"...The core of Assad's support still lies within the minority Alawite sect, of which he is a member. Many Alawites, who make up about 12% of the population, feel that Assad has mismanaged the instability, but they cannot ignore the reality that, in a Sunni-dominated Syria, their community — like the Sunnis of Iraq and the Maronite Christians of Lebanon — is likely to be pushed to the margins of power and suffer reprisals.But it would be a mistake to assume that only the Alawites support the status quo. The Syrian Baath Party's Arab nationalist ideology, its strong support for the Palestinians and its opposition to Israel have proved useful tools in extending the regime's legitimacy beyond the Alawite sect.One source of support for Assad is Syria's Christian community, which makes up about 10% of the population. Though many Christians feel that the regime has made numerous mistakes in addressing the protest movements, they have a deep and understandable fear of the sort of instability and sectarian recriminations that followed Saddam Hussein's fall in Iraq. The majority of Iraqi Christians there were eventually forced to flee the country after suffering high levels of violence and intimidation. Other minority groups, such as Syrian Kurds and Druze, have either continued their support of Assad or have resisted the urge to join elements of the protest movement for similar reasons.Though Sunnis account for the overwhelming majority of Syrian opposition to the Assad regime, there are other Sunnis within the Baath Party's rank and file that would have few prospects in a post-Assad Syria and so have not opposed the status quo. The country's Sunni merchant class and business community, located mainly in Aleppo and Damascus, have also remained largely on the sidelines of the protests. Some have supported elements of the opposition, but most remain fearful of the socioeconomic vacuum that an abrupt change in leadership would create.....One factor bolstering the military's continued support for the regime is fear of "de-Baathification" along the lines of what happened in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Regime loyalists within the military probably would face bleak futures in a post-Assad Syria. Another factor is that more than three decades of Baathist indoctrination have served to ensure that this is not only Assad's military; it is also that of the Syrian Baath Party. Many in the military continue to view the current cycle of unrest as part of a foreign conspiracy to degrade Syria's internal stability and regional role.Taken together, these pillars of regime support provide a wide base within the Syrian population that continues to prefer that Assad remain in power. At the same time, opposition forces are hurt by having little minority support and being largely leaderless and divided. They have embraced regime change yet have not offered a real-world vision of what would come next, or how they would navigate what would surely be years of political and socioeconomic instability following Assad's fall..."
Friday, March 2, 2012
Assad's hidden strenghts!
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That LA Times article neglects to mention that the Assad government has the support of the Sunni clerical leadership in Syria. It has the support of the Sunni religious establishment broadly speaking on its side. There are virtually no prominent Syrian Sunni clerics who are advocating for an overthrow of the regime. The Sunni Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassoun and Mufti of Damascus Al-Bouti having been prominently and consistently advocating for the regime's reform program.
The following is some more info about support for the regime among Syrian Sunnis specifically, which I wrote before as a comment at a different website.
The great majority of the government cabinet ministers, provincial governors, chairpersons of municipal councils, and other visible public figures of the regime are Sunni in their religion. The religious composition of the Syrian Baath Party is at least 80 percent Sunni. The same is true among the people who control the larger private enterprises. The Sunni religion is the preponderant religion among the people who control the trade unions, the mass media, the legal system, the education sector, the university departments, the religious endowments establishment, the private-sector civic organizations, and the municipal councils of almost every city, town and county in the country. The religious composition of the country as a whole is roughly 74 percent Sunni. Nothing important can happen or be sustained in Syria if most Sunnis object to it. It is a fact that most of the Assad regime's personnel are Sunnis and that Sunnis constitute the main plank of the regime's political supporters. And this has been continuously true since the very beginning of the regime over four decades ago. Here for instance is Patrick Seale talking about the early days of Hafez Assad's rule in the early 1970s: "Hafez Assad was not an Alawi sectarian, as his choice of closest associates made clear -- his prime minister, defence minister, foreign minister, private secretary, speechwriter and personal bodyguard were all non-Alawis. He still depended on the Alawi community for his security of tenure and ultimate survival." http://books.google.com/books?id=Z_rlPwgezoUC&pg=PA177&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false . To which I add that Hafez Assad depended on the Sunni community for his security of tenure and ultimate survival to a greater degree. If the Sunni merchant class and/or the Sunni religious establishment had turned against Assad, the Alawis wouldn't have been numerous enough or organized enough to withstand an onslaught. Hafez Assad had a coalition of all sects. But the Sunnis were the most numerous sect in the coalition and they still are. Syria's Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa said in July 2011 that Syria is "immune to sectarianism". President Bashar Al-Assad said in December 2011 that in year 2011 "a sectarian crisis was never present in Syria.... except in some parts of Homs". They are correct about that, from all I can see. There is no divergence of interests between the sects, from all I can see. More than half the regime's positive supporters are Sunnis in their religion. Hence an anti-regime uprising by other Sunnis cannot be sectarian as such. It can potentially be Islamist. But not sectarian as such. In fact, most of the Syrian rebels are poorly-educated working-class people who are Sunni in their religion but who have no ideas and no substantive agenda other than to howl at the Establishment. They draw some moral and political ideas from Islamic teachings, which they've gotten some education on. Thus they have some Islamist ideas and values like the poorly-educated working-classes who voted for Islamist parties in recent elections in Egypt and Tunisia. But the rebels or protesters out on the streets have been largely free of sectarian slogans and sectarian emblematics for all these past eleven months, despite the fact that the great bulk of them have been poorly educated Sunnis. Furthermore, looking at the entirety of the poorly educated working-classes in Syria, most of them are rejecting the rebels and are supporting the Establishment (Syrian patriotism is one of the strongest cognitive planks of that support). The Assad regime represents the Syrian society's Establishment, and this Establishment happily encompasses all religions, and a necessary condition for that longstanding reality is that the Establishment's Sunni majority wants it to be that way.
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