Syrian President Bashar al-Assad appears to have triumphed. He remains in power, the Syrian conflict is nearly over, and efforts are underway in the Arab world to normalize relations with his regime. Yet, while the level of violence may have gone down after ten years of destruction, can one say that Assad has changed his method of ruling? Has Syria’s experience altered his views about the essence of politics?
To answer those
questions, we must recall what happened at the beginning of the Arab uprisings.
In early 2011, even after massive social mobilization had overthrown two
longstanding strongmen in the span of a few weeks, Assad stated that those
events had no relevance for Syria. He told the Wall
Street Journal that “Syria was stable.” Referring to what had happened in
Tunisia and Egypt, the president remarked that his country was “outside of
this.”
A few weeks later,
revolution came banging on Bashar’s door, revealing how out of touch with
reality he had been. A decade on, it is still legitimate to ask why the Syrian
dictator overlooked the harbingers of his own vulnerability. Three mechanisms
explain this disconnect.
I. Speak, so that I may see you. The first was that the Assad family was myopic about
the fact that excessive control reduced its exposure to the true workings of
Syrian society, hindering its foresight. Politics is a dynamic process that
involves expression, negotiation, and conflict. By 2011, the Assad regime had
established a ‘controlocracy,’ a tight and elaborate system of control, with
tentacles throughout society. In having tightened its grip on power structures,
security agencies, political parties, and public space, the regime had placed
nearly all visible aspects of politics under its stringent authority.
The problem with
this is that the Assads failed to realize that by placing politics in a
straightjacket, they pushed it into murkier recesses, so that political opinion
and contestation shifted from party politics, parliamentary debates, and media
outlets into private conversations and subtle forms of dissent. Small facts
speak to large issues—“winks to epistemology or sheep raids to revolution,” as
the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz once wrote. Under the Assads,
ellipses of speech, allegorical phrases, nods of desperation, exhalations of
anger, or even silence, spoke volumes about what was rankling in the hearts of
people.
From the People’s
Palace, a hilltop fortress sitting perched on Mount Mezzeh overlooking the
enduring city of Damascus, Bashar al-Assad saw a different picture. Silence
implied loyalty, self-censorship consent. The uprising in March 2011 showed how
deeply he had misread reality.
II. Private
Truths, Public Lies. Not only had
Syrians concealed their true preferences in response to political pressures,
they also feigned many of their reactions and support for the regime. Economist
Timur Kuran has called this “preference falsification” in his 1995 book Private
Truths, Public Lies. Privately, this may mean faking a smile or compliment
in a social gathering. Under authoritarian regimes, however, the practice is
more consequential.
It is telling that
for both those who supported the Assads and their critics, fear was the Syrian
regime’s trademark. While critics called it a “republic of fear,” the regime
was fond of upholding the notion of “the prestige of the state,” or haybat
al-dawla, albeit blended with awe and dread. Between 1970 and 2011, the
politics of terror had been institutionalized in Syria. In the thick of fear,
people acquired a knack for survival. They would bend with the wind, withdraw
into their shells, go into mental exile, or simulate devotion.
An astute poet from
the early Islamic era, Abu al-Atahiya, stated it well: “If life narrows on you,
silence is wider.” And so a spiral of silence pervaded Syria before 2011. Yet,
silence is more often a mark of patience than a sign of fidelity. Nor, because
it is essentially a burden, does it last eternally.
Rather than reading
between the lines of silence, the Assad regime had been busy constructing a
personality cult around its leader and craving eternal rule: “Assad forever,”
or “Al-Assad ila al-abad,” was its favorite slogan. However, it took no great
insight to see that sycophancy had bred arrogance.
III. Caged Behind
the Walls of Time. Time widens the
disparity between reality and fantasy. The Assad regime suffered from its longevity,
so that time had effectively encaged it. Often, the longer an autocrat stays in
power, the greater his propensity to rely on a small coterie of confidants who
share his opinions and delusions. The leader’s inner sanctum limits his
exposure, so that reality becomes “like a night in which all cows are black,”
as the German philosopher Hegel put it.
By early 2011, the
Assads, Hafez and Bashar, had spent 40 years in an ivory tower. A former
advisor to Bashar observed that
the president “lives in a cocoon.” In fact, Bashar was probably never fully
aware of the inner workings of his own state organs, particularly the unbridled
security agencies. Becoming a family heirloom had turned the Syrian state into
a compartmentalized dictatorship in which a shadow state had emerged, personal
fiefdoms had proliferated and public institutions had been emptied of all
relevance.
However deep the
wounds of the Syrian conflict, the lessons of its outbreak should not be lost
on anyone. The Syrian uprising took the dictator by surprise, stripped him of
his aura, and demonstrated that politics could not be eliminated or forever
buried. If the regime repeats its mistakes after the uprising’s conclusion,
then the dark events of the past decade will reappear again.
Nael Shama
* This article
appeared first in Diwan (Carnegie Middle East Center) on April 15, 2021.
