October 18, 2013
Neither
the removal of the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons nor a surge in the Gulf’s
financial, arms, and logistical support to the Syrian rebels would dramatically
alter the dynamics of the Syrian civil war. Violence by the power nexus that
has developed around the Al-Assads in the past four decades, and by the
jihadist groups resisting the regime, is here to stay. Irrespective of which side will manage in the
medium term to sustain some sort of military dominance, the outcome of the war
will almost certainly be a fractured Syria with a semblance of authority in
Damascus, surrounded by cantons of power divided along sectarian and ethnic
lines.
Syria’s
future, however, will not depend on the actors that will dominate specific
parts of the country in the medium term.
Two other factors are more crucial: how the largest segments of the
society will define Syria; and how that social view would affect sectarianism
in the country.
Modern
Syria, like other eastern Mediterranean countries, was the product of the 1916
Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France in which the two powers
divided the Arab world into respective spheres of influence. But unlike other
Eastern Mediterranean countries, the historical Syrian state—which commanded
the entire northern part of the Levant from the Tiberius Lake to the Torros
Mountains—is not a new creation; it dates centuries back. The defining
characteristics of this state, however, varied across the ages.
In the
four centuries from the beginning of the sixteenth century (when the Ottomans
annexed the Levant in 1517) to the late nineteenth (the birth of the modern
Syrian state), the country was the bulwark of Sunni Islamism in the eastern
Mediterranean. Sykes-Picot divided the Levant on a sectarian basis: Lebanon was
envisioned as a haven for Christians (especially Maronites) and Druze;
Palestine with a sizable Jewish community; the Bekaa valley, on the border
between the two countries, effectively left to Shia Muslims; leaving Syria with
the region’s largest sectarian demographic: Sunni Muslims.
Geography
helped. For the period from the end of the Crusades up until the arrival of the
European powers in the late nineteenth century, and despite the region’s
vibrant trading culture, the different sects effectively lived separate from
each other. The Maorinites and the Druze dominated Mount Lebanon; the Shias
scattered in the region’s southern valleys, the Alawites in the hills
surrounding Latakia, and the Sunnis in the relatively large urban centres of
the region, Beirut and Damascus.
This
sectarianism meant that different parts of the eastern Mediterranean gradually
developed distinctive characters. With a clear Sunni Muslim majority, the
regions that form today’s Syria gradually took a Sunni Islamic feel, in the
same way that, for example, Mount Lebanon developed a Catholic milieu.
Economics
cemented sectarianism. As European influence rose in the region, several groups
leveraged on their religious affiliations with the European powers to gain
trading privileges. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, for
example, being a Maronite carried with it advantages in international trading
and securing credit.
For a
period, cosmopolitanism shrouded sectarianism. A thriving trading culture and
the existence of scores of established merchant families from Christian, Druze,
Armenian, Jewish, Persian, and Greek origins made Damascus and Aleppo
prosperous, cosmopolitan, and urbanised. But this pluralistic scene floated
above a dominant Sunni Islamic culture, especially in the interiors, rural, and
suburban parts of the country, and which were slowly but steadily creeping to
the margins of these flourishing cities.
This
Sunni Islamic identity has been suppressed throughout the past century. In the
aftermath of the First World War, Britain awarded Syria to the Hashemites; and
though the Hashemites base their legitimacy on their descent from the Prophet
Mohammed, they were keen to anchor their rule in their new kingdoms in the
eastern Mediterranean on the notion they championed in their revolt against the
Turkish Ottomans in the 1920s: Arab nationalism. From the 1930s to the 1950s,
Syria endured successive coup d’états that brought to power five militarist
regimes in less than three decades. All of them sought to establish some sort
of legitimacy, also through championing Arab nationalism. At the end of the
1950s, and after the 1956 Suez-crisis catapulted the Nasserite version of Arab
nationalism to the stratosphere, the military cabal that controlled Syria at
that time almost begged Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser to accept their country as
the “northern province” in a United Arab Republic. This venture collapsed less
than three years later, but Syria was to endure another decade under warring
generals, until a steely army commander by the name of Hafez Al-Assad
orchestrated a power grab that sidelined the different sparring officers and
quickly cemented his control over the country. Three decades later his son Bashar
inherited the country after the original heir designate (Hafez’s eldest son)
died in a car crash.
The
descent of Hafez’s regime into corruption, despotism, extreme violence, and
eventually dynastic succession, meant that he had to rely on a power structure
based on personal loyalty and familial allegiance. His son Bashar followed
suit. The Alawites, the sect the Al-Assads belong to, began to command immense
and unrivalled power. The Al-Assad regime evolved into a sectarian power nexus
maintaining control only through centralising and monopolising power.
In 2011,
when the revolt against the Al-Assads sprialed into a civil war, a deep
division in the Syrian society opened up. At the surface, there is a ferocious
strife between segments that want a return to calm and stability, even if under
dictatorship, and segments that believe the prize of liberation from the
Al-Assads’ power system is worth the price in blood and chaos.
But there
is a deeper divide, one that will fundamentally shape Syria’s future. On the
one hand are those advocating the continuation of classic Arab nationalism as
the overriding Syrian identity—one that encompasses all sects and rises above
social schisms, in sync with the country’s history in the last one hundred
years. On the other hand are those who believe that Arab nationalism was a
top-down ideology forced upon the lower middle class and poor whose genuine
choice would be a country with a historical Sunni Islamist character. At heart,
this is a struggle between those who believe that the modern Syrian state that
has existed from the end of the First World War should be preserved and those
who believe that this state was a historical aberration in the flow of the
previous five centuries: Syria as the land of Sunni Islamism in a sectarian-split
Eastern Mediterranean.
Both
views have credible justifications in this country’s rich past. The difference
is the length of arc casted over history.
Neither
Bashar Al-Assad nor the leaders of the fighting rebel groups, (and certainly
not the political representatives of the Syrian opposition) can impose their
answer to this identity question. Only the Syrian people can—through elections,
the drafting of a national constitution, and the normal evolution of a
functioning civil society and a free cultural scene.
Amid the
current mayhem, these mechanisms are now impossible to undertake. Two momentous
risks exist. First, a significant part of the fighters against the Al-Assad
regime are non Syrians—jihadists from Yemen, North Africa, and the Caucasus,
who are killing in order to establish a Sunni Islamic state that has nothing to
do with Syria’s own Sunni heritage. Second, this sectarian war is being
exacerbated by the region-wide cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Geopolitics is complicating the already highly fraught Syrian situation.
The
longer this war and these risks persist,
the more difficult it would be for a solution to emerge through a peaceful
political process. Meanwhile ordinary Syrians continue to be excluded from the
struggle over their future.
Given
Syria’s demographic weight and the social and cultural links the country has
always had with Lebanon and Jordan, this struggle will very likely spread to
the rest of the Levant, plunging the entire eastern Mediterranean into chaos.
The solution rests on three action lines.
First,
end the regional and international tolerance of the existence of terrorist
jihadist groups in the country. The financial and logistical backers of these
groups should learn from their experience in supporting the Mujahideen in
Afghanistan in the 1980s, who for two decades after the end of their war with
the Soviet Union, terrorized the entire Middle East. Irrespective of the result
of this war, if these groups entrench themselves in the country, they would
irrevocably wreak havoc on Syria and the entire region.
Second, sideline Bashar Al-Assad, and arrive
at a bargain with the key powers in the regime that guarantees them and their
families safe—and very comfortable—exits. This would shift their perspective
from fighting an existential war to cutting their losses.
And
third, use the nascent attempts at goodwill between Iran and the West to demand
that Iran stops its direct involvement in the war as the Gulf powers cease
their support for the Sunni jihadists in Syria. Eliminating the jihadists and
the fighting powers in the Al-Assad regime would allow for establishing the
circumstances through which Syrians would gradually settle their society’s
identity question. And the lesson from the experience of the past century is
that international powers should not design the outcomes—or the entities that
are to inherit the future. Let the Syrians do so.
Tarek
Osman is the author of the international bestseller Egypt on the
Brink. He has published articles on Egypt and the Middle East in
leading international newspapers. On Twitter: @TarekmOsman.