?”