Understanding Syria: From Pre-Civil War to Post-Assad

This is an excellent background on the problems in Syria. It includes maps and graphs. What has Assad done to make things better? What has Russia done to meet the challenges in Syria? When can the Syrian refugees return home?

Understanding Syria: From Pre-Civil War to Post-Assad


How drought, foreign meddling, and long-festering religious tensions created the tragically splintered Syria we know today.

William R. Polk first wrote for The Atlantic during the Eisenhower administration, with a report in 1958 about tensions in Iraq. Soon after that, he was recruited from a teaching position at Harvard to work on the State Department’s Policy Planning staff in the Kennedy administration. In the years since, he has written and taught extensively about international affairs, especially in the Middle East.

Now he offers an updated report on the grim prospects in Syria. Like his previous offerings, it is long and detailed—but as with the others, it offers both a coherent perspective and a myriad of facts and insights you will not find elsewhere. —James Fallows

Geographical Syria

Syria is a small, poor, and crowded country. On the map, it appears about the size of Washington state or Spain, but only about a quarter of its 185,000 square kilometers is arable land.

That is, “economic Syria” is about as large as a combination of Maryland and Connecticut or Switzerland. Most is desert—some is suitable for grazing but less than 10 percent of the surface is permanent cropland.

Except for a narrow belt along the Mediterranean, the whole country is subject to extreme temperatures that cause frequent dust storms and periodic droughts. Four years of devastating drought from 2006 to 2011 turned Syria into a land like the American “dust bowl” of the 1930s.

That drought was said to have been the worst ever recorded, but it was one in a long sequence: Just in the period from 2001 to 2010, Syria had 60 “significant” dust storms.

The most important physical aspect of these storms, as was the experience in America in the 1930s, was the removal of the topsoil. Politically, they triggered the civil war.

snip

Last year, according to the World Bank, agriculture supplied about 20 percent of national income (GDP) and employed about 17 percent of the population.

Before the heavy fighting began, Syrian oil fields produced about 330,000 barrels per day, but Syrians consumed all but about 70,000 of that amount. Sales supplied about 20 percent of GDP and a third of export earnings.

Production subsequently fell by at least 50 percent, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Syria’s oil is of poor quality, sour, and expensive to refine. Industry, (mainly energy-related) employed about a third of the adult male population and provided a similar percentage of the national income. Before the war, moves were being made to transport oil and gas from farther east across Syria to the Mediterranean; obviously, these projects have been stopped.

Now there is a sort of cottage industry in crude refining of petroleum products for local use and smuggling.

continued

http://www.theatlantic.com/internat...yria-from-pre-civil-war-to-post-assad/281989/

 

FYI..............

 

The matter of polio is covered in this background piece on Syria.

Understanding Syria: From Pre-Civil War to Post-Assad - The Atlantic



www.theatlantic.com/.../12/understanding-syria...post-assad/281989/






Dec 10, 2013 - How drought, foreign meddling, and long-festering religious tensions created the tragically splintered Syria we know today.

 

Syria is not just a piece of land; it is densely populated. When I first visited Syria in 1946, the total population was less than 3 million. In 2010, it reached nearly 24 million. Thus, the country offered less than 0.25 hectares (just over a third of an acre) of agricultural land per person.

Considering only “agricultural Syria,” the population is about five times as dense as Ohio or Belgium, but it does not have Ohio’s or Belgium’s other means of generating income. If the population were much smaller, Syria could have managed adequately but not, of course, richly.

 

The bottom line is that the population/resource ratio is out of balance. While there has been a marginal increase of agricultural land and more efficient cropping with better seed, neither has kept up with population growth. Moreover, as the number of people in the country has increased, they have been unable to agree on how to divide what they have. So it is important to understand how their “social contract”—their view of their relationship with one another and with the government—evolved and then shattered.

The Syrian Heritage

Since before history was written, Syria has been fought over by foreign empires—Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Persians, Macedonian Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Turks, British, and French. Only during the Umayyad Caliphate in the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. was it the center of an empire. But that relatively short period left Syria with its Islamic heritage. For many centuries, the society has been overwhelmingly Muslim.

Syria also has historically been a sanctuary for little groups of peoples whose differences from one another were defined in religious and/or ethnic terms. Several of these communities were “leftovers” from previous invasions or migrations. During most of the last five centuries, when what is today Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire, groups of Orthodox, Catholic, and other Christians; Alawis, Ismailis, and other sorts of Shia Muslims; and Yazidis, Kurds, Jews, and Druze lived in enclaves and in neighborhoods in the various cities and towns among Sunni Muslim Arabs.

During Ottoman rule the population was organized in two overlapping ways. First, there was no “Syria” in the sense of a nation-state, but rather provinces (Turkish: pashaliqs) that were centered on the ancient cities. The most important of these were Damascus, which may be the oldest permanently settled city in the world today, and Aleppo. The concept of a state, much less a nation-state, did not enter into political thought until the end of the 19th century. Inhabitants of the various parts of what became Syria could move without feeling or being considered alien from one province of the Ottoman Empire to the next.

Thus, if the grandfathers or great grandfathers of people alive today were asked about what entity they belonged to, they would probably have named the city or village where they paid their taxes.

 

Second, throughout its centuries of rule, the Ottoman Empire generally was content to have its subjects live by their own codes of behavior. It did not have the means or the incentive to intrude into their daily lives.

Muslims, whether Turk or Arab or Kurd, shared with the imperial government Islamic mores and law. Other ethnic/religious “nations” (Turkish: millet) were self-governing except in military and foreign affairs. The following map is modern but shows approximately the traditional distribution of minority groups in enclaves scattered throughout the area that became Syria.

French Syria

During the First World War, Great Britain and France were at war with the Ottoman Empire, which had sided with Germany and Austria. The war was hard fought, but long before victory was in sight, the British and French concluded what became known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement to divide the Middle East between them. Britain subsequently made other, conflicting deals with the leaders of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire that would have modified the agreement, but France insisted on effecting most of its terms. (Subsequently, France lost to Britain the mainly Sunni Muslim Arab and Kurdish area of what was to become northern Iraq.) The map on the right shows how the Middle East was to be divided among the Great Powers. Most of what became Syria is shown as “Zone A” on the map, which the French gave to the British at the peace conference to remind them of the deal.

During the latter part of the war, the leaders of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire established a kingdom at Damascus and at the Paris Peace Conference sought recognition of their independence. France was determined, however, to effect its deal with Britain, so in 1920 it invaded and “regime-changed” the Damascus government, making Syria a de facto colony of France but legally, under the League of Nations, a “mandate.” The terms of the League mandate required France to prepare it for independence, but the French showed little intention to do that. They spent the next three years actually conquering the country and reformulating the territory.

First, the French created a “Greater” Lebanon from the former autonomous adjunct provinces (Turkish: sanjaqs) of Mount Lebanon and Beirut. To make it their anchor in an otherwise hostile Levant, they aimed both to make it Christian-dominated and big enough to exist as a state. But these aims were incompatible: the populations they added, taken from the pashaliq of Damascus, were mainly Muslim, so the French doomed Lebanon to be a precariously unbalanced society. Then they split Syria into detached administrative units: In 1921, they separated Alexandretta, in the northwest, and later ceded it to Turkey (where it was renamed Hatay); they split off the hinterland of the port of Latakia, a partly Alawi area, and in 1922 briefly made it a separate state; and they made the Druze area (Jabal ad-Druze) in the southwest an autonomous part of their colony. Finally, they divided the two major cities, Damascus and Aleppo, making each the capital of its neighborhood.


None of these divisions worked, so the French reversed course. They united the country as defined in the mandate but attempted to change its social and cultural orientation. Their new policy aimed to supplant the common language, Arabic, with French, to make French customs and law the exemplar, to promote Catholicism as a means to undercut Islam, and to favor the minorities as a means to control the Muslim majority. It was inevitable that the native reaction to these intrusions would be first the rise of xenophobia and then the spread of what gradually became a European style of nationalism. It is thus in the 1920s and 1930s that we can begin to speak of the concept of Syrian statehood. Indeed, a sense of statehood and nationhood were the major ideas that emerged from the First World War and were popularized during the period of French rule.

When French policies did not work and nationalism began to offer an alternate vision of political life, the French colonial administration fell back on violence. Indeed throughout the French period—in contrast to the relatively laissez-faire rule of the Ottoman Empire—violence was never far below the outward face of French rule. The French bombarded Damascus, which they had regime-changed in 1920, in 1925, 1926, and 1945, and they pacified the city with martial law during most of the “peaceful” intervals. Constitutions were proclaimed periodically, only to be revoked, and independence was promised time after time until it was finally gained—not by the Syrians nor given by the French but bestowed on Syria by the British army. Because the French administration was under the control of the Vichy government and had abetted German activities, the British invaded in 1941 and overthrew Vichy France’s administration. However, they left behind the “Free French” who continued essentially the Vichy regime. The last French soldier did not leave until April 17, 1946, which became Syria’s national day.

It is not unfair to characterize the impact of the 26 years of French rule thus: the “peace” the French achieved was little more than a sullen and frustrated quiescence; while they did not create dissension among the religious and ethnic communities, the French certainly magnified it and while they did not create hostility to foreigners, they gave the native population a target that fostered the growth of nationalism. These developments have lingered throughout the last 70 years and remain powerful forces today.

Syrian Independence

As it took hold of at least educated Syrians, nationalism may have been emotionally satisfying, but it did not prove to be an organizing principle. Even spurred by it, Syrians did not grasp the means to control their destiny. So, in the years after the French were forced out, coup leader after military dictator spoke in nationalist rhetoric but failed to lead his followers toward “the good life.” Finally, in 1958, the one coherent, powerful, and mobile force, the army leadership, threw the country into the arms of the one Arab leader they admired and trusted, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. They thought and hoped that Egypt, always the bellwether of the Arab world, could give them stability. So, for three and a half years, Syria became a part of the United Arab Republic. Despite the media view of the event, Nasser was a reluctant participant in Syrian affairs and set what turned out to be unacceptable terms, including the withdrawal of the army from politics and the holding of a referendum. Union did not work, so in 1961 Syrians were thrown back on their own resources. A fundamental problem they faced was what it meant to be a Syrian.

The majority of those who became Syrians were Arabic-speaking Sunni Muslims. Since the road to worldly success was through the Arabic-speaking army or bureaucracy, Syrians, like the inhabitants of empires throughout Asia, found conversion to Islam and becoming Arabic-speaking—if they were not already members of this community—attractive. The earliest estimates we know suggest that between seven and eight in 10 Syrians saw themselves as Muslim Arab—and, under the growing influence of nationalism, saw being a Muslim Arab as the very definition of Syrian identity.

What was unusual about Syria was that the other two or three in 10 Syrians did not feel the same way. As in Ottoman times, they continued to live in economically autarkic areas of the countryside and in quarters of most of the cities and towns of the country. Nationalists took this diversity as a primary cause of weakness and adopted as their primary task integrating the population into a single political and social structure.

But the nationalists were deeply split. The major Islamic movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, argued and fought for the idea that the nation must be Arab Sunni (or “Orthodox”) Muslim. Minorities had no place except in the traditional and Ottoman sense of “protected minorities.” The more conservative, affluent, and Westernized nationalists believed that nationhood had to be built not on a religious but on a territorial base. That is, single-state nationalism (Arabic: wataniyah) was the focus of Syria’s statehood. Their program, however, did not lead to success; its failure opened the way for a redefinition of nationalism as pan-Arab or folk nationalism (Arabic: qawmiyah). As it was codified by the Baath Party, it required that Syria be considered not a separate nation-state but a part of the whole Arab world and be domestically organized as a unified, secular, and at least partly Westernized state. This was a particularly difficult task because the dominant Muslim community, initially as a result of French rule and later as a result of domestic turbulence and foreign interference, regarded the members of the minority communities, particularly the Jewish community, as actual or potential turncoats.

Looming over Syrian politics and heightening the tensions among the contenders for dominance throughout the post-war period has been the modern, powerful, and American-supported state of Israel; regular wars between Syria and Israel began in 1948, almost before either state had achieved full independence, and were repeated in 1967 and 1973. Border clashes, informal fighting, and limited ceasefires were interspersed among these major confrontations. And since 1967, Israel has occupied the 1,200 square kilometers (460 square miles) of Syrian territory known as the Golan Heights. In 1981, Israel proclaimed that it had annexed the territory, a move not recognized by the U.S. or other states, and moved nearly 20,000 settlers there. Meanwhile, intermittent peace talks have been secretly held from time to time without result. A ceasefire, negotiated in 1974, has held, but today the two states are still legally at war.

The Assad Regime

It was in answer to the perceived weakness of Syrian statehood and the disorder of Syrian political life that the first Assad regime was established in 1970 by Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current leader. The Assad family came from the Alawi (a.k.a. Nusairi) minority, which includes about one in eight Syrians and about a quarter of a million people in both Lebanon and Turkey. Like the Jews, the Alawis consider themselves the “chosen people,” but they are regarded by Orthodox Muslims as heretics. Under Ottoman pluralism, this mattered little, but as Syrians struggled for a sense of identity and came to suspect social difference and to fear the cooperation of minorities with foreigners, being an Alawi or a Christian or a Jew put people under a cloud. So, for Hafez al-Assad, the secular, nationalist Baath Party was a natural choice: it offered, or seemed to offer, the means to overcome his origins in a minority community and to point toward a solution to the disunity of Syrian politics. He therefore embraced it eagerly and eventually became its leader. Consequently, to understand Syrian affairs, we need to focus on the party.

Thus, Saddam became as much the ogre in the bestiary of Hafaz al-Assad as he later became in America’s.

The “Resurrection” (Arabic: Baath) Party had its origins, like the nationalist-communist Vietnamese movement, in France.

Two young Syrians, one a Christian and the other a Sunni Muslim, who were then studying in Paris were both attracted to the grandeur of France and appalled by the weakness of Syria. Like Ho Chi Minh, they wanted to both become like France and get the French out of their nation. Both believed that the future lay in unity and socialism.

For Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar, the forces to be defeated were “French oppression, Syrian backwardness, a political class unable to measure up to the challenge of the times,” according to the British journalist Patrick Seale’s account in The Struggle for Syria.

Above all, disunity had to be overcome. Their answer was to try to bridge the gaps between rich and poor through a modified version of socialism, and between Muslims and minorities through a modified concept of Islam. Islam, in their view, needed to be considered politically not as a religion but as a manifestation of the Arab nation.

Thus, the society they wished to create, they proclaimed, should be modern (with, among other things, equality for women), secular (with faith relegated to personal affairs), and defined by a culture of “Arabism” overriding the traditional concepts of ethnicity. In short, what they sought was the very antithesis of the objectives of the already-strong and growing Muslim Brotherhood.

Like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Baath Party spread among young students. When, as a young student myself, I visited Syria in 1950, I was astonished at how vigorous the student political movements were and how seriously, even violently, the students played a national role. Hafez al-Assad was one of the first student recruits of what would become the Baath Party, and quickly became a local hero for his dedication to its cause. As Seale describes, “He became a party stalwart, defending its cause on the street … he was one of our commandos.” And he almost paid with his life for his bravery when a Muslim Brother stabbed him. So, pardon the pun, his antipathy to the Muslim Brotherhood began early and went deep.

Like many young men of his generation, Hafez al-Assad first put his hopes in the military, which seemed, more than political parties, even the Baath, to embody the nation. He avidly studied his new profession and became a fighter pilot, but he quickly realized that the military was only a means of action and that what it did had to be guided by political ideas and organization. So, he used his military affiliation to energize his party role. This, inevitably, caught him up in the coups, counter-coups, and sundry conspiracies that engaged Syrian politicians and army officers during the 1950s and 1960s. Emerging from this labyrinth, he skillfully maneuvered himself into the leadership of his party and domination of the political and military structure of the country by 1971. And his assumption of the presidency was certified by a plebiscite in that year.

His survival, much less his victory, was nearly a miracle, but he had not managed to solve the fundamental problem of Syrian ethnicity and particularly the role of Islam in society.

This problem, which is so tragically and bitterly evident in Syria today, found an early expression in the writing of the new constitution in 1973. The previous constitutions, going back to French colonial times, had specified that a Muslim should hold the presidency. Despite his dedication to secular politics, Hafez al-Assad made two attempts to cater to Muslim opinion. In the first, he got the clause in the former constitutions conditioning the presidential office to a Muslim replaced by a redefinition of Islam of sorts. “Islam,” the new language stressed, “is a religion of love, progress and social justice, of equality for all…” Then, in the second move, he arranged for a respected Islamic jurisconsult (not from Syria but from Lebanon, and not a Sunni but a Shia) to issue a finding (Arabic: fatwa) that Alawis were really Shia Muslims rather than heretics. This was not merely an abstract bit of theology: as heretics, Alawis were outlaws who could be legally and meritoriously killed—as we have seen in recent events in Syria.

The Muslim Brotherhood was furious. Riots broke out around the country, particularly in the city of Hama. For some years, Assad managed to contain the discontent—partly by granting subsidies on food and partly by curbing the already-hated political police—but the fundamental issue was not resolved. Muslim Brothers and other disaffected groups organized terrorist attacks on the government and on Assad’s inner circle, killing some of his close collaborators and exploding car bombs at installations, including even the office of the prime minister and the headquarters of the air force. Assad was told that he would soon follow Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, killed by Muslim terrorists, into the grave. As it had been periodically during French colonialism, the whole city of Damascus came under siege. Finally, the Islamic forces were ready to challenge the regime in all-out war. An army unit sent into the Muslim Brotherhood stronghold in the city of Hama was ambushed. The local Muslim guerrilla leader gave the signal for a general uprising. Overnight the city was engulfed in a vicious, “no-prisoners” insurrection. The regime was fighting for its life. As Patrick Seale, the most astute observer of those events, has written, in words that also ring true for the events of 2013:


Fear, loathing and a river of spilt blood ruled out any thought of truce … that explain the terrible savagery of the punishment inflicted on the city. Behind the immediate contest lay the old multi-layered hostility between Islam and the Ba’th, between Sunni and ‘Alawi, between town and country…. Many civilians were slaughtered in the prolonged mopping up, whose districts razed, and numerous acts of savagery reported…. Government forces too suffered heavy losses to snipers and many armoured vehicles were hit by grenades in the rubble-strewn streets … between 5,000 and 10,000 [people died].

 

Read about the Assad regime and the Alawites.

 

Posted in August 2016.

 

1946 ???
72 Years ago !!
How old are you ??

 

I see your problem..

"William R. Polk first wrote for The Atlantic during the Eisenhower administration."

He has been visiting Syria since 1950.