SYRIA: IDENTITY CRISIS
by Robert D. Kaplan

Atlantic Online
April 5 2007

Hafez-al Assad has so far prevented the Balkanization of his country,
but he can’t last forever

On my first visit to Syria, in the 1970s, a tourist-information
official at Damascus airport handed me a map on which not only
the Israeli-held Golan Heights but also the Hatay region around the
ancient city of Antioch were depicted as part of the country. Wanting
to see Antioch, I asked the official about tours there. His reply
and apologetic tone gave me pause: "Unfortunately, sir, for the time
being it is not possible; maybe in a few months."

Located at the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea, the Hatay
is a 2,000-square-mile area where Arabs and Armenians once slightly
outnumbered Turks. In July of 1938 the Turkish army moved in, forcing
many of the Arabs and Armenians to flee, and preparing the way for
the Turkish government to annex the region. The French, who held the
mandate for Syria, did not protest, and the occupied population could
not. Thinking about this history in terms of the tourist official’s
sheepishness has since led me to wonder, How could the Syrians ever
acknowledge the 1967 loss of the Golan Heights when they don’t really
accept an older loss-one that, unlike the Golan Heights, has long
been officially recognized by the world community?

The answer is simply that they can’t. As the example of the Hatay
suggests, the loss of the Golan Heights was merely the latest of
several territorial truncations that underpin an explosive and
unmentionable historical reality: that Syria-whose population, like
Lebanon’s, is a hodgepodge of feuding Middle Eastern minorities-has
always been more identifiable as a region of the Ottoman Empire than as
a nation in the post-Ottoman era. The psychology of Syria’s internal
politics, a realm whose violence and austere perversity continue to
baffle the West, is bound up in the question of Syria’s national
identity. The identity question is important: events inside Syria
reverberate throughout the Middle East.

The word "SYRIA" is derived from the Semitic Siryon, which appears in
Deuteronomy in reference to Mount Hermon, which straddles the current
frontiers of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. From the early nineteenth
century until the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman
sultanate collapsed, the region that European travelers called Syria
stretched from the Taurus Mountains of Turkey in the north to Egypt
and the Arabian Desert in the south, and from the Mediterranean Sea
in the west to Mesopotamia in the east. Present-day Lebanon, Israel,
Jordan, western Iraq, and southern Turkey were all part of this vast
area. Syria was not linked to any specific national sentiment.

What sentiment did exist was pan-Arab. Indeed, the nineteenth-century
Syrian cities of Damascus and Beirut, with their secret cultural
and political societies, engendered the First World War Arab revolt
against the Turks. But the revolt, although it freed Arabia from
outside control, only complicated matters for Syria, whose proximity
to Europe left it particularly vulnerable to foreign exploitation.

Anglo-French rivalry for spoils resulted in a division of Syria into
six zones. A sliver of northern Syria became part of a new Turkish
state, which was being carved out of the old Ottoman sultanate
by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. (This area was separate from the Hatay,
whose annexation would come later.) Syria’s eastern desert became
part of a new British mandate: Iraq. Southern Syria, too, was soon
controlled by the British, who created two additional territories:
a mandate in Palestine and a kingdom in Transjordan, the latter ruled
by Britain’s First World War ally Abdullah, a son of the Sharif of
Mecca. The French got the territory that was left over, which they
in turn subdivided into Lebanon and Syria.

Lebanon’s borders were drawn so as to bring a large population of
mainly Sunni Muslims under the domination of Maronite Christians,
who were allied with France, spoke French, and though not exactly
Catholic had a concordat with the Holy See in Rome. Syria, Lebanon’s
neighbor, was a writhing ghost of a would-be nation. Although territory
had been cut away on all sides, Syria still contained not only every
warring sect and religion and parochial tribal interest but also the
headquarters, in Damascus, of the pan-Arabist movement, whose aim was
to erase all the borders that the Europeans had just created. Thus,
although it was more compact than the sprawling pre-war region called
Syria, the new French mandate with that name had even fewer unifying
threads. 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."

Each of Syria’s sects and religions was-as it largely still
is-concentrated in a specific geographical area. 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.

The Alawites, along with the Druzes and the Isma’ilis (still another
Muslim sect in Syria), are remnants of a wave of Shi’ism which
swept over the region a thousand years ago. The term "Alawite" means
"follower of Ali," the martyred son-in-law of Mohammed who is venerated
by millions of Shi’ites in Iran and elsewhere. Yet the Alawites’
resemblance to the Shi’ites constitutes the least of their heresies
in the eyes of Syria’s majority Sunni Arabs; far more serious is the
Alawite doctrine’s affinity with Phoenician paganism-and also with
Christianity. Alawites celebrate many Christian festivals, including
Christmas, Easter, and Palm Sunday, and their religious ceremonies
make use of bread and wine.

When the French took control of Syria after the First World War,
they were fresh from colonizing experiences in Algeria and Tunisia,
which had kindled hostility in them to Sunni Arab nationalism. In an
effort to forestall a rise in Arab nationalism, the French granted
autonomous status to Alawite-dominated Latakia and to Jabal Druze,
making their inhabitants completely independent from the Sunni Arabs in
Damascus, and answerable to the French only. The Alawites, the Druzes,
and the other minorities also paid lower taxes than the majority
Sunnis, while getting larger development subsidies from the French
government. What is more, the French encouraged the recruitment of
Alawites, Druzes, Kurds, and Circassians into their occupation force,
the Troupes Speciales du Levant. (From then on the military became a
popular career for poor rural Alawites bent on advancement in Syrian
society.) The majority Sunni Arabs, for their part, were severely
repressed. The Damascus region was treated as occupied territory
and patrolled by tough Senegalese troops, with help from Alawites,
Druzes, and Kurds. The Sunni Arabs felt besieged to a degree they
had never experienced under the Ottoman Turks.

Sunni paramilitary groups responded by organizing brawls and uprisings
against the French in the streets of Damascus. Arguably, not even
British Palestine, with its periodic outbursts of communal violence
between Arabs and Jews, was as tense and unstable a place as French
Syria, whose two colliding forces-minority self-determination and Sunni
pan-Arabism-were encouraged rather than restrained by French rule.

A myth persists about Syria, perpetuated in part by the American media,
which seem to lack historical memory, and in part by supporters of
Israel, who wish to distinguish starkly between the democracy of the
Jewish state and the nondemocracy of Arab states.

The myth is that Syria’s Arab inhabitants have experience neither
with democracy nor even with the rule of law. This is not true:
Syria gave democracy a try, against enormous odds.

Patrick Seale, a British specialist, chronicles the postwar period
in The Struggle for Syria. In July of 1947, soon after achieving
full independence, and with France’s divisive influence still strong,
Syria held elections. The results were predictable for a country that
had been created out of several rival political communities. The
National Party, led by Shukri al-Quwatli, got more votes than any
other group, but was able to form only a minority government. The
majority of the ballots went to various independents representing
sectarian interests. Beneath the surface the reality was even worse.

"I look around me," wrote Habib Kahaleh, in Memoirs of a Deputy,
"and see only a bundle of contradictions." Israel’s humiliation of
Arab armies in its 1948 War of Independence further weakened the
democratically elected government. When the Syrian chief of staff,
General Husni al-Za’im, staged a coup d’etat on March 30, 1949-the
first of many military takeovers in the postcolonial Arab world-crowds
danced in the streets of Damascus.

Za’im, like many Syrian leaders who were to follow him, was
exhibitionistic and extravagant, and lacked a coherent strategy for
reconciling the various local nationalisms of what used to be French
Syria. He was soon overthrown and summarily executed. The next military
regime held new national elections, but the vote was just as fractured
as it had been in 1947, and this democratic experiment, too, collapsed
into anarchy. The chaos ended in December of 1949, when Colonel Adib
al-Shishakli seized power. It was the third coup of the year.

Shishakli’s ability to restore order caused foreign observers to
hail him as the Arab world’s Ataturk, who would mold Syria into a
nation on the Turkish model. But it was not to be. Shishakli publicly
lamented in 1953 that Syria was merely "the current official name for
that country which lies within the artificial frontiers drawn up by
imperialism." Unfortunately for him, he was right. In 1954 Shishakli
was overthrown. Once again the dislodging force came from various
sectarian elements within and outside the military.

Meanwhile, an ideological solution to Syria’s contradictions began
to emerge. Ba’athism, from Ba’ath, Arabic for "renaissance," was
started by two Syrian Arabs, one Christian and one Muslim. The movement
appealed to a brand of patriotism both radical and secular, and sought
to replace religion with socialism. Whether Ba’athism was capable of
smoothing over sectarian divisions was tested in the fall of 1954,
a few months after Shishakli’s overthrow, when free parliamentary
elections were held. The results corroborated earlier evidence that
Western democracy was not necessarily the solution for the ills of
Arab societies. Although the largest number of parliamentary seats
again went to the tribal and sectarian independents, the biggest
gains relative to the 1949 ballot were registered by the Ba’ath Party,
which advocated a communist-style economic program and a pro-Soviet
foreign policy.

Syria teetered on, with Egypt, Iraq, the Soviet Union, and the United
States all interfering in its internal affairs. In January of 1958
the Syrians gave up. A delegation flew to Cairo and begged Egypt’s
leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to annex Syria as part of a new union,
the United Arab Republic. Shukri al-Quwatli, the Syrian President,
reportedly complained thus to Nasser about the Syrian people: "Half
claim the vocation of leader, a quarter believe they are prophets,
and at least ten percent take themselves for gods."

The United Arab Republic collapsed in 1961, partly because non-Sunni
Syrians increasingly resented the rule of Egypt’s own Sunni Arabs. In
1963 the Ba’ath Party finally came to power in Damascus in a military
coup. 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.

Another coup followed in 1966. But the coup of 1970, which brought
an Alawite air-force officer, Hafez al-Assad, to power, was what
finally ended the instability that had reigned in Syria since the
advent of independence.

Assad has now remained in power for twenty-two years. Considering that
Damascus saw twenty-one changes of government in the twenty-four years
preceding his coup, Assad’s permanence is impressive. It is still more
impressive when one realizes that he belongs to Syria’s most-hated
ethnic group-the group that has historically been suspected by other
Syrians of sympathizing with the French, the Christians, and even the
Jews. Daniel Pipes, a Middle East historian, writes in Greater Syria,
"An Alawi ruling Syria is like an untouchable becoming maharajah in
India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia-an unprecedented development
shocking to the majority population which had monopolized power for
so many centuries."

One rarely stated reason for the longevity of Assad’s regime-which
also applies to other Arab dictators who arose around the same time,
like Muammar Qaddafi, in Libya, and Saddam Hussein, in Iraq-is his use
of state-of-the-art electronic surveillance techniques and Soviet-bloc
security advisers: powerful, sometimes lethal tools that had not
been available to earlier dictators. (American diplomats familiar
with Syria in the 1950s describe it as a charming banana republic,
where the government’s attempts at surveillance had an amateurish,
comic-opera quality to them.) Assad’s extraordinary skill as a leader
is another reason why he has survived. For example, by patient trial
and error over the past seventeen years, he has won for himself the
role of de facto military overlord in Lebanon, thus effectively undoing
the French crime of separating Lebanon from the Syrian motherland.

However, Assad’s leadership ability notwithstanding, historical
evidence suggests that the Assad era, like the rule of communists in
Eastern Europe, is more a historical intermission than an indication
of enduring national unity.

The city of Hama, a traditional bastion of Sunni Arab strength, is a
case in point. In 1964 a revolt in Hama almost toppled the then current
Ba’athist regime, top-heavy with Alawites. Finally, in February of
1982, the Sunni Arab Muslim Brotherhood took control of the city and
murdered its Alawite-appointed officials. Sunni renegades had earlier
massacred Alawite soldiers in Aleppo. The roots of this violence lay
in age-old ethnic distrust, aggravated by Assad’s support during the
late 1970s of Maronite Christian militias in Lebanon, which Sunnis
in Syria saw as yet another Alawite-Christian conspiracy against
them. Assad reacted by sending 12,000 Alawite soldiers into Hama. They
massacred as many as 30,000 Sunni Arab civilians and leveled much of
the town. Hama in 1982 was proof that beneath the carapace of Assad’s
stable rule lay a seething region that was no closer to nationhood
than it had been after the Turks left, or after the French left.

Assad, though only in his early sixties, has often been reported to be
in ill health. However long he survives, Syria faces a day of reckoning
when his control over the country weakens. Though the American media
occupy themselves with Assad’s current shift toward moderation-Syria’s
participation in the peace talks, its more civilized attitude toward
Syrian Jews, and its seeming abstinence from anti-Western terrorism-the
question remains: Given Syria’s history up to this moment, do any of
these policy changes really matter? Syria, it is to be remembered, is
part of the same world as Yugoslavia: a former Ottoman territory that
has yet to come to terms with the problems of post-Ottoman boundaries.

Future scenarios for Syria resemble those predicted for Yugoslavia
during the Cold War years. From the standpoint of the present,
the scenarios always seem implausible. But from the standpoint of
historical process and precedent, they seem inevitable.

Syria will not remain the same. It could become bigger or smaller, but
the chance that any territorial solution will prove truly workable is
slim indeed. Some Middle East specialists mutter about the possibility
that a future Alawite state will be carved out of Syria. Based in
mountainous Latakia, it would be a refuge for Alawites after Assad
passes from the scene and Muslim fundamentalists-Sunnis, that is-take
over the government. This state would be supported not only by Lebanese
Maronites but also by the Israeli Secret Service, which would see no
contradiction in aiding former members of Assad’s regime against a
Sunni Arab government in Damascus. Some Syrians, such as the Muslim
Brotherhood, look forward to the collapse of both Israel and Jordan
and their reintegration into Syria, as they waited in the 1940s for
the incorporation into Syria of the autonomous states in Latakia
and Jabal Druze. Should Assad’s death lead to chaos in Damascus,
it is not out of the question that the region of Jabal Druze would
break away from Syria and amalgamate itself with Jordan. Because
Lebanon’s current stability rests upon Syrian military domination
there, a weakening of government institutions in Syria could result
in a renewal of the Lebanese civil war.

What Syria deep down yearns for-what would assuage its insoluble
contradictions-is to duplicate the process now under way in the
Balkans. That is, it wishes to repeal the political results of the
twentieth century-in Syria’s case, the border arrangements made by
Great Britain and France after the First World War. In the Balkans,
of course, "repeal" means the fragmentation of a larger whole into
its constituent parts, and that fragmentation is proceeding apace. In
Syria it means the opposite: the reconstitution of the whole out of its
constituent parts. Indeed, Syria wishes to return to a world where,
as Daniel Pipes says, it could be subsumed into an even larger whole
and become "a region that exists outside politics." This, after all,
is what lies behind its calls for "Arab unity." And nothing of the
sort will happen.

For the moment, then, Assad staves off the future. It is Assad, not
Saddam Hussein or any other ruler, who defines the era in which the
Middle East now lives. And Assad’s passing may herald more chaos than
a chaotic region has seen in decades.

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