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http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=12970
As protests continue, the specter of sectarian strife looms.
Margot Patterson | AUGUST 15, 2011
the cover of America, the Catholic magazine
A lmost five months after the Syrian uprising began, the regime of the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, and the protesters seeking to bring it down remain locked in a mortal and painfully protracted struggle. The current military attacks on the cities of Hama and Deir al-Zour mark another bloody turn in the stalemate. Since they erupted in March, the protests have grown and spread. The regime has not been able to suppress them, but neither have the protesters brought down the regime.
In Syria, a French religious who has lived there for many years describes this fraught period in the country’s history: “Information is very contradictory and each person recounts what he has seen and heard and has a tendency to generalize: an incident or attack is presented as if it is like that everywhere. There is nothing clear, either in the news or in its interpretation. Who shot first? Who responded? Who is aiding the conflict from outside?”
Concerns about the future are particularly keen among religious minorities, who have supported the Assad regime since it came to power in 1970.
If those in Syria find it hard to discern what’s going on, observers outside the country are at an even greater disadvantage. The scarcity of independent reporting, the contradictory information that comes out from the government and the protesters, and the fluid, chaotic events on the ground make for a confused and confusing picture of what is taking place in Syria. Western news media have focused on the courageous defiance of the protesters and the violence of the government crackdown, but relatively little attention has been paid to the context in which the protests are taking place or their effect on a country that has prided itself on its secular government and its tolerant, pluralistic society. Inside and outside of Syria, some wonder if it will remain so.
Fawaz Gerges, the director of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics, visited Syria recently and reports that many Syrians are “terrified of the morning after.”
“The silent majority, more than 50 percent, remain on the sidelines,” he says. “The silent majority worries about descending into all-out war like neighboring Iraq and Lebanon. That’s what the Assad regime is capitalizing on. It’s capitalizing on the fact that the silent majority will not only remain passive but basically support the existing power structure.”
Assad and Religious Minorities
Syria is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society; it include Arabs, Kurds, Circassians, Armenians and a variety of faiths and sects. Concerns about the future are particularly keen among religious minorities, who, together with a prosperous Sunni merchant class, have supported the Assad regime since it came to power in 1970. The Assad family are Alawites, a historically poor and disenfranchised minority in Syria comprising about 12 percent of the population. Another 10 percent of the Syrian population are Christian, who range from Greek and Syrian Orthodox to Melkites, Armenian Catholics, Assyrian Catholics, Maronites, members of the Armenian Apostolic Church and a smattering of Protestants. Druze account for about 3 percent of the population, with smaller number of Shi’ites and Yazidis. About 74 percent of the population are Sunni Muslims.
With protesters calling for the downfall of the Assad regime, religious minorities are nervous of what will follow should the regime fall—and what kind of treatment they will receive in the interim.
“The regime has positioned itself as the protector of minorities. There are fears within Christians, Druze, Alawites that if the regime falls, there may be vengeance,” says Mohamad Bazzi, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “There may be Islamists or Islamist-learning figures who take power; there may be score settling.”
Members of the Syrian opposition say that such fears are unfounded. They point to the fact that the opposition draws from all sects, including Christians and Alawites. They emphasize Syria’s long tradition of religious pluralism and speak of the spirit of unity prevailing among the demonstrators. The Friday protests have been given different names to express the inclusivity of the protesters and the diversity of their backgrounds. Thus, Azadi Friday was named for the Kurds, after the Kurdish word for freedom. The Friday protest on Easter weekend was called Azime Friday, “Great” or “Good” Friday, in honor of Christians. Protest organizers have been quick to suppress signs of sectarianism among the demonstrators. At one point the Facebook group The Syrian Revolution 2011, which has more than 200,000 followers and has played an important role in the uprising, listed a code of ethics against sectarianism.
Like other Arab countries roiled by protests this year, Syria has a young population and high unemployment. Since coming to office following his father’s death in 2000, Bashar Al Assad has liberalized Syria’s command economy, a move which has led to increased corruption and a growing gap between rich and poor. Neither the opposition nor the government is talking much about what could be done to improve Syrians’ economic prospects, however, and the economic grievances fueling protests across the Middle East have received relatively little attention in the West.
Since the protests began, Assad has made some concessions to demonstrators’ demands—lifting emergency rule, for instance—and has promised more even while his government continues to respond to the protests with lethal force. In addressing Syrians, he emphasizes unity, security and stability, warning that if Syrians divide along sectarian lines, they will fall prey to Saudi fundamentalists or to the “Zionist agenda,” to civil war and to outside powers that will then have their way with Syria. The choice he outlines is between Syria becoming a political football, like Iraq and Lebanon, or being an active player on the regional and international scene.
It’s an argument that still holds purchase for a lot of Syrians.
In response, members of the opposition accuse the government of promoting the very sectarianism it condemns. “The regime is playing on sectarian fears, especially among the Alawite community,” says Radwan Ziadeh, the founder in Syria of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies and the executive director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Concerns in Washington, D.C.
Ziadeh says the diversity and unity of the protesters guarantee that Syria will not fall into sectarian conflict after the Assad regime falls: “The uprising in Syria is across the sects. Christians have been killed in the uprising. Alawites have been killed. This is why it is clear there will not be any religious clashes.”
But fears of sectarian strife remain, and while members of the opposition play down this possibility, many observers warn that it is still a threat.
“I think the risk is real, particularly for the Alawites in terms of vendettas and retribution for the crackdown in recent months and for past actions,” says David Lesch, the author of The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria. “It could be potentially dangerous for other minorities, Christian minorities and Druze, who have tended to side with the regime and whom the regime has courted over the years and co-opted into supporting the government.”
The opposition wants to de-emphasize the risk of civil strife because it wants international support, Lesch says. Conversely, he argues, the Syrian government has a motive to play up the risk of conflict so that the international community will not support regime change.
The Fate of Christians
Those who work with Christian communities in Syria report that Christians are anxious. Vivian Manneh, the emergency regional manager for Catholic Relief Services, works with churches in Syria to provide assistance to Iraqi refugees living there. She visited Syria in June and again in July.
“It’s very sensitive the whole situation for Christians,” Manneh says. ”They feel that minorities are protected under the current regime. They are worried about what is happening and how this is going to affect them. A lot of people I talked to were saying the demonstrators are not coming with a clear agenda of what they want. If they want to change the regime, okay who is the alternative? What is the request? It’s not clear what their demands are.”
An old saying in Syria—that the Christians run between the legs of the Sunnis and the Alawites—describes the cautious behavior Christians usually have adopted in steering their path through Syrian society. But the middle road is not necessarily a safe one in revolutionary times. That some Christian bishops and clerics in Syria have expressed public support for the Assad regime has already evoked criticisms from some Syrians warning that the Sunni majority will remember Christian support for Assad’s “misrule.”
How Sunnis would treat Christians in a post-Assad Syria is an open question.
“On the surface, we say there are excellent relations between all Christians and Muslim groups, but if the regime is not there anymore, would that be sustainable?” says Michel Constantin, who helps direct the Catholic Near East Welfare Association’s programs for Christians in Lebanon, Egypt and Syria. “We don’t really know the feeling of the Sunnis towards the Christians. We know relations between Christian in general and Alawites will sustain because they are both minorities.”
On both sides of the conflict, views have hardened. Just four months ago, Bashar Assad was seen as a young and popular leader whose country was unlikely to see the kind of turmoil affecting Egypt and Tunisia. The initial demands of the protesters were for reform, not for revolution. But the many killings and arrests by the government have radicalized the demonstrators and the ongoing turmoil has had a similar effect on regime supporters. A posting on the blog Syria Comment by a young American living in Syria testifies to the extreme views each side is developing of the other.
In his post, the American writes of a Christian couple who supports the government crackdown in Dera’a. For the wife, Najwah, “the city of Dera’a has become a single entity containing one kind of people: bad. For her, the terrorist persuasion of the people in that community now justifies virtually any action against them.” In talking to Najwah, her American friend realizes he is witnessing “the kind of passive approval for massacres that one reads about in history books, when individuals or groups become convinced of the evil of another and of the necessity of wiping them out. Najwah is not an evil woman, but the people of Dera’a have become completely vilified in her mind, and she fears them.”
Radical Divide
As this blog post underscores, polarization along sectarian lines is growing in Syria, expressed in subtle and not so subtle ways. The opposition is accusing the government of using Alawites to kill Sunnis, a charge that is incendiary yet not without truth, as the Alawites hold key positions in the military and security forces and the regime has often used predominantly Alawite forces to confront the protesters. With Iran and Hezbollah supporting the government, the opposition has turned against both and burned the flag of Hezbollah as well as the Russian flag—an attempt by the opposition to demonstrate it rejects the entire foreign policy of Syria.
Particularly alarming to Christians and Alawites was a chant heard among protesters on the outskirts of Damascus: “Christians to Beirut and Alawites to the grave,” a slogan that could hardly help from sending a shiver of apprehension through both communities.
In fact, though they publicly abjure sectarianism, both the opposition and the regime seem at times to be playing to sectarian undercurrents. As a minority regime, the government cannot risk offending the Sunni Muslim majority; however, in a move that seems aimed at scaring secular Sunnis as well as religious minorities, the government has highlighted the presence of extremist Islamist groups among the protesters. For its part, the opposition sometimes makes use of freighted language that plays on anti-Alawite or anti-Shi’ite sentiment, thereby capitalizing on Sunni-Shi’ite hostility that has worsened throughout the Middle East since the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
As hopeful signs, however, Syrians can point to both the remarkable discipline and unity the protesters have shown so far and to Syria’s history as a welcoming community to many different sects and faiths. A large Armenian Christian community lives in Syria, the descendants of refugees forced out of the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian genocide. Assyrian Christians persecuted in Iraq in 1933 sought shelter in Syria. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, about a million Iraqi refugees have found safe haven in Syria, including most of the Iraqi Christians forced to flee. Syrians point out that Syria’s first post-colonial prime minister was a Christian.
Syria does not have any history of sectarian violence or religious conflict,” Radwan Ziadeh says. While true, others say sectarianism is never buried too far below any political question in Syria. While Syrians may wish to see themselves as superior to their Iraqi and Lebanese neighbors, whose political conflicts have spun into sectarian civil war, the same sectarian division threaten to tear at the communal fabric.
The important question, Fawaz Gerges argues, concerns not so much the degree of sectarianism in Syria as why it is on the rise now. Syria has always been one of the most nationalist and least religious societies in the Middle East, he notes. But in moments of tension, people fall back on familiar affiliations, whether it is the church or the mosque. The sectarian divide in Syria is real but masks the greater fault lines that are economic and political—divides that in the last six or seven years have become particularly pronounced.
“One of the major blunders of the current regime is that it has allowed a tiny business minority to suck the blood out of the veins of the Syrian economy. This has fueled the current tensions,” Gerges says. “The sectarian tensions are also fueled by the economic and social tensions. There are many poor Alawites, but most of the poor tend to be Sunnis.”
A Missed Chance
Is a dialogue between the protesters and the regime still possible? Opposition members say a prerequisite for dialogue is an end to violence against protesters. Some opposition leaders say it is too late for dialogue; too much blood has been spilled by the government. Between an emboldened opposition and a government that has acted brutally and clumsily, prospects for dialogue seem tenuous.
“At this stage, I really doubt that there is anything the Assad regime can do to satisfy the appetites of the opposition. The more he offers, the greater the appetite of the opposition because the opposition now is no longer interested in tinkering with the system, they want to overhaul the system,” Gerges says.
Reports of arms flowing into Syria from Iraq and Lebanon, with Syrians crossing the border to stock up on Mi6s, AK-47s and Kalashnikovs, raise concerns that violence could escalate. Sectarian killings in Homs several weeks ago are a disturbing sign of where the conflict could go. On both sides, there is fear. Demonstrators fear that if they stop their demonstrations, the regime will crack down even harder on them, tracking them down and punishing them. Safi says the government’s policy of talking softly and carrying a big stick has sowed mistrust.
The supporters of the regime have their own fears, from worry about political and economic uncertainty to larger fears of social upheaval, economic collapse, ethnic cleansing and war.
Can Syria escape this last fate? Opposition members say it can. Revolutions are unpredictable, and the end game is still not in sight, but they may have the chance to prove their case.
Margot Patterson is a freelance journalist who traveled to Syria in March.
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