I am traveling through early Fall on a Boston College research grant. I expect to be in the Middle East for at least part of my grant period. If this pans out, I hope to revive this blog "from the Levant"--provided I have reliable internet. In the meantime, and before I get disconnected, here's my latest on Syria, and my commentary to the doubting Thomases who've only now begun considering a "third option" (umm, partition) which I've spoken about since the very early days of the uprisings.
A version of this post (here) ran in the July 10, 2012 issue of the National Interest
Many Middle East commentators have described the Houla massacres of
May 2012 as "a turning point" in Syria’s sixteen-month old uprisings.
“This is Syria's Srebrenica” clamored some, speculating sterner
international pressures ranging from the imposition of more debilitating
sanctions against the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, to further isolating
his government (with the prospects of enlisting Chinese and Russian help,) to
possibly putting boots on the ground to lend support to the armed opposition
and eventually create civilian "safe havens." Yet the brutal
killings continued, an undaunted Assad went on flouting international denunciations,
and save for a quasi-universal litany of jeremiads and consternations about the
regime's cruelty, precious little has changed on the ground in Syria. If anything, Assad seemed to have raised the
stakes in late June downing a Turkish military jet that had presumably breached
Syrian airspace. Yet, this too, along
with news of fresh new massacres in the Damascus neighborhood of Douma, met
with international mutism—and curiously enough, with Turkish resignation.
True, there was the recent ballyhooed Geneva conference, and before
it the histrionic expulsions of Syria's diplomatic corps from key Western
nations—with the Obama administration, true to form, demurring. But those remained sparse, perfunctory, timorous,
and largely ineffective slaps on the wrist. For, beyond the killings,
beyond the world's cacophonous indignation, and beyond the Syrian regime's continued
recalcitrance, there lurked a method to Assad's madness that very few observers
have deigned address or entertain: namely, that what animates Assad are
communal survival concerns and Alawite group contingencies; that the
international community’s and the Syrian opposition’s oratory about Syria’s unity
and national integrity are the least of the regime’s preoccupations; that it
might be too late at this point in the game for the Alawites to abdicate their
reign and resign themselves to a subservient future in Syria; that many
assumptions about the current shape of the Syrian state are broken beyond
repair; and that the Alawites would rather dismantle their existing republic
and retreat into a fortified autonomous entity in the Alawite mountains than
share power with a brutalized Sunni-Arab majority ill-prepared to granting
either democracy or clemency to its cruel erstwhile wardens.
Save for analysis published in The National Interest throughout 2011
and early 2012 (see for instance here, here, and here,) most analysts,
diplomats, and policy makers invested in Syrian affairs seem still beholden to
spent paradigms about the country; namely that Syria is somehow a single
unitary entity that shall remain so whatever the cost and whatever the outcome
of the current uprisings, to be ruled in its entirety by a single dynasty
beholden to a single ideology and bound to a single political culture. Yet, if
anything, the events of the past sixteen months—and more recently the Houla and
Douma massacres—have demonstrated that the Alawites, not unlike other Syrian
communal and ethnic groups, have yet to overcome their regional, sectarian, and
subnational loyalties for the sake of some fancied uniform "Syrian
nation." Historically speaking, there was never anything resembling
this vision of a homogenous Syrian entity, and there is precious little today
that would justify the constitutive elements of this artificial construct
remaining intact.
The grisly massacres running riot through the Syrian countryside are
not mere sectarian outbursts or spasmodic bouts of senseless killings and retaliatory
counter-killings; they bear the telltale markings of what became known in Yugoslavia
of the 1990's as "ethnic cleansing." Like their twentieth century Balkan precedent,
Syria’s massacres of civilian populations are deliberate, controlled,
methodical, and focused, aimed at removing "from a specific territory,
persons of a particular ethnic group... in order to render that area ethnically
homogenous." Ironically the
parallels don’t end there. Like the
Balkans, geographic Syria—including today’s troubled Syrian Arab Republic—was once
part of the Ottoman dominions. It was
and remains at once a crossroads and a rugged mountainous refuge where many
linguistic families, multiple ethnic groups, and bevies or religious and
sectarian communities—among them Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, Shias, Sunnis,
Greek-Orthodox, Druze, Syriacs, Alawites, Maronites, Jews and others—have for
centuries lead an uneasy existence and a tenuous coexistence. The conditions that have lead to the
twentieth century rending of the Balkan states into multiple ethnic formations
may be different from those responsible for Syria’s travails today. But the ingredients are hardly dissimilar: restless
ethnic, religious, and linguistic mosaics forcibly brought together under the
banner of a homogenizing authoritarian pan-national idea.
And so, today’s strings of wanton murders, sexual assaults, torture,
arbitrary detentions, targeted bombings, and destruction of civilian neighborhoods—and
what they entail in terms of displacements, deportations, and population
movements—are nothing if not the groundwork of a future Alawite entity; the
grafting of new facts on the ground and the drafting of new frontiers. No longer able to rule in the name of Arab unity,
and in the process preserve their own ethnic and sectarian autonomy and specificity,
the Alawites deem it salutary to retreat into the Levantine highlands
overlooking the Mediterranean. The area
in question is a sanctuary that the Alawites had called home for centuries, and
which the French had helped them instate and protect as an autonomous “ethnic
state” during the first-half of the twentieth century.
By no means will the population of this projected state be
homogenous; but its Alawite element will be an overwhelming majority that is
politically, psychologically, militarily, and economically well-prepared to
stand up and be counted. What’s more,
the largely Christian coastal regions of Tartous and Lattakieh have remained
“neutral” throughout the uprisings—and have in effect signaled (even if
tacitly) their acquiescence in an Alawite-dominated state. Furthermore, the buffer zones of Masyaf and
Cadmus to the East are home to a large Ismaili community, which has thus far
remained loyal to the Alawites. Heading
northeastward, beyond the Turko-Syrian border town of Idlib, the Syrian branch
of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) seems to have already begun establishing
the foundations of autonomous rule, with Alawite blessings and encouragement. Though its industrial resources are quite
limited, this projected Alawite region benefits from a well developed
infrastructure, rich arable highlands, fertile coastal plains, abundant water
sources, and more importantly perhaps, Syria’s only deep-water harbors—Tartous
and Lattakieh—and an international airport that would make any emerging state
in that particular region at once self-sufficient and supremely defensible.
The earth is flat no more when it comes to Syria, and its current
shape no longer makes sense to a recently empowered group unwilling to revert
back to servility. It is high time prevalent
images of "Syria" and its future—as a cultural, linguistic,
historical, and ethnic monolith—also moved away from this sort of
cognitive dissonance. This is not a
prescription. This is a gentle reminder
that a model for this future can be found in Syria’s Ottoman and
French-Mandatory past, and that a single unitary Syria locked up in its current
map is neither sacrosanct nor a law of nature.
Indeed if anything it is an historical anomaly that arose in 1936—a date
prior to which conceptually, politically, and geographically speaking, Syria as
we know it today was non-extant. Policy
maker, peace processors, diplomats, and those invested in Syrian affairs and
the Syrian people’s wellbeing would do well exploring all possible solutions to
the current Syrian crisis, not only solutions dictated by prevalent models and comforting
ideological predilections.
