Opinion This Syrian summer

You ask,what sort of state does this? What sorts of people leave their country’s most renowned political cartoonist with a broken hand on a side street to bleed? Ali Farzat was just doing his job: he published a cartoon showing Bashar al-Assad hitching an out-bound ride with Colonel Gaddafi. Farzat paid the price.

With at least 2,200 dead (UN figures),it is still not clear how the Syrian awakening,a product of the Arab Spring,will go. Despite calls from the international community for Bashar’s exit,he refuses to surrender power. Bashar maintains he was elected to power in 2007: he secured 97 per cent of the vote. He was also the sole candidate in the election. Even Iran’s Ahmadinejad has spoken out,calling for Bashar to head to the negotiating table: you know that when Iran speaks for basic freedoms something must have gone terribly awry in its ally’s political landscape.

Hama encapsulates the struggle and the city is not without history. In 1982 the elder Hafez al-Assad carpeted the city,choked the uprising and killed at least 10,000. Hafez was the engineer of the current political system and his son,Bashar,built upon it and how.

There is complete centralisation of power with the Assad clan: Maher al-Assad is the head of the Presidential Guard,an elite group of security forces. Bashar’s brother-in-law,Asef Shawkat,heads the military intelligence and they all come from the small Alawi sect — 12 per cent of the population. Crafty alliances,however,are the regime’s lifeblood: it is by capitalising alliances with the well-to-do Sunni majority that Bashar rules. But Syria is also a country where sectarian tensions are easily aggravated.

Again,Hama is an exemplary example. On the eve of Ramadan,the Syrian army raided Hama. Many died in the predominantly Sunni town and provoked ever-threatening sectarian repercussions. The Muslim Brotherhood accused the regime of “sectarian cleansing” and then news reports detailed attacks by Sunni extremists on Alawites. This retaliation enables Bashar to rule: it is either he (who can tame the minorities) or chaos.

This is not Egypt or Tunisia where the people spoke with one voice. The Sunnis themselves are divided. The wealthy Sunni merchant class in Damascus and Aleppo has the capacity to change the direction of this protracted revolution but thus far they have not joined others rising in the smaller,poorer locales. These gamechangers have sat silently on the fence,for life under Bashar is one of privilege. But this might soon change.

With the hard-hitting Western-imposed sanctions,the lives of the privileged are being threatened. A ministry of finance employee says the economic repercussions of the conflict are evident:

“I can’t spend on my Visa or MasterCard outside of central Damascus.” Lives were being disrupted: Syrian Airways has come to a halt due to an oil embargo,she explains. “Who is suffering,the politicians or the people?” she asks.

But she won’t take to the streets. In another conversation the Damascus interpretation of the struggle is laid out: that this is an engineered revolution by extremist elements who want to overthrow the state,cause chaos,incite rebellion. Susanna,a bank employee,explains how her small local supermarket owner was offered $500 to protest. “This is not a real revolution,” she says,but adds that reform is needed.

Syria faces another problem: the absolute absence of a genuine opposition. With membership or allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood punishable by death,the once powerful party can’t organise within the country. Most of the other would-be opposition leaders are in exile and despite the attempted formation of a national transitional council; there is an absence of a coordinated view on a post-Assad Syria.

As the feel-good phase of the Arab Spring ends it ushers in the second phase. A longer,protracted struggle and a slow degradation of the Syrian regime.

express@expressindia.com