"In the context of the Syrian Uprising, many elements in the Left have settled for visions of imaginary ideal societies; visions that are marred by antiquated ideas of anti-imperialism, the limited framework of cold-war politics, and the... more
"In the context of the Syrian Uprising, many elements in the Left have settled for visions of imaginary ideal societies; visions that are marred by antiquated ideas of anti-imperialism, the limited framework of cold-war politics, and the support for a quasi-socialist, so-called progressive, authoritarian regime, all to the detriment of genuine revolutionary social movement. This chapter argues that the discourse of these currents in the Left is not grounded in the material conditions of Syrian society and is reactionary as a result. I briefly outline some of the debates that have emerged on this issue over the last two years and in doing so demonstrate how some elements in the international left have supported the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, but not in Syria. I then address the material conditions of Syrian society by looking at how, in “Assad’s Syria,” leftist politics were crippled by ideological Balkanisation, organisational hopelessness and feebleness, and political de-classing, and how much of its leadership has been marred by the morass of personal egotism, power-mongering and political opportunism.
I provide a brief overview of how the Ba’ath Party was transformed, inflated, and de-ideologised, so as to fit into the authoritarian format of Assad’s regime and to neutralise and breakup the left, all the while inculcating mistrust among Syria’s diverse ethnic and religious communities. I focus on the role that Bashar al-Assad’s regime played in marginalising Syria’s Sunni community, turning it into a demonised underclass. I contend that in order for the Left to reassert its relevance today, it must recognise, interrogate, and address the nexus between class and sectarian politics.
""
I provide a brief overview of how the Ba’ath Party was transformed, inflated, and de-ideologised, so as to fit into the authoritarian format of Assad’s regime and to neutralise and breakup the left, all the while inculcating mistrust among Syria’s diverse ethnic and religious communities. I focus on the role that Bashar al-Assad’s regime played in marginalising Syria’s Sunni community, turning it into a demonised underclass. I contend that in order for the Left to reassert its relevance today, it must recognise, interrogate, and address the nexus between class and sectarian politics.
""
Publisher: Praeger
Publication Date: 2013
Publication Name: Communism in the 21st Century
Research Interests:
Communism, History of the Left, the Syrian revolution, and Syria Ba'athism<div>()</div>edit
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CHAPTER 3
Left Out? The Syrian Revolution and the Crisis of the Left
Firas Massouh
INTRODUCTION
When mass protests erupted in Syria against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in March 2011, attention turned toward intellectuals and cultural agents, especially those traditionally and broadly associated with the Left, or, those that are at least perceived to have leftist tendencies. In the minds of the Syrian youth calling for social change, equality, dignity, and freedom, there was an expectation that Left-leaning public intellectuals, academ-ics, artists, and politicians—many of whom had criticized the regime’s policies in the past—would eventually take a cue from the protestors and rise to the occasion, leading the charge to establish democracy and de-velop a comprehensive, principled, and popular program to bring about the fundamental changes in society that Syrians have long sought. As of the present time, however, this expectation has not been met. The revolution has not received sustained or effective support from the Left, either within Syria or globally. True, some of the most active uncondi-tional supporters of the revolution are on the Far Left of the political spec-trum; in Syria they represent the avowedly Far Left sections of the Syrian opposition, namely the Syrian Revolutionary Left,
1
while regionally they tend to be Trotskyist parties, such as the Socialist Forum in Lebanon and the Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt, or Maoist parties, such as the Demo-cratic Way in Morocco.
2
Such groups publish communiqués, produce lit-erature, organize vigils and sit-ins, participate in demonstrations around the world in support of the Syrian Revolution, and act in the name of the internationalist Left and perpetual revolution. Yet, these groups have a
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52 Communism in the 21st Century
small membership and an even smaller impact, and while leftists, world-wide, have overwhelmingly celebrated the Tunisian and Egyptian revolu-tions, they have failed to grant the Syrian Revolution their unanimous support. This reluctance is symptomatic of an influential current in inter-national leftist politics that clings to the ideals of resistance and anti-imperialism at all costs; lending support to despotic regimes on the pretext of giving priority to the “national question.”
3
At least in rhetoric, Syrian sovereignty is defined along Ba’athist ideological lines, and clearly, the Stalinist formulation of what constitutes a nation was one of the main pillars of the Ba’ath Party’s organization of the multitude of ethnicities and religious communities within Syria. Predicated on the belief in Arab cultural unity, the Ba’ath’s slogan “One Arab Nation Bearing an Eternal Message” falls in line with Josef Stalin’s definition of the nation as a “his-torically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”
4
In 1963, with the advent of The Syrian Arab Republic, the qualifier Republic came to serve an important ideo-logical function in signifying antimonarchist sentiments directed at Arab monarchies long perceived to be in league with Western interests. Yet, as Yassin al Haj Saleh argues, “we find that most importance is attached to the qualifier ‘Arab,’ followed by ‘Syrian, with ‘Republic’ a poor third.”
5
It was however, the party’s other main motto, “Unity, Liberty, Socialism,” that declared the Ba’ath’s socialist agenda, based on the assumption that Arab unity could be achieved only through a socialist system of property and development, uniquely capable of overcoming the social and eco-nomic legacy of imperialism and colonialism, and emancipating Syria’s workers and peasants. Many Syrian communists saw past this political rhetoric and believed Ba’athist socialism to be “nothing but anarchy, eco-nomic crisis and the constant retreat before the feudalists and the big bourgeoisie.”
6
However, even if its socialist credentials were called into question, the Ba’ath, and the Assad regime by extension, was able to maintain cred-ibility by prioritizing an anti-imperialist agenda, upholding pan-Arabism ideals and then gradually positioning itself as the lynchpin in the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah Axis of Resistance. It was thus successful in creating a narrative that appeals to pan-Arabists as well as anti-American, anti-Israel, third-worldist, and antiwar strains on the Left. Today, this dubious position has arguably contributed to the interna-tional community’s inertia in the face of the continually escalating hu-manitarian crisis in Syria, but more significant for this discussion and for the future of Syria is the status of the Left as an oppositionary force within Syrian politics, a status which is far from assured. Political Islam increas-ingly represents a far more coherent and effective opposition to the Assad
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Left Out? The Syrian Revolution and the Crisis of the Left 53
regime. Some of the factors for this are the recent ascension to power of Islamist political parties in Tunisia and Egypt, which has given a boost to public support of Islamic resistance, and, the funding by Salafists in the Gulf of certain hard-line rebel groups that are advancing against forces loyal to Assad and are promoting pan-Islamic ideas in the areas they seize. The nature of the conflict and the role and character of the opposition is also misconstrued in the increasingly prevalent discourse in international mainstream media, claiming that the grassroots uprising has mutated, first into a “civil war,” and now into a “proxy war,” as Hillary Clinton recently stated.
7
This misrepresentation of the situation confirms the re-gime’s narrative that there was never a genuine revolution, rather a sectar-ian insurgency aiming to destabilize Syria’s sovereignty, thereby serving the interests of monarchist Sunni regional powers in their fight against the Axis of Resistance. However, is not the rise of Islamo-Fascism—as Slavoj Žižek ponders—primarily “the result of the Left’s failure, but simultaneously proof that there was a revolutionary potential, a dissatisfaction, which the Left was not able to mobilize”?
8
Is not this inability to understand, mobilize and support the revolutionary current in Syria, the result of a failure on the part of some on the Left to recognize the Fascistic tenets of the Syrian Ba’ath? Indeed, as the conflict in Syria approaches its third year, and the eventual social, cultural, economic, and political fallout of the revolu-tion remains far from predictable, it appears the Left has rather a lot to answer for. Arguably, the uncertainty that surrounds Syria today is no-where more apparent than in what may, in general terms, be called the crisis of the Left. Today, the Left is presented with a mixture of existential challenges; to imagine communism is to completely re-think its social project and recuperate its intellectual independence as a necessary condition for or-ganizational and political independence, especially if the Left is “to re-main relevant in the eyes of the masses whose basic interests it purports to represent.”
9
In the context of the Syrian Revolution, many elements in the Left have opted out of this project in exchange for visions of imagi-nary ideal societies; visions that are marred by antiquated ideas of anti-imperialism, the limited framework of Cold War politics, and the support for a quasi-socialist, so-called progressive, authoritarian regime, all to the detriment of genuine revolutionary social movement. This chapter begins by arguing that the discourse of these currents in the Left is not grounded in the material conditions of Syrian society and is reactionary as a result. I briefly outline some of the debates that have emerged on this issue over the last two years and in doing so demonstrate how some elements in the international Left have supported the revolu-tions in Tunisia and Egypt, but not in Syria. I then attempt to address the material conditions of Syrian society by looking at how, in Assad’s Syria,
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54 Communism in the 21st Century
leftist politics were crippled by ideological Balkanization, organizational hopelessness and feebleness, and political de-classing, and how much of its leadership has been marred by the morass of personal egotism, power-mongering, and political opportunism. It is not tenable here to review in detail the power struggles and complex feuds that helped shape and form Syrian politics, or lack thereof. How-ever, it will suffice to provide a brief overview of how the Ba’ath Party was “transformed,” “inflated,” and “de-ideologised,” so as to “fit into the au-thoritarian format ” of Assad’s regime and to neutralize and break up the Left,
10
all the while inculcating mistrust among Syria’s diverse ethnic and religious communities. It is imperative to understand the role that Bashar al-Assad’s regime played in marginalizing Syria’s Sunni community, turn-ing it into a demonized underclass. I contend that in order for the Left to reassert its relevance today, it must recognize, interrogate, and address the nexus between class and sectarian politics.
THE LEFT, THE ARAB SPRING, AND THE SYRIAN REVOLUTION
When the revolutions of the Arab Spring erupted, first in Tunisia in De-cember 2010 and then in Egypt at the dawn of 2011, many leftist intel-lectuals, antiwar activists, staunch third-worldists, and self-proclaimed anti-imperialists gave two cheers to what they, and indeed many others, perceived to be popular uprisings against two of the most authoritar-ian, corrupt, and oppressive regimes in the Middle East/North Africa region. Despite having a foreign policy that was seemingly grounded in an awareness of the requirements to maintain their Arab and Mus-lim identity, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak’s regimes were classically associated with Western interests in the region. In their respec-tive foreign relations, both Ben Ali and Mubarak maintained a decidedly pro-Western path, particularly in regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Fol-lowing a bloodless coup d’état that ousted President Habib Bourguiba in 1987, Ben Ali ascended to the presidency but retained his predecessor’s outlook in “offering Israelis the promise of diplomatic recognition” and “engaged in behind-the-scenes assistance to further Israeli-Arab mutual recognition.”
11
Similarly, Mubarak ensured that the Camp David Accords—the peace treaty signed in 1979 by his predecessor Anwar al Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin under U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s supervision—remained intact. Mubarak was especially criticized for his resoluteness in upholding the peace deal with Israel; the belief that his regime had betrayed the Palestinians was prevalent in Arab public opin-ion. Ben Ali, on the other hand, decided to break all diplomatic ties with Israel following the outbreak of the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000.
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Left Out? The Syrian Revolution and the Crisis of the Left 55
The Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman stated that “Israel is surprised at the Tunisian decision. It appears that Tunisia has elected to renounce its potential role as a bridge for dialogue between Israel and its neighbors, thereby harming the critical effort to promote regional peace.”
12
However, Tunisia’s voice in Arab politics was rather meek in comparison to Egypt’s political clout and Israel seemed much less concerned with the fate of Ben Ali than with that of Mubarak. During that tumultuous Egyptian January in 2011, Israel sought to “convince its allies that it is in the West’s interest to maintain the stability of the Egyptian regime.”
13
Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu stressed that “the peace between Israel and Egypt has lasted for more than three decades and our objective is to ensure that these relations will continue to exist.”
14
In the eyes of those who equate pro-Israel policies with the maintenance of the unequal economic, cul-tural, and territorial relationships between the populations of the region—especially where the Palestinian issue is concerned—Israel’s support for Mubarak at that particular juncture was reason enough for many on the Left to lend their support to the anti-Mubarak movement. This is not to say that, as a whole, the international Left was only supportive of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions simply because they opposed pro-Western regimes; though this is nonetheless signifi-cant. Doubtless, it was recognized that what took place in Tunisia, for example, was “a veritable working class response to unemployment, uneven regional development and the suppression of liberties.”
15
The movement was secular in nature, inclusive of everyone with political, economic, and social grievances against the government, and emphatic to the role that the working classes play. In ousting Ben Ali, “work-ers have shown the strength they have when they are organised. Tens of thousands of Tunisia’s poorest people came together to overthrow the regime.”
16
Similarly, in Egypt, labor activist Hossam El Hamalawy stated that “the only social movement right now that is continuing the struggle is the labour movement [and not the Brotherhood]. . . . There are strikes daily and they are over bread and butter and political is-sues,” while Ahmed Ezzat, founder of the recently established Workers’ Democratic Party, argued that “Lenin’s ‘What is to be Done’ and ‘April Notes’ helped shape our strategy, as did Marx’s theories.”
17
Moreover, the Revolutionary Socialists (RS), a Trotskyist organization that worked for years under the umbrella of the Center for Socialist Studies and was active through its participation in the Palestinian solidarity movement since 2000, was key in organizing and mobilizing protestors and in de-veloping strategies for January 25, the moment of Tahrir. Leading RS member Sameh Naguib said: We put workers’ class demands front and center in all of our litera-ture and agitation. We talked to all of our contacts and allies in the
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56 Communism in the 21st Century
workers’ movement, and we agitated for strikes to strengthen the revolution.
18
The involvement of young socialists, their frequent reference to Marx-ist terminology, as well as their emphasis on the workers’ struggle, was bound to excite international socialist commentators such as John Rees who, two weeks following Tahrir, wrote: The Egyptian revolution is exceptional in the level of self-activity compared with most revolutions of the modern era. . . . Increasingly the organised workers played a role in the final days of the revolt, helping to tip the balance. Some of the strikes continue and they are one sign that the great example of the revolution is spreading and deepening below the surface.
19
Similarly, British Pakistani veteran journalist and celebrated “Street Fighting Man” Tariq Ali argued that: The show of popular strength was enough to get rid of the current dictator. He’d only go if the US decided to take him away. After much wobbling, they did. They had no other serious option left. The victory, however, belongs to the Egyptian people whose unending courage and sacrifices made all this possible.
20
In the eyes of Rees, Ali, and others—prominent figures who one “would have expected to know better,” as Jamie Allinson chides—no such vic-tory is attainable for the Syrian people. Mousa Ladqani notes that, among many factors, “the weakness of the revolution” is attributable to the no-tion that it “erupted under the influence of the wider Arab revolution,” without which “it would most likely have taken a few more years for the revolutionary movement to erupt on its own”; that the Syrian work-ing class “did not, and still does not, have independent organizations of its own that it can use to express its class interests”; that many elements among the revolutionary forces have been “raising religious slogans, de-mands, and using a religious language,” which has only served to confirm the regime’s depiction of the revolution as a religious one; and that Syria’s geopolitical location means that “it has become the place in which oppos-ing interests in the region are being played.”
21
And so it seems that even though there is “little support for the Assad clan . . . unconditional supporters of the revolution do not seem to be in the majority.”
22
The Syrian Revolution is making the Left, “whether strictly Communist, tending towards Marxist, leftwing nationalist, radi-cal or moderate—seem in disarray.”
23
This is mainly because of all the arguments on Syria that have left political commentators mystified, one
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Left Out? The Syrian Revolution and the Crisis of the Left 57
question in particular has eclipsed, if not overtaken, all others: that of for-eign intervention. For the most part, the more influential ideologues of the Stalinoid Left, who identify themselves as the only true anti-imperialist movement
,
turn a blind eye to the popular uprising and instead see the crisis in Syria in terms of Western/Turkish/Gulf-states-
24
In the process of pushing geopolitical concerns, these anti-imperialist ideologues are missing the smaller—or rather—the bigger picture. What is truly remarkable about the Syrian Revolution is that it erupted without a unified command center; rather, it was led by a range of distinct indi-viduals and groups. A significant contingent was made up of young peo-ple working in the fields of culture and communication, such as freelance journalists and correspondents for foreign media outlets. The vast major-ity of these people were not affiliated with party politics. They tended to be secularists from the urban middle class, or young adherents of political Islam, and were mainly university students or graduates with skills in technology and the new media. Other instigators included members of the Muslim Brotherhood, groups of political activists and independent human rights activists, members of various organizations such as the Damascus Declaration, and certain leftist parties such as the Communist Labor Party, the Marxist Left movement, and the Democratic People’s Party (but not the Syrian Communist Party), as well as some Syrian Kurdish groups. Having neglected to examine the local dimensions of the revolution, anti-imperialist ideologues have failed to understand it “in terms of class or as a revolt against injustice, repression, and censorship. Instead, their self-satisfying geopolitical reading sees only a struggle between a US-led effort
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58 Communism in the 21st Century
to impose imperialistic order and a last-ditch Arab resistance supported by Russia and China.”
25
Moreover, anti-imperialist ideologues brazenly refuse to condemn Rus-sian and Iranian support for pro-regime military forces and paramilitary groups, claiming this would amount “to an at least partial compromise with our own ruling class and its propaganda.”
26
“Using tactics that vary from the overt to the insidious,” Jess Hill aptly notes, “these ideologues are willfully twisting the narrative on Syria to score points against the ‘imperialist West.’ In the process, they are excusing and providing intel-lectual cover for the Assad regime.”
27
Perhaps had the rebels been waving red banners, these ideologues may have joined the bandwagon. We may even imagine Rees, Ali, British MP George Galloway, or award-winning journalist John Pilger, appearing at benefits around world capitals, col-lecting donations for those in Syria who are singing “The Internationale.” But, this was not to be. Instead, the rebels waved flags of many colors and now increasingly they wave the black-and-white flag of jihad. It should come as no surprise that the void left by the Syrian Left has been filled by Islamists; we have the Assad regime to thank for both the demise of the former and the rise of the latter. Rather than allowing themselves to be distracted by conspiracy theories, the anti-imperialist ideologues ought to take a lesson in Syria’s modern history. If they were to come to under-stand the complexities of Syrian society, then they would recognize the revolution for what it is; a popular revolution; a chaotic and messy affair. “Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revo-lution is.”
28
THE BA’ATH PARTY, ASSAD’S SYRIA, AND THE BALKANIZATION OF THE SYRIAN COMMUNISTS
Anthony Shadid noted that when Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970, he put an end to a “volatile chapter in Syria’s history that saw dozens of attempted coups” since the country’s independence from French col-onization, not through “the modernisation of infrastructure and educa-tion,” nor through “his service to the poor and rural,” but by inculcating “a suffocating cult of personality, buttressed by fear, often the most vis-ceral sort.”
29
Assad understood that every section of society would have to be under his control in order to ensure real security for his avowedly pan-Arabist, secular regime, and thus began to invade the public sphere. Former political prisoner and dissident author Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes: No sooner had the man taken office that there were “patriotic an-thems” praising him and “spontaneous popular marches” waving the picture of this “devoted son of the people.” At the same time
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Left Out? The Syrian Revolution and the Crisis of the Left 59
the intelligence services began to make their presence felt in public life, and with them the military and paramilitary forces responsible for the regime’s security. Propaganda and security have remained cornerstones of the regime to this day. The agency responsible for propaganda is closer to being a slightly chaotic priesthood: its only religion, indeed its only skill, being the sanctification of the presi-dent and maintaining his absolute exclusivity. The security branch is made up of a number of agencies whose task is to keep control over terrorism: to build high walls of fear around, or perhaps inside, the regime’s subjects.
30
“The existence of a ‘Master of the Nation’ in the form of the president,” argues al-Haj Saleh, “abolishes the republic in one fell swoop, and with it, all equality between its inhabitants. It institutionalizes ties of personal allegiance and a culture of political appointments and privilege and di-vides society along sectarian lines.”
31
Indeed, Hafez clearly understood the sectarian dynamics of his country. He belonged to the Alawite sect, a heterodox Muslim group that accounts for 11 percent of the population, yet he maintained good relations with his Ba’athist comrades, many of whom were members of the majority Sunni sect, by giving them ministe-rial positions in his cabinet. With an eye on the economy, he was also swift in forging strong alliances with Syria’s Sunni merchant class. Of equal im-portance was his success in neutering and co-opting his rivals on the Left: “Political competition was abolished, subsumed by the cult of worship around the president, not to mention swallowed up by the prisons and the ruling Progressive [National] Front let by the Baath-Party.”
32
In May 1972 the Ba’ath Party formed the so-called Progressive National Front (PNF), a coalition of political parties over which it presided. The PNF was initially formed of four parties: the Syrian Communist Party (SCP) under the leadership of Khaled Bakdash; the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), which was originally the Syrian branch of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser’s party of the same name; and two parties that had defected from the Ba’ath Party in the early 1960s: the Movement of Socialist Unionists (MSU) and the Arab Socialist Party. The new coalition was rejected by the League of Communist Action whose small membership worked covertly toward undermining the Ba’ath by publishing and circulating explicitly antiregime pamphlets. The parties in the coalition, however, enjoyed a limited level of participation under the umbrella of the PNF but were also subject to a variety of restrictions. The coalition ensured the Ba’ath Party’s oppressive control and meticulous monitoring of its rivals on the Left, who soon began to Balkanize. In many ways, Hafez al Assad’s ascension to power in 1970 marked the end of the First Syrian Republic, which was well on the path to dis-integration ever since the Ba’ath Party’s takeover in 1963. Paradoxically,
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the same year saw the “end of the Ba’ath Party as an autonomous force, and even as a forum for serious debate.”
33
The promulgation of a new constitution in 1973 saw Syria’s transformation from Ba’ath state to Assad’s Syria. While the new constitution guaranteed the leading role of the Ba’ath Party in both state and society, it granted Hafez ultimate power in all domains. The Ba’ath was molded into a “powerful institu-tion of political control that at the same time could confer an appear-ance of legitimacy upon his presidency.”
34
Its ideals were on their way to becoming the thin veneer that has barely covered the Assads’ familial domination over Syria’s affairs in the last four decades. This exacerbated the divides in Syrian politics; for example, in 1974 a faction split from the MSU and formed the Democratic Socialist Unionist Party but remained in the PNF.
35
However, the most significant of these fractures was the defection of a sizable group of communists from the SCP who refused to join the PNF. In 1973 the group renamed itself the SCP-Political Bu-reau, and in January 1974 elected Riad al-Turk as its secretary general.
36
It was initially reasonably effective in its opposition to the government and was popular among “the younger party cadre and new recruits who had expected some changes in the original Syrian Communist Party in both leadership style and substantive ideological positioning, particu-larly after its isolation following the breakup of the UAR in 1961 and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.”
37
Such aspirations for structural and ideologi-cal change within the SCP caused concern both for the Ba’ath Party and for Khaled Bakdash, the SCP’s secretary general. Bakdash accused Turk of “leading a deviationist, adventurist clique,”
38
and as evidence of his standing with Ba’ath officials was successful in rallying the government to conduct a campaign of oppression against the SCP-PB. Turk was “im-prisoned in 1974, freed in 1975 when he went underground, and was re-captured in 1978. Shortly after being released in 1980, he was imprisoned again and was not released until 31 May 1998.”
39
Also among the SCP-PB’s main concerns were Syria’s increasing mili-tarism, and Assad’s nepotism and oppressive measures against his politi-cal opponents. In 1976 it was vocal in condemning Assad’s intervention in the Lebanese Civil War on the side of right-wing Maronite militias against leftist Lebanese and Palestinian rebel groups. But it was espe-cially critical of Assad’s policies back home. In bringing more members of his family and sect to the center of power, Hafez was able to appoint individuals he could trust to positions in the military and intelligence services. Allegiance, he thought, was best fostered on familial and sectar-ian grounds. Indeed, the capricious powers of the
mukhabarat
intelligence and the favoritism enjoyed by Alawites in official appointments aggra-vated the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group deprived of all legitimate outlets for political activity and which regarded the Ala-wites as socially inferior heretics.
40
This was criticized by opponents of
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Left Out? The Syrian Revolution and the Crisis of the Left 61
Assad as a dangerous manoeuver, which was bound to alienate the Sunni majority and elicit popular hostility against the Alawites. In 1980, dur-ing his brief time out of prison, Turk and his supporters participated in the formation of the National Democratic Gathering (NDG), a coalition created in response to the conflict between Assad’s forces and Islamist militants (mainly members of the Muslim Brotherhood) who since 1976 had been carrying out a “campaign of assassinations of senior Alawi and regime figures and bombing of regime symbols.”
41
The NDG consisted of the SCP-PB with four other banned parties: the Democratic Arab Social-ist Union, a faction headed by Jamal al-Atassi, which broke away from the ASU; the Movement of Arab Socialists; and two parties previously associated with the Ba’ath itself: the Arab Revolutionary Workers’ Party, a Marxist offshoot of the Ba’ath from the 1960s, and the Democratic So-cialist Arab Ba’ath party, a remnant of Salah Jadid’s
42
leftist faction of the Ba’ath.
43
While the NDG was critical of the Islamist insurgency, its staunch criticism was directed more toward the regime’s brutal response to the Muslim Brotherhood. Members of the NDG were arrested, along with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, by the thousands. This particular episode in Syria’s history should be read in the context of Islamic political activity in the region in the late 1970s and early 1980s; there was the rise of jihadism in Afghanistan, which was reenforced by the Soviet invasion of the country in 1979; the Islamic Revolution in Iran; the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamists, who held it for two weeks before the Saudi military regained control; the assassina-tion of Egyptian president Anwar al Sadat by members of the Muslim Brotherhood; and various other rebellions in North Africa. In the same manner that Islamist insurgencies were crushed in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria, political Islam in Syria became the quintessential nemesis of the state. This garnered Islamists overwhelming public em-pathy as they were seen as the most aggressive and antagonistic oppo-nents of the regime’s economic, social, and diplomatic failures, as well as its draconian policies in strengthening elite circles based on familial and sectarian ties. This did not mean that others weren’t critical of the regime; even the SCP was banned in the early 1980s and was only re-stored to favor in 1986 as a concession to the Soviet Union. Yet the Is-lamists, consistently aiming to de-legitimize other political movements and currents opposed to the regime, saw themselves as its archetypal enemy. But they were also its primary victims. Syrian Law 49 of 1980 stipulates that membership of the Muslim Brotherhood is a capital of-fence. At certain stages in the campaign against the Brotherhood, the Defence Platoons, under the command of Hafez’s now exiled younger brother Rif’at, “took to the streets and initiated a harassment of veiled women in an attempt to identify Brotherhood members.”
44
The climax of Assad’s reprisal against the Brotherhood was a three-week standoff in
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62 Communism in the 21st Century
the city of Hama in 1982, when the Assad army fought armed Islamists, flattened much of the city’s historic center over the heads of its residents, and then combed the rubble, killing surviving rebels. This bloody chap-ter in the country’s history saw the deaths of 30,000 people, according to some sources, and was subsequently shrouded in secrecy in Syria. Ev-erybody understood the regime’s message: “if you go against us then we will crush you,” but beneath that lies another message, a far more useful one in terms of coaxing support from minority communities: “only we can protect you from the Islamist bogeyman.” Even well after the events in Hama, the regime continued to oppress relatives of members of the Muslim Brotherhood who had been exiled, arrested, or killed.
45
Thus, the Assad regime succeeded in portraying any opposition to it as the voice of a Sunni Muslim underclass. Some leftists, meanwhile, kept a low pro-file or were sidelined, either absorbed into the Ba’ath’s political machine or locked up in Syria’s notorious prisons.
ASSAD’S SYRIA UNDER BASHAR, THE CIVIL SOCIETY MOVEMENT, AND THE REACTIVATED PNF
In 2000, Bashar al-Assad, who became heir apparent following his older brother Basel’s death in a car crash in 1994, took the office of the presi-dency. He made a pretense of political reform to allow intellectual free-dom. Already in the late months of Hafez’s life, the political climate in Syria had loosened to some extent and the economy, which was experi-encing its first stages of liberalization at the time, was being subject to open debate. While the fundamentals of the system “were still taboo,” Alan George writes, “aspects of how it functioned—for example the in-efficiencies of the bureaucracy—became permitted areas of discussion in the media and elsewhere.”
46
Bashar brought into his administration younger and more dynamic personnel, and called for the reinvigora-tion of the PNF. But as exiled Marxist writer Subhi Hadidi argues, this was indicative of how the new president “conveniently ignored what every adult Syrian knows: that this Front was a dead body when it was first set up and has continued to decompose with an unbearable stench ever since.”
47
Terms like “modernisation,” “development,” “constructive criticism,” and “creative thinking” became hallmarks of Bashar’s new-speak, eliminating the vocabulary of freedom, democracy, civil liberties, and so forth. Instead, Bashar described the PNF as “a democratic model developed through our own experience.”
48
Bashar thereby made it clear that he was no liberal democrat but that under the auspices of the reac-tivated PNF, “Syria was entering a period of reforms and openings in all fields.”
49
While dismissive of the PNF, some of Syria’s leading intellectuals chose to be sanguine with what they could potentially achieve in this
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Left Out? The Syrian Revolution and the Crisis of the Left 63
new climate. Eminent thinkers, businessmen, and former political prison-ers such as Michel Kilo, Riad Seif, Antoun al-Maqdisi, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Jamal al-Atassi, Burhan Ghalyoun, and Riad al-Turk, assumed a crucial role in establishing forums interested in reviving the “cultural and demo-cratic movement in Syria.”
50
Initially, informal forums were set up in pri-vate Damascene homes for the discussion of political and social matters; the most famous of these were the Riad Seif Forum and the Jamal al-Atassi National Dialogue Forum. In its renewed form, this movement, dubbed the Damascus Spring, was responsible for issuing communiqués—namely the Statement of 99 and the Statement of 1000—which stressed the need for the new government to end the State of Emergency Law; issue a public pardon to all political detainees; ensure freedom of assem- bly, freedom of the press, and freedom of expression; and allow for the participation of citizens in all aspects of public life.
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Subsequently, these salons formally established themselves as the Committees for the Revival of Civil Society in Syria, and within six months of Bashar taking office hundreds of salons appeared, mainly in Damascus, but also in other Syr-ian cities. However, as the activities of civil society forums intensified—Seif, for example, went as far as to announce his plans for an independent political party—so did the regime’s campaign to de-legitimize the civil society movement as “a collection of spies, fools or both, serving the ma-levolent interests of foreign states—for which read Israel and America.”
52
The Damascus Spring had to be crushed and the regime proceeded to ban discussion forums and to vilify the civil society movement in its media. Furthermore, the line of official argument did all it could to portray intel-lectuals as representative of an insignificant minority that was detached from the real wants and needs of Syrians. In contrast to the civil society movement, what Bashar offered was an economy first argument and as such advocated for a China-style economic liberalization.
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Sadiq Jalal al-Azm maintains that this was simply a ruse, a cunning attempt to deceive the population that economic reforms are possible without political ones. He argues: It’s not true that the Chinese are simply making changes in the econ-omy and not making changes at a lot of other level. The entire ruling
équipe
has changed in China, while in Syria it’s still the same. The “old guard” is there. Secondly, in China you can delay the politi-cal changes and concentrate on the economy because there is a very high rate of economic growth. . . . This doesn’t apply to Syria at all. There is no flourishing economy that will bribe people into keeping quiet about the needed political, social and judicial reforms.
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With Bashar adamant on pursuing his economic program, certain cos-metic alterations to the face of the intelligence apparatus were needed. He
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64 Communism in the 21st Century
presented himself as a president with “an everyman quality, frequenting restaurants and driving his own car.”
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However, he simultaneously main-tained an imperial sense of power through continued nepotism, corrup-tion, and repression of political freedoms and censorship of independent journalism. Moreover, he did his utmost to sideline the civil society move-ment and warned that [w]hen the consequences of any action affect stability at the level of a country there are two possibilities: . . . that the actor is an agent who is working against the interests of the state and he is either ignorant or doing it without intending to do so. The result is that in both cases the person will be serving the enemies of his country. And here, at the level of a country the results are addressed imme-diately. Here the person will be held fully responsible regardless of his intentions and backgrounds.
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In August 2001 his tolerance for the Damascus Spring had run out and a crackdown against the civil society movement was justified on the basis that it aimed to “change the constitution by illegal means.”
57
Seif, Turk, and eight other activists received prison sentences between 2 and 10 years. Meanwhile, Bashar ensured that his father’s political rela-tionships with key parties in the PNF, most notably the communists, re-mained intact. At this stage, the communists were split into two factions: the main communist party under Wisal Farha Bakdash, Khalid Bakdash’s widow who inherited her departed husband’s position; and its offshoot, the party of Yousef Faisal, which in 1986 broke away from the SCP over differing attitudes to Soviet perestroika, but which remained a member in the PNF. Both parties, having experienced political stagnation even by PNF standards, had much to benefit from Bashar coming to power; the privileges that the communists procured decades earlier under his father’s reign were not only going to be preserved, but potentially ex-panded under the patronage of the new president, so long as they re-mained within the confines of the reactivated PNF. The Ba’ath resolved that the parties of the PNF should be allowed not only to privately dis-tribute their newspapers, as was the case up until Bashar’s inheritance of power, but also to place them on the newsstands. In early 2001 the SCP-Bakdash’s
Sawt al-Sha’b
(
Voice of the People
) and the SCP-Faisal’s
Al-Nour
(
The Light
)
were launched. While both factions of the SCP may have had a historic opportunity to shake things up from within the PNF, both contin-ued to assume the subordinate role given to them in the Ba’ath’s political establishment. Certainly, neither was ready to cross the red lines of Syrian journalism. Instead, their publications contained within them the typi-cal reports one would find in most Arab newspapers on the Palestinian
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struggle; abstract ramblings about class struggle, the unity of the Arab people, and anti-imperialism; criticisms of other parties in the PNF; and articles that celebrated the benevolence of the Assad family. In November 2001, a cable was sent by Lady Bakdash, which “extended to the Presi-dent most sincere greetings of appreciation for the great role he plays in enhancing the country’s position in the Arab and international arenas.”
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It was thanks to this kind of publicity that Bashar appeared not only as anti-Israel, anti-West, pro-Iran, and pro-Hezbollah, read pro-resistance, but also as the last true caretaker of Arab sovereignty, whose foreign pol-icy was tinged with leftist ideals. In contrast, in
Al-Nour,
one could oc-casionally read exposés on the government’s economic misconduct and the rife poverty of Syrian neighborhoods. But faced with the Bakdash party’s brokering of Ba’athist interests, Faisal’s group was uninfluential and ineffective. Furthermore, the former accused the latter of departing from “Marxism as the basis of organisation,” disrespecting “democratic centralism,” and not adhering to “proletarian [principles] and Marxist theory.”
59
The Bakdash faction maintained a firm grip on Faisal’s party in order to further its political ambitions and ensured that any internal ef-forts to restore the role of communism in Syria as a vanguard of the work-ing class were crushed. If the outcome of Riad al-Turk’s long struggle is any indication, it is evident “that there was no room for any ideological challenge either to the Syrian regime or Bakdash’s position vis-à-vis the regime.”
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THE RISE OF ISLAMISTS AND THE OTHERING OF SYRIAN SUNNIS
Throughout the 2000s, Bashar was able to withstand successive efforts to relaunch the civil society movement and to instigate regime change. This was largely due to the ideological disagreements and petty personal con-flicts that took place among dissidents. In 2005, Riad al-Turk’s NDG, the Muslim Brotherhood, Kurdish and Assyrian parties, and members from the Damascus Spring, such as Michel Kilo and Riad Seif, issued a state-ment called the Damascus Declaration, which sought to unite the frac-tured Syrian opposition. However, almost from the outset, the initiative was riddled with problems that took place between some secularists and the Islamists. This was exacerbated when the Muslim Brotherhood joined the National Salvation Front of Bashar’s former vice president Abdul Halim Khaddam, who had defected in 2006.
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Today, these feuds and rifts contribute to the lack of a “genuine rev-olutionary leadership with a clear economic, social, and political pro-gramme.”
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These factors serve to undermine confidence in the relevance and efficacy of the opposition and have been further exploited by the west
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66 Communism in the 21st Century
in order to avoid committing to one political faction more than the other. This is because as Fredric Jameson writes: Villainy in mass culture has been reduced to two lone survivors of the category of evil: these two representations of the truly antisocial are, on the one hand, serial killers and, on the other, terrorists (mostly of the religious persuasion, as ethnicity has become identified with religion, and secular political protagonists like the communists and the anarchists no longer seem to be available).
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The West is increasingly adhering to this concept in the way it sees events in Syria. While
Nusra Front,
for example, is recognized as being the most organized and disciplined rebel group in the fight against Assad, it is also classified by the United States as a terrorist organization and is purported to have strong links with al-Qaeda in Iraq.
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In generating a discourse that paints the struggle in Syria as one between two categories of evil—the Assad regime as the serial killer and the armed resistance to it as the terrorist—it essentially affirms the Assad regime’s narrative to the detriment of genuine revolutionary action against tyranny. We should not expect any less from the West. However, it cannot be denied that Islamists are increasingly proving to be the most aggressive element of the opposition. The Muslim Brother-hood has greatly expanded its influence through its penetration of the two main oppositionary umbrella groups, the Syrian National Council and the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, as well as the brigades of the FSA. Furthermore, it coordinates with some of the more extremist groups such as the
Nusra Front
and
Ahrar al-Sham.
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Nevertheless, there is a tendency to reduce the debate around Syria to a tiresome minorities/majority dichotomy, that is, Sunni Muslims against the rest. This provides neither recourse nor respite for Syrians; there are many prominent figures of opposition who come from minority religious or ethnic communities. Further, there is a robust Sunni merchant class that continues to work hand in hand with the regime, and to facilitate its trade with its foreign allies. Certainly, the extent to which Syrians express and cultivate their antiregime sentiments is shaped by political and economic conditions in as much as it is shaped by local, ethnic, and religious ones; this can ultimately be read as a struggle for self-determination in which disparities in economic class play a significant role. Nonetheless, an engagement with the nuances of Syrian society, par-ticularly its religious and ethnic makeup, enables us to escape the space in which grand illusions prevail. The price of distancing oneself from the sec-tarian discourse that so many commentators fear—especially those who promote themselves as leftist, secular, or progressive—is to buy into the mythologized national self-image drawn by more than four decades of
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