Although the fear of a disproportionately harsh regime response to mass protests certainly played a role in discouraging large-scale demonstrations following the Hama massacre, the differentiated positions of the local elites seem to have played an even more important role. According to the former Vice President Khaddam, what made the scale of the Hama revolt possible was the strong local alliance struck between Akram al-Hawrani’s powerful peasant movement, the urban merchants, the Ikhwan and the rural notables.72 The rich landed Hamawite families which formed the core of the local elite until the mid-1960s had been so hurt by the Ba’athist land reforms that, by the late 1970s, they had joined the anti-regime protests, providing money and weapons to the protesters, thereby indirectly encouraging the radicalization of the opposition movement.73 In Aleppo, the situation had been very different. Local demands voiced by the Aleppine elite were partially met by a Ba’athist regime striving to negotiate its way between repression and conciliation. While several hundred Aleppines were arrested or killed after the March 1980 protests, the regime also sent a message of conciliation by dismissing the Governor of Aleppo, a brutal Ba’athist officer whose rural roots in the region of Deir ez-Zoor had irritated many in the northern metropolis. Instead, an Aleppine lawyer was nominated in a move thought to appeal to the Lawyers’ Union which had been very active in the anti-regime protests. By nominating as mayor of the city an Aleppine architect with much influence in Damascus, the regime also strove to appease Aleppo’s cultural and political elite which had been resentful of the way the previous urban policies had been carried out locally.74
Despite sporadic attacks, Damascus remained relatively quiet throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. A few spontaneous protests broke out, led by the religious Zayd movement and souk merchants, but these were swiftly repressed by the Defence Companies of Rif ’at al-Assad, Hafiz’s brother, who had been entrusted with keeping the capital safe from protests. According to Abdel Halim Khaddam, it was clear for many inside the Ba’ath that Damascus constituted a “red line”75 which the protesters could not be allowed to cross; if they did, they could very well drag down the entire regime. This is perhaps why Hafiz al-Assad, aware of the Ba’ath Party’s lack of popularity inside the capital, endeavoured to co-opt the Damascene economic and political elite in the early 1970s. Prominent Sunni Damascenes were nominated to key posts in the bureaucracy and the security services. In addition, their proportion inside the Regional Command of the Ba’ath Party rose from 2 per cent in 1963 to 25 per cent in 1976.76 Most visibly, the local merchants of the Damascus Chamber of Commerce brought their unconditional support to the Ba’athist regime in exchange for a lifting of restrictions on the import and export of goods, precisely at a time when the Aleppo souk traders were starting a long strike.77
By 1982, the regime had managed to reassert its authority over the whole country. The urban uprisings which had swept through Syria’s major centres, Aleppo and Hama in particular, had been put down by conciliation, repression, or a combination of both. Local elites played a significant role in every city by stirring up or calming down the popular anger expressed by the urban population. By the early 1980s, however, the confrontation between the Islamist opposition and the Ba’ath regime had become so intense that it had alienated large corners of Syrian society. The Islamic movement, which had led the anti-regime protests, had become dominated by a new generation of radical activists who increasingly employed heated religious rhetoric and were even prepared, if deemed necessary, to resort to political violence to achieve their goals—thus putting the country on the brink of a sectarian civil war.
4
“A MINORITY CANNOT FOREVER RULE A MAJORITY”
By the late 1970s, much of the Islamic opposition to the Syrian Ba’ath had become framed in sectarian terms. This reflected an effort on the part of some Islamic militants to portray the struggle against the regime as a “Sunni awakening” which, by making it clear to the country’s primarily Alawi leaders that “a minority cannot forever rule a majority”, was drawing mass support from Syria’s largely Sunni Muslim population—whether pious or not. Deliberately exposing the “sectarian face” of the regime would broaden the scope of popular support for the Islamic movement. Even though this strategy was the work of only a handful of radical activists, a self-described “vanguard” whose overtly sectarian outlook and violent militancy would bring the country to the verge of civil war, it managed to exacerbate the struggle between a popular Islamic opposition and a regime keen to reinforce its power base by drawing increasing support from its key constituencies—the country’s minority religious communities in general and the Alawis in particular.
Those militants who strove to put forward such a sectarian strategy will be the topic of Chapters 5 and 6. This chapter will primarily examine the socioeconomic, religious and political dynamics which led to the emergence of an environment propitious to the rise of a radical and sectarian Islamic trend—thereby providing a sought-after opportunity for the regime to use overwhelming force to crush not only these militants but also the wider Islamic and non-Islamic opposition to Ba’athist rule. It is also important to note that the sectarian tone assumed by the Islamic opposition was not a purely religious phenomenon arising from Ibn Taymiyya’s earlier condemnations of the Alawis. Rather, it reflected the increasingly vocal bitterness felt by Syria’s Sunni majority at the concentration of power in the hands of a selection of Alawi officers. Whether or not the ascent to power of the “Nusayris”, as the minority community is often referred to negatively in Islamic literature, was part of an “Alawi plot” destined to take over Syria will be debated in this chapter.
It is also worth noting that understanding the historical background against which the sectarian struggle developed in late 1970s Syria—a country long hailed as exemplary for the peaceful coexistence of religious minorities—is also key to analysing the contemporary implications of a conflict revived by the regime’s crushing of the Syrian opposition in 2011 and 2012.
Sunnis and Alawis: a history of mistrust
If the Ba’athist officials of Alawi faith have sometimes been described as the “Mamluks of modern times”,1 it is because the community to which they belong has historically been one of the most oppressed and marginalized of all social groups in Syria before some of its members took over the most significant political, economic and military Syrian institutions in the mid-1960s—much like the Mamluks did in thirteenth century Egypt.
The Alawis, comprising approximately 11.5 per cent of the Syrian population, form part of a religious community heavily concentrated in the small mountain villages spread throughout the Latakia region in the north-west of the country. Fitting the traditional pattern of socioeconomic and political dominance of Middle Eastern cities in the countryside during Ottoman times, the Alawi peasants cultivated the soil of the upper-class Sunni and Christian landowners from the towns of Latakia, Jablah and Banyas, in exchange for an often meagre income. Their living standards were never enviable. According to the author Hanna Batatu, a researcher who studied the social roots of Syria’s ruling class in great detail, “the conditions even of the more independent and less downtrodden Alawi peasants in the inaccessible mountainous regions became so deplorable that they developed after World War I the practice of selling or hiring out their daughters to affluent townspeople.”2
In addition to being economically dominated by the urban center, the Alawis traditionally suffered a measure of social and religious oppression from the ruling Sunnis, representing 69 per cent of the Syrian population, who at times accused the minority religious community of being “heretical”. The doctrine of the Alawis, founded in the tenth and eleventh centuries as an offshoot of Shi’ism, evolved over time to include elements thought to be inspired by Greek philosophy, Phoenician Paganism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity.3 In practice, this has meant that the Alawis have subscribed to unorthodox views such as believing that Ali is the incarnation of God himself, adopting the idea of a di
vine triad and adhering to the concept of an esoteric religious knowledge which can only be revealed to a few.4 Several works published in the 1930s and 1940s go as far as strongly suggesting that Alawism has encouraged wine-drinking, male sodomy and incestuous marriages among the members of this community.5 Whether an accurate reflection of reality or not, such perceptions gained ground and encouraged the discrimination perpetuated by many orthodox Sunnis against those whom they saw as being “heretical Alawis” who did not belong to Islam. Crucially, the longstanding Sunni disdain for Alawi beliefs and practices was also theologically backed by a fatwa (“religious ruling”) from the medieval Syrian scholar Ibn Taymiyya. In Taymiyya’s view,
these people called Nusayriyya […] are more heretical than the Jews and the Christians and even more than several heterodox groups. Their damage to the Muslim community […] is greater than the damage of the infidels who fight against the Muslims such as the heretic Mongols, the Crusaders and others. They do not believe in God […]. They are neither Muslims, nor Jews, nor Christians.6
Socially marginalized, economically exploited and religiously isolated, the Alawis saw the advent of the French Mandate in Syria (1920–1946) as an opportunity to obtain autonomy in the region of the Jabal al-Nusayriya, surrounding Latakia, where they formed 62 per cent of the local population. The French quickly realized the opportunity to use Alawi resentment against the rest of the Syrian population and pursued a policy of divide-and-rule aimed at curbing the rapidly expanding Arab nationalist movement, led in Syria by Sunni and Christian intellectuals. However, by briefly providing the Alawis with a country of their own, “the State of the Alawis” (1920–1936),7 the French ended up reinforcing the longstanding mutual distrust between Sunnis and Alawis—the former accusing the latter of being traitors to the Arab cause and pro-Western in their orientation. In fact, the British Embassy in Damascus reported the “constant visits”, between 1941 and 1945, that the military and political officers of the French Consulate in Latakia paid to Suleyman al-Murshid, a popular Alawi leader seeking independence for his province—offering to clandestinely supply him with 3,000 rifles, it was reported.8 In fact, it is believed that French help to Alawi separatists continued until after Syria’s independence—and was then still significant to the extent that it pushed the central government in Damascus to issue a decree declaring the Alawi region as “a forbidden area in which foreign consuls should not exercise any of their functions”.9 On the whole, British diplomats concluded with a zest of irony that “the French have for some time been working for unity among the Alawis, but not for unity with the rest of Syria.”10
The Sunnis, who had managed to perpetuate their economic dominance throughout the French Mandate era and had been at the forefront of the independence struggle, inherited the political institutions of Syria in 1946.11 According to a foreign observer, Sunnis have since that time shown a “regrettable tendency to assert [the domination of their community] at the expense of other communities”.12 They quickly destroyed the remnants of the “State of the Alawis”, crushed the separatist Alawi rebellion led by Suleyman al-Murshid and re-integrated the region of Latakia into the whole of the country. By then, Sunni resentment at Alawi separatism had become such that, in the vote on a law abolishing the autonomy of their region, the Alawi members of parliament in Damascus did not even dare to vote against it for fear of retaliation against them. Indeed, a British diplomat reported in March 1946, “When the resolution […] was passed in the Syrian Chamber of Deputies on December 19th, only two Alawi Deputies happened to be present and they both declared subsequently that the nationalist feeling during the sitting was so strong that it would have been impossible for them to make any protest without endangering their lives.”13
By 1947, Sunni political dominance over the Latakia region, and therefore, over the Alawis had become so significant that it led the Oriental Secretary and the Military Attaché of the British Embassy in Damascus to note, after a tour of north-western Syria, that “it was noticeable that all the senior Government officials were Sunni Muslims and that Alawis were largely shut out from posts of responsibility.”14 This was a state of affairs a leader of the security services in Latakia did not try to deny, explaining to a British diplomat who, in turn, reported the content of the conversation to London:
He said that the Alawis were dissatisfied that the Syrian government had given most of the government posts in the region to Sunni Muslims of Latakia and Tartous. He explained that it was difficult, however, for the government to do otherwise since for the past twenty years the Alawis had generally co-operated with the French against the central government whereas the Sunni Muslims of Latakia and Tartous had not done so; it was therefore natural that the central government would appoint to government posts the people on whom they had learnt to rely.15
This was, of course, something the most influential Alawi figures of the region were not prepared to accept. They accused the central government of exercising “uncontrolled authority in the area”, carrying out “malpractices” and “withholding the constitutional rights from the Alawi people”.16 On the whole, they remained “deeply distrustful of the intentions of Sunni Muslims”,17 a British diplomat concluded.
Discriminated against in political, religious and socioeconomic terms, many Alawis left their countryside during the immediate post-independence period in order to join two of the few institutions providing them with upward mobility and inside which their power would ultimately prevail after the coup of 8 March 1963: the army and the Ba’ath Party. It was through their prominent position in these two key institutions that members of the Alawi community would become the new masters of Syria. To paraphrase the author Martin Kramer, the situation thus seemed rich in irony: the Alawis, having been denied a state of their own by the Sunni nationalists, were about to take all of Syria instead.18
The “revenge of a minority”?
Scholars of Syrian politics have long debated the extent to which the Alawi-dominated Ba’ath regime was consciously driven by a purely sectarian motivation. Some, such as Annie Laurent and Matti Moosa, have argued that the Alawis’ ascent in the Ba’ath regime was always part of a “plan for a future takeover of the government”19 in order to get their “revenge”.20 Others, such as Daniel Pipes, agree and have gone as far as quoting alleged clandestine meetings of Alawi leaders in the 1960s to demonstrate that, from the very beginning, sectarian loyalties shaped the nature of a regime which, in his view, would ultimately become an “Alawi dominion”.21 But was the Alawis’ ascent to power really the product of a conscious attempt at enhancing their communal power?
In many ways, it can be seen as only natural that the growing Alawi resentment at the Sunni domination over the country would find its expression through the armed forces and the Ba’ath Party. The latter had been established as a political platform by Salah Eddine al-Bitar and Michel Aflaq, of Sunni and Christian confessions respectively, in a move symbolizing the Party’s attachment to the notion of a secular state in which “Arabness” rather than religion would bind citizens together. The secular aspect of Ba’athist ideology was to prove quite attractive to religious minorities such as the Christians, Druzes, Ismailis and Alawis. Indeed, according to an analysis provided by a British diplomat posted in Damascus in 1947, religious minorities were at the time increasingly worried by the emergence of a growingly vocal Islamic current in post-independence Syria.22 Furthermore, the Ba’athist blend of revolutionary socialism and pro-rural bias which emerged out of the 1953 alliance with Akram al-Hawrani proved attractive to members of the lower and lower-middle classes of Syria’s countryside, including many Sunnis but also Alawis, located mainly in the deprived and rural region of Latakia. More than a conscious attempt to deliberately infiltrate the Ba’ath on a communal basis, the ascent of the minority inside the party should thus be viewed as a phenomenon largely explained on the basis of the “qualitative break”23 which, according to Hanna Batatu, was proposed by way of a political platform offering the
Alawis equality with other citizens.
In parallel, another reason behind the Alawis’ growing influence in the Ba’ath Party was their increased prominence in the army officer corps—a significant proportion of whom also belonged to the influential Military Section of the Ba’ath Party. The Alawis’ over-representation in the Syrian armed forces was partly due to the legacy of the French Mandate during which the politique minoritaire of “divide and rule” inclined the French to recruit as many non-Sunni Arabs (Druzes, Ismailis and Alawis) as possible to fill in the ranks of Syria’s Troupes Spéciales. Upon Syria’s independence from France, the bulk of the Troupes Spéciales were integrated into the newly formed Syrian army24—hence the initial prominence of Alawi soldiers among national troops. Perhaps most significantly, though, the deprived socioeconomic situation in which many Alawis found themselves did not allow them to pay the badal (financial substitute), a tax of 500 Syrian pounds which would exempt young Syrians from undertaking the obligatory two and a half years of military service. While, as a general rule, that amount was affordable for an urban Sunni of humble outlook, for an Alawi of peasant extraction it represented several seasons of arduous labour, making it difficult for many inside the community to escape military service. Ultimately, however, the Alawis’ ascent to prominence inside the officers’ corps was the result of the internal divisions which plagued Sunni officers’ ranks and pitted them against each other along political, regional and class lines—while Alawi officers, for various reasons, remained, at least temporarily, a relatively cohesive bloc.25
Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria Page 9
