Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East

Syria

204 Syria paulo gabriel hilu pinto Contextualizing the Syrian Uprising Protests against Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria started in the aftermath of the ousting of Ben Ali’s dictatorship by the Tunisian revolution. In January 2011, civil disobedience and demonstrations of dissatisfaction with the Baathist regime, which included self-immolations, started to occupy the Syrian public arena.1 Despite these early signs of unrest, Assad affirmed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal (2011) that Syria was and would remain unaffected by the wave of revolts and protests spreading throughout theArab world. Explaining his views on the phenomenon, he described the situation as follows: It means if you have stagnant water, you will have pollution and microbes; and because you have had this stagnation for decades, let us say, especially the last decade in spite of the vast changes that are surrounding the world and some areas in the Middle East, including Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan , because we had this stagnation we were plagued with microbes. So, what you have been seeing in this region is a kind of disease. That is how we see it. . . . We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries but in spite of that Syria is stable. Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.This is the core issue.When syria 205 there is divergence between your policy and the people’s beliefs and interests , you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance. Nevertheless, by February mass protests had become part of Syria’s political landscape, albeit in a pattern much more localized and fragmented than the uprisings of national scale that marked the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Harassment from the police or the security forces, which most Syrians usually endured as a mix of a societal structural problem and individual misfortune, started to create outrage, and people were mobilized into protest. In February 2011 hundreds of people protested in Damascus after traffic police officers assaulted the son of a merchant in the Hariqa district. The protesters chanted “The Syrian people will not be humiliated” while still pledging allegiance to Assad as Syria’s president (Al Arabiya News 2011). Ironically, despite Assad’s rhetoric of confident calm, it was precisely the reality of overzealous security forces repressing all possible expressions of opposition to his government, or even support for the protesters in other Arab countries, that unleashed the events that ended in an open revolt against Assad’s Baathist regime. Throughout February, protests in solidarity with the Egyptian Revolution or with the Libyan rebels were met with violent repression by the Syrian security forces. Some two hundred demonstrators gathered in front of the Libyan embassy in Damascus with placards reading “Freedom for the people” and “Traitors are those who beat their people” before they were violently dispersed by the police, with many demonstrators being beaten or arrested (All4Syria 2011). The incident that ignited the nationwide revolt against the Baathist regime happened in Der‘a, a medium-size town near the Syria–Jordan border. Der‘a, the main town of the Hawran, a fertile agricultural region south of Damascus, had been directly affected by years of drought, the negative impacts of which had been enhanced by state underinvestment and mismanagement of resources by state officials. As a result, the town had experienced a sharp rise in poverty and unemployment. Adding to that, the location of Der‘a near the border meant that it had a large presence of the security apparatus of the regime, and the town’s inhabitants felt strongly the increase in repression and the predatory 206 Paulo Gabriel Hilu Pinto corruption of government officials that developed duringAssad’s ruling decade. Der‘a’s geographic and sociological characteristics constituted the main causal elements behind the Syrian uprising: increasing poverty , decreasing governmental investments and services in rural regions, violent repression, and resource-draining corruption. Thus it was not unsurprising that Der‘a became the uprising’s early flashpoint. On March 6, 2011, a group of fifteen kids, between ten and fifteen years old, were arrested for writing the slogan of theTunisian revolution, “Al-sha‘b yurid isqat al-nizam” (The people want the downfall of the regime), on the wall of their school.The kids were interrogated and even tortured under police custody.The arrest was felt as a “moral insult,” not only by the families directly related to...