Politics and the Sword in Syria

...A Greek Orthodox newly recruited to the Army: "Why do we fight...

...Take the Palestinians...

...Yet since then the depth of support for the Palestinians has become a question mark...

...Indeed, Assad's is an Alawi regime, a fact that sheds a great deal of light on Syria's internal political situation as well as on some of its foreign policy initiatives...

...Theoretically, Syria is run by the Socialist Baath party, suggesting communal leadership...

...They're the first to run when the fighting starts...

...from the rank of major up, enabling him to stock the upper ranks of the Armed Forces with friendly faces...

...Hafez gets all dewy-eyed whenever Rifat enters a room," reports one man...

...And people want to know where a soldier, even a high-ranking one, gets the money for a palatial country estate or the coffee-colored Ferrari I saw outside his well-guarded office near the Hotel Meridien...

...The most likely source, according to Western diplomats, is illegally acquired property, and certainly the opportunities for aggrandizement exist...

...Sure the regime looks healthy...

...The religious minorities in the Arab world are not subject to this conflict...

...But 30 years later, in June 1976, when its tanks rumbled into civil war riven Lebanon—sights set on the Palestinians and their compadres—the Syrian Arab Republic seemed to come of age...

...His assessment cannot be easily dismissed, disturbing as it is to any neat analysis...

...According to a Syrian official, too, a high-level member of the regime with internal security responsibilities, Naji Jamil, was recently demoted for failure to make progress in uprooting the assailants...

...They shot back...

...Consequently, except for the zealots, acquiescence to Assad's rule seems to be the Sunni watchword...

...The eminent Lebanese historian, Kamel Salibi, placed the effects of these developments in perspective for me during a recent interview at his seaside office at the American University of Beirut: "When the Ottoman Empire was disbanded, the Sunni Moslem was cast into confusion...

...On the eve of independence in 1946, historian Albert Hourani observed that little sense of "Syrianism" was evident because "Syria" had been a term encompassing roughly Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and the present truncated country...

...If he gives his loyalty to the nation-state, he feels he is betraying the higher ideal of breaking down its border...

...and that increasingly politicians were looking to the military as the only constituency worth courting...

...The country is consequently better run now...

...To escape from the poverty, in more recent times many of them entered the Army...

...The rumors of his sexual activities, for example, do not go over well in a country where many of the women still wear the veil...

...Some people weren't too pleased about that...

...This ideology contends that unifying the Arabs into a single expansive nation would not only remedy their atrophied condition but expedite their return to world prominence...

...For centuries the Alawis, who today comprise about 11 per cent of the population, lived impacted in the mountains of Latakia as a defense against persecution by the Sunni Moslem majority...

...The Sunni's internal conflict is not to be slighted...

...Sometimes I ask myself...

...The more politically zealous among the last group—at present not of significant number—enlist in movements like the Youth of Mohammed, whose leader, Marwan Hadid, died last summer in prison, apparently as a result of a hunger strike...

...They explain why, when Assad entered Lebanon, he dispatched his brother's forces to areas of high Sunni concentration...

...With Lebanon on the verge of Pal-estinianization—hence a problem to Syria's security and prosperity—Hafez Assad made plain whose interests came first...

...Socialism's sharper edges have been blunted and a broader private sector has been mapped off as a gesture toward the predominantly Sunni middle and upper classes...

...In reality, it is increasingly ruled by one man, President Hafez Assad...

...They're finished with the Palestinians...

...A PALPABLE SECTARIAN STRIFE Politics and the Sword BY MICHAEL TANNENBAUM Damascus The security service in this country—where leaders of the Arab "Front for Steadfastness and Confrontation" (Algeria, Libya, the Palestine Liberation Organization, South Yemen, and Syria) met last month to plan a strategy for undermining the Camp David "framework" agreements between Egypt and Israel —operates no less than five distinct branches...

...They watch the public, the Armed Forces, and one another...

...Translated politically, that confusion is the chaos we've experienced in the Middle East ever since...

...The public does not find him attractive either, for Rifat is a man of excess...

...The Range Rover vehicles they alone use can be seen churning up dust all over this capital's tree-lined boulevards, advertising their ubiquitousness...

...Although the responses noted are representative of the overwhelming majority I elicited, a caveat is necessary...

...His universal Moslem state was divided and unable to adapt to a nation-state framework: he longs for its recovery...

...One coup followed the next...

...But look at it another way...

...Economic policy, though, has had an extenuating effect...

...In this atmosphere the Alawis were drawn to the Baath Party for two reasons: the values of social justice it espoused and the stress it placed on a non-sectarian identity—an Arab identity —as an umbrella for the country's varied religious groupings...

...And, most significantly, the social force that fuels this pan-Arab fire is a Sunni Moslem one...

...Its existence, in fact, was an embarrassment: a constant reproach that unity hadn't been achieved...

...Believe me, I don't know...

...Nevertheless, after speaking at length with foreign and local residents, a number of educated tentative conclusions about the present situation seem justified...

...Consider the follow ing: ?A Sunni university student from Aleppo: "No, I don't want to serve in the Army...

...For example, the religious minorities (some 30-40 per cent of the population) feel generally secure under Assad, recognizing in him a man of similar background...

...That's precisely what our Afghani embassy was reporting just two days before the recent coup...

...The presence of assassins does not necessarily reflect a regime's general popularity, of course, and in the case of Syria there are few ways of taking an accurate reading...

...Within this elite, Rifat is a special force in his own right, busting up fledgling coalitions in the Army's officer cadres...

...That, in a word, is the motive underlying pan-Arabism, though most of its proponents are unconscious of this...

...A Greek Orthodox university student from Latakia: "No one cares about the Palestinians anymore...

...How can you believe in it...

...They also explain why Assad's regime would be in deep trouble without the Army and security service—despite its veneer of strength...

...In some sectors of the Armed Forces protests were mounted against the incursion, and shakeups ensued...

...When the minorities came to power [i.e., the Ala-wis] it was a different story...

...The great Arab dynasties were Sunni Moslem dynasties, as was the Turkish Ottoman Empire, overlord to the Arabs for some 400 years, until World War I. At the end of that War, the Turks were vanquished and the victorious Western powers broke up the empire, laying down borders that have been the bane of pan-Arabists...

...The government forces you...

...In the light of this, what we've witnessed in Syria is no surprise...

...The Palestinian cause has long ridden the crest of the most deep-seated and compelling force of modern Arab political culture: Pan-Arabism (or Arab Nationalism...

...Yet at least one veteran Mideast hand here expresses skepticism...

...The nonsectar-ian approach was especially appealing, a Beirut sociologist explained, for it allowed a man from the minorities to confront a Sunni Moslem as an equal...

...The underlying tensions between Sunni and Alawi still exists in today's Syria...

...The country under Sunni rule [1946-1963] was in unremitting turmoil...

...Ask him [he points to a portrait of President Assad...

...Dead Syrians were being shipped home...

...The Palestinian does two...

...The Sunni suffers a lack...

...Even he doesn't know...

...It would appear, therefore, that the government has no serious challengers...

...The Sunni Moslem majority for the most part dislikes the regime...

...Western sources add that Jamil was in longstanding rivalry with Rifat Assad—a singularly unhealthy state...

...For it points to the conflicting emotional pulls that make it difficult to predict the future course of events in Syria...

...An extreme case in point is the special forces unit headed by the President's younger brother, Rifat Assad...

...In addition, since a sizeable segment of them still lives in rural areas, they have been beneficiaries of the revolution that has swept Syria...

...During the past year-and-a-half, more than a dozen Alawis of secondary prominence have been cut down by assassination—a reasonably clear indication that an organized effort is under way to thicken an already palpable sectarian strife...

...A prominent journalist in Damascus: "Correct, we attacked the Palestinians...

...They emphasized Syrian interests...

...Eventually Baathist military men came to power, and a few years later, a "corrective" coup within the party brought the Alawi contingent to the fore...

...Motorcycles, driven by some of the assassins, have been restricted in use...

...It also testifies to the illusory or actual security that Rifat affords—a security Hafez cannot do without...

...Maybe he prefers all Syrian young men to die...

...There they found that the military had launched itself into the political arena...

...Assad hails from a smaller tribe and the manner of his ascension produced bad blood within the community) to devout Sunnis, who have long censured the Baath as atheistic...

...Such doubts are supported by the country's history...

...Elections here are scarcely worthy of the name, the media provide no outlets for public expression and citizens wisely refrain from candid conversation with those not in their circle...

...He personally evaluates every military transfer and promotion Michael Tannenbaum, a previous NL contributor, is a freelance journalist specializing in the Arab world...

...Thus one man 1 spoke to dismissed the idea of support for the Palestinians truly undergoing erosion, claiming that it was merely a surface phenomena: "The people are behind them...

...Then how do you justify going to the Army, I asked...

...It's just that with the lack of apartments, and taxes doubling prices on cars, and long lines for bread —all because the government spends most of the budget on arms mainly for the Palestinian struggle—there is a tendency to blame the Palestinians...

...Under Ottoman rule they lived in nearly autonomous communities, their loyalties hence always more regional or communal...

...Assad, who has given this country the longest lasting, most stable government it has known, works hard at retaining power...

...The leadership kept trying to sell off Syria to other Arab states with the aim of unifying...

...For the very notion of loyalty to Syria, not to mention a Syrian government, is a relatively new one...

...Not everyone by any means shares their sentiments...

...We'd like nothing better than to get rid of him," an official confided...

...A Sunni fisherman from Tartous, now with Rifat Assad's special forces: " 1 do three years in the Army...

...It guards the regime's nerve center from Damascus' southwest periphery, has a particularly high percentage of Alawis and is armed with the newest, best weapons...

...They are currently prospering, for although the country's heady annual growth rate of 10-12 per cent a few years ago has declined considerably, it continues at a respectable 4-5 per cent...

...That Hafez Assad hasn't done so attests, observers say, to the depth of the President's affection for his younger brother...

...Land reform and the extension of electricity lines have resulted in the remotest villages experiencing increases in income and in the standard of living...

...He not only exploits the Baathist structure—its trade and student unions, women's organizations —to strengthen his personal hold, but more important, he has turned the security service and the military into instruments of personal power by blanketing each with a network of fellow Alawi Moslems...

...A West Bank Palestinian on a visit from Hebron: "What my Syrian friends want is the Golan...

...These Sunni leaders had little interest in Syria...

...No, really, I don't know...

...The public's initial reaction was one of stunned disbelief...

...Not surprisingly, his popularity among those he oversees is low...

...At least that is the impression a reporter comes away with as he tries to measure present sentiment with the admittedly limited tools available to him here...

...Speculation about the identity of the assassins ranges from Iraqis to Palestinians to dissident Alawis (the man Assad deposed in 1970 came from one of Latakia's two major Alawi tribes...

...This is one important reason why officials in Damascus traditionally tended to place the Palestinian cause above that of Syrian well-being...

...Why should I do his fighting for him...

...The security service is said to be having trouble penetrating the organization, whose supporters have pledged revenge...