The People Want by Gilbert Achcar

Author:Gilbert Achcar [Achcar, Gilbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saqi Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Provisional Balance Sheet No. 6: Syria

In Syria, as in Bahrain – notwithstanding the difference between the two countries’ political systems, one a tribal monarchy, the other a military-Baathist dictatorship – the government is based on a sectarian minority. Arab Sunnis, an institutionally privileged minority in Bahrain, are a majority in Syria, where they make up more than 70 percent of the total population on the estimate of demographer Youssef Courbage.54 Syria’s Alawite minority, which, again according to Courbage, comprises a little over 10 percent of the population, is not institutionally and legally privileged. To codify Alawite privileges in that way, the Assad dynasty’s regime would have needed to be even more tyrannical than it already is, given that Alawites represent a much smaller minority in Syria than do Sunnis in Bahrain.

While there is both de facto and de jure sectarian discrimination in Bahrain, the Syrian state is theoretically egalitarian as far as the country’s Arab citizens are concerned. (Since the core of the Baath’s official ideology is Arab nationalism, this official equality before the law does not extend to Syria’s Kurds, many of whom were denied citizenship until the 2011 uprising. The Kurds, a large majority of whom are also Sunnis, constitute a national minority; they are oppressed in Syria, as they are in Turkey and Iran.) Indeed, Hafez al-Assad went so far as to conform to the Sunni faith in public, official practice, so as to accommodate the religious denomination of the majority of the population. The Syrian regime’s sectarianism is based not on religion, but on community, in the sense that the ruling clan, the extended Assad family, bases its power on the Alawite ‘asabiyya55 – while simultaneously exploiting the various tribal ‘asabiyyat among the Alawites themselves – in order to make sure that it has the allegiance of the state’s hard core: the elite troops and the regular army’s officer corps.

The preponderance of Alawites among army officers, from non-commissioned officers to the highest levels of the military hierarchy, came about gradually in the course of the 1960s: it was not the result of a premeditated, organised operation, but stemmed from social and political factors that Hanna Batatu has studied in great detail in an excellent book.56 Thus it precedes the 16 November 1970 reformist coup d’état, known as the “Corrective Movement” (al-Haraka al-Tas’hihiyya), in which Hafez al-Assad, then defence minister, seized power, purging the army and Baath party of the radical left faction to which Assad himself had once belonged. His putsch was, moreover, viewed much more positively by Sunnis, especially the Sunni urban bourgeoisie, than by his co-religionists.

The elder Assad was a shrewd Bonaparte – the most Machiavellian leader in contemporary Arab history, in both the positive and pejorative sense of the reference to the author of The Prince. He consistently saw to it that he was surrounded by well-placed Sunnis who had a direct interest in maintaining the government’s stability for the sake of the material privileges that they derived from it. However, he kept

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