On June 10, 2000, President Hafiz al-Asad died in his bed after three decades as Syria’s unrivaled leader. Later that same day, the People’s Assembly ratified an amendment to the constitution that lowered the age requirement for the presidency from 40 to 34, exactly the age of the former president’s eldest surviving son, Bashshar. The Regional (Syrian) Command of the Ba‘th Party announced that evening that Bashshar al-Asad had been named head of state. The next day, Vice President ‘Abd al-Halim Khaddam proclaimed that Bashshar al-Asad had been designated commander in chief of the Syrian armed forces and promoted to the rank of lieutenant general. At the long-planned but hastily convened Ba‘th Party congress a week later, the new lieutenant general was voted onto the Regional Command and elected to the post of secretary general. He was then nominated to be the Ba‘th Party’s sole candidate for the presidency, a nomination that was ratified by the People’s Assembly on June 26.
Presidential elections in the form of a popular referendum took place on July 10, 2000. Bashshar al-Asad came away from the balloting with the approval of 97.3 percent of the electorate and on July 17 took the presidential oath of office in front of a special session of the People’s Assembly. The remarkably smooth transition of power reflected not only the absence of viable alternative candidates but also the high degree of complementarity that had taken shape among various components of the regime in the decades after the coup d’état of November 1970. Unlike November 1983, when Hafiz al-Asad had suffered a heart attack and abruptly disappeared from the scene, no tanks rolled through the streets of Damascus.
Nevertheless, considerable jockeying among top military commanders and security officers took place in the weeks immediately following Hafiz al-Asad’s death. Colonel Manaf Tlas, son of long-time Minister of Defense Mustafa Tlas, joined Bashshar al-Asad on the Regional (Syrian) Command of the Ba‘th Party despite having no previous command experience. The head of the National Security Council, Muhammad Sa‘id Bukhaitan, also took a seat on the Regional Command, while the head of Military Intelligence retired in early July. Such changes have generally been interpreted as part of a coordinated effort to usher supporters of the new president into key posts and squeeze out potential rivals and adversaries.
In his inaugural address, President Bashshar al-Asad promised to continue to prosecute the anticorruption campaign that he had supervised during his father’s last years in office. He underscored the importance of “present[ing] new ideas in all areas, while also improving ideas that no longer suit the existing reality, or even relinquishing old ideas that are no longer useful.”1 More provocatively, the new president expressed a commitment to furthering democratic governance, albeit “a democracy distinctive to us, founded on our history, culture and personality and stemming from the needs of the society and reality in which we live.” He then solicited proposals from the political parties in the Progressive National Front for opening up the domestic arena to a broader range of public expression and greater popular participation in policy making.2
Taking the president at his word, intellectuals, academics, and artists started to organize public forums to discuss political, economic, and social issues. A collection of these groups, led by Riyad Saif and Michel Kilu of the Communist Action League, announced plans to organize a Committee of the Friends of Civil Society to push for civil rights and fundamental institutional reform. Other groups simultaneously petitioned to be recognized by the Ministry of Social Affairs as the Committee for Environmental Protection. In late September, 99 prominent civil rights activists published an open letter in a Beirut newspaper, which called for freedom of assembly and expression as well as the immediate release of all political prisoners. By the end of the year, the Tuesday Economic Forum run by the Association for Economic Science in Damascus had started to circulate scholarly treatises that questioned specific aspects of government economic policy, and even the official newspapers began to print articles that criticized long-standing administrative practices.
Meanwhile, independent representatives in the People’s Assembly took steps to set up a liberal political party that would operate outside the purview of the Progressive National Front. The initiative was blocked by the leadership of the assembly, but the 21 prospective members of the new party continued to voice objections to ministerial reports and introduce motions for reforms in existing bureaucratic procedures throughout the winter of 2000–2001. A collection of Nasirist and socialist parties concurrently coalesced into the National Democratic Bloc, whose members subjected cabinet ministers to formal questioning and complaints from the left.
In response to these developments, local branches of the Ba‘th Party convened public rallies to rebut the points that had been raised by the civil rights activists and liberal reformers. Party officials also made overtures to the Syrian Social National Party, one of the primary rivals of the Ba‘th that had gradually rehabilitated itself and quietly resumed activities inside Syria. President al-Asad ordered the release of 600 imprisoned members of the Communist Workers’ Party, the Iraq-leaning Democratic Ba‘th, the Muslim Brothers, and the Lebanon-based Islamic Liberation Party. Such conciliatory moves were soon overtaken by harsher measures. Minister of Information ‘Adnan ‘Amran charged in early January 2001 that the public forums were being funded by the embassies of foreign governments.3 As the winter of 2000–2001 drew to a close, organizers of forums were told by the security forces that they must obtain permits for meetings in advance and then found it impossible to navigate the byzantine vetting process that such permits required. By May 2001, almost all of the public forums had shut down; at the end of the summer, several outspoken members of the nascent opposition in the People’s Assembly found themselves under arrest.
Two overlapping dynamics sealed the fate of the short-lived “Damascus spring.” First, and not surprisingly, senior commanders in the military and the security forces chafed at the drift away from orderliness that the discussion groups and parliamentary critics both epitomized and furthered. At the same time that President al-Asad was hinting at the need for more openness in political affairs, the former heads of several key security agencies came out of retirement and began to act as his political advisers. Among these were ‘Ali Duba, the former commander of Military Intelligence; Muhammad al-Khuli, the past chair of the Presidential Intelligence Committee; and Muhammad Nasif, the former chief of the internal branch of General Security.
Potential dangers inherent in loosening up the political arena were illustrated in early November 2000 when fighting abruptly flared in the countryside around Dir‘a. A band of Sunni tribespeople attacked Druze inhabitants of the village of Rahi in a dispute over property rights, prompting the Druze to retaliate by setting fire to houses and mosques belonging to the local Sunni population. Druze residents then seized control of the municipality and provincial administration office, while others staged a rowdy protest in front of the People’s Assembly in Damascus. Druze students at the University of Damascus joined the demonstrators in demanding that President al-Asad disarm the tribespeople and enforce existing landholding arrangements. In the end, a task force of some 5,000 troops and security personnel had to be dispatched to the southern highlands to restore order. The incident convinced senior military and security officers that unregulated public activism was likely to lead directly to outbreaks of violent unrest.
Second, a jump in world oil prices and a burst of financial assistance from the European Union provided the central administration with sufficient resources to offer economic incentives to those citizens who restrained themselves. The influx of higher oil revenues enabled state officials to raise public-sector wages by 25 percent in September 2000. The Ninth Five-Year Plan (2001–2005) earmarked more than two-thirds of new investment funds to public-sector projects. The plan boosted total spending on public transportation infrastructure by some 400 percent over the amount that had been allocated in the Eighth Five-Year Plan.
More important, crude oil started flowing across Syria from the oilfields of northern Iraq in the fall of 2000. The authorities distributed the Iraqi oil, estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 barrels per day, inside the country to satisfy local demand at subsidized rates, and exported Syrian petroleum overseas for sale at market prices. The influx of Iraqi oil accompanied a marked increase in Syrian exports of processed food, clothing, plastic wares, and other manufactured goods to Iraq. Due to the severe constraints associated with UN economic sanctions, Iraqi consumers enjoyed little if any access to goods from other countries and were therefore forced to settle for Syrian products.
Exports to Iraq bolstered Syria’s obsolescent public-sector manufacturing plants but did little to halt the general slide in per-capita gross domestic product. As improvements in foreign trade failed to diminish the country’s rising unemployment, state officials turned to private entrepreneurs to engage in new industrial and commercial ventures. The Higher Council for Investment approved licenses for 31 companies in August and September 2000, which were expected to create some 2,000 jobs. At the same time, the government welcomed the formation of the Saudi-sponsored Islamic Institution to Promote the Private Sector to encourage further investment in the free zones. October saw the opening of an investors’ conference under the auspices of the Ministry of the Economy and Foreign Trade and the chambers of commerce of Damascus and Aleppo. More important, a draft banking-reform bill was presented to the People’s Assembly in January 2001, the first step toward deregulating the state-dominated financial system. The resulting Law No. 28, which was ratified by the assembly in April, authorized the formation of both private banks and partnerships between public and private financial institutions.
In the countryside, state officials started to allow private farmers to take control of agricultural land that had previously been worked by the state-run collective farms. Law No. 83, issued by the Ba‘th Party in December 2000, ordered all government landholdings to be transferred to heirs of their former owners, laborers who worked on the collective farms, and technical employees of the General Administration of the Euphrates Basin, in that order. Myriam Ababsa reports that in the northeastern provinces, along the Euphrates river and its tributaries, the law “triggered considerable tension and competition among these three categories [of beneficiaries], as each feared being excluded from the land redistribution process. As implementation proceeded, more than 250 complaint letters were addressed to the Syrian President’s office and a peasant revolt took place in the village of Disbi Afnan in December 2002.”4
Many of the opportunities that arose out of initiatives to bolster private enterprise were seized by close relatives and long-time comrades of President al-Asad. The introduction of mobile telephones, expansion of duty-free shops, and spread of Western-style franchise restaurants rapidly enriched one of the president’s wife’s cousins. Highly profitable food processing and real estate ventures ended up in the hands of sons of Vice President Khaddam and Minister of Defense Tlas. Cousins of the president snapped up lucrative contracts to provide services for the oil sector and construct public housing, while a son of the head of Internal Security became the owner of the country’s largest advertising agency. This trend enhanced the economic weight and political influence of an assortment of well-connected individuals whom Salwa Ismail aptly calls “the children of authority” (awlad al-sultah).5
December 2001 saw a significant reshuffling of the Council of Ministers. The portfolios for economy and foreign trade and finance were put in the hands of two Western-trained economists, Ghassan al-Rifa‘i and Muhammad al-Atrash. A firm champion of the public sector was removed as minister of industry and replaced by the more market-oriented minister of planning, ‘Isam al-Za‘im. At the same time, comrades of the president from university days and from the Syrian Computer Society took over as minister of higher education and ambassador to the United States, respectively.
State officials attempted to mask, and perhaps also to dilute, the expanding prerogatives of the president’s relatives and political allies by ramping up the anticorruption campaign. In March 2002, the Council of Ministers announced that all government employees over the age of 60 would be required to step aside so that their positions could be turned over to younger individuals. At the same time, several senior figures in the public sector were dismissed on charges of embezzlement and other forms of malfeasance. They included the director general of the Commercial Bank of Syria, who was placed under arrest, and the head of Syrian Arab Airlines, who was merely removed from his post. Moreover, Minister of the Interior ‘Ali Hamud launched a campaign to root out corruption inside the security forces: Some 220 mid-level officers and 40 senior commanders were forced to retire, mostly for exhibiting “undisciplined and immoral behavior.”6 The campaign coincided with the promotion of several powerful military and security chiefs to ceremonial positions in the Ministry of Defense.
Official actions aimed at weeding out corruption got derailed in early June 2002, when a recently constructed dam across the al-‘Asi (Orontes) River north of Hamah suddenly collapsed. The resultant flooding killed more than 20 people and devastated hundreds of hectares of productive farmland. Preliminary reports that the dam’s failure had been caused by shoddy building materials, compounded by negligence in performing routine maintenance on the part of the state-run Orontes Basin Company, prompted the People’s Assembly to demand a thorough investigation. Reporters who visited the scene came away impressed by “the utter poverty and deprivation of the surrounding countryside. It [was] as if virtually everyone there [was] in need, yet after some 30 years of authoritarian rule, the state had not yet reached the area.”7
Spontaneous demonstrations broke out in Syria’s larger cities in July 2002 to protest Israeli military activities in the West Bank. Ostensibly pro-Palestinian protests quickly displayed the slogans and symbols of organizations that stood opposed to the Ba‘thi regime. Dissidents took advantage of the demonstrations to distribute handbills that called on the authorities to release political prisoners, end martial law, and relax restrictions on public assembly and expression. Faced with signs of simmering popular restiveness, senior officials in the Ba‘th Party orchestrated a succession of mass rallies and marches that highlighted the party’s unwavering struggle against Zionism. And for good measure, public-sector wages were raised another 20 percent in late October.
Members of the Kurdish Democratic Unity Party in Syria (Yakiti) staged a protest outside the People’s Assembly in December 2002 after their formal request to meet with the minister of the interior had been denied.8 Julie Gauthier notes that this demonstration, “though modest, represented a marked contrast to the usual gatherings and memorial ceremonies undertaken by the Kurdish parties. Because of the messages on the placards, the ideology of the regime was displaced from the street, a space that had long been confiscated and manipulated by the state for its own glorification.”9 In the wake of this incident, a group of civil rights activists announced the creation of the Committee to Free Political Prisoners. Faced with these challenges, the authorities clamped down on campaigning in the run-up to elections for the People’s Assembly in the spring of 2003. New regulations stipulated that in order to be eligible to run for a seat in the assembly, candidates had to have been a member of one of the parties in the Progressive National Front for at least 10 years.10 Still, electoral competition turned out to be remarkably fierce, and the balloting ended up bringing 177 new faces to the 250-member body, 125 of whom were under 50 years of age.
Shortly after U.S. troops occupied Iraq in March 2003, the oil pipeline from Kirkuk in northeastern Iraq to Banyas on the Syrian coast was shut down. Largely due to the collapse of the oil distribution scheme, “the year 2003 was gloomy with all external factors—declining oil exports, a bad harvest and regional conflict—being negative and contributing to an economic slowdown.”11 Moreover, the Iraq war severely disrupted the flow of capital investment and economic assistance from the Arab Gulf states. Spreading popular discontent was reflected in a silent protest against corruption and government ineffectiveness by 100 young people in the capital, which was quickly broken up by the security forces.12
Faced with the prospect of having to adjust to dramatically reduced resources, the Council of Ministers created a Credit and Monetary Council to accelerate the formation of private- and mixed-sector banks.13 The government then released a revised economic development plan that set an objective of 6 percent annual growth rates over the following five years. Steps were taken to boost tax collection by setting new assessments that were low enough to encourage compliance while at the same time toughening the penalties for evasion.14 More important, the prohibition against carrying out transactions in foreign currency, which had been promulgated in 1986, was lifted in early July. Two months later, the Council of Ministers was reshuffled, with ministers who had expressed doubts about joining the European Union–sponsored Mediterranean Trade and Investment Initiative replaced by pro-EuroMed politicians. The speaker of the People’s Assembly, Muhammad Naji‘ al-‘Utri, was given a mandate to rationalize and accelerate the liberalization of the economy. A Western-trained, proreform economist on the staff of the United Nations Development Program in Damascus, ‘Abdullah al-Dardari, became director of the State Planning Organization.
Trade with Iraq revived briefly during the fall of 2003 by order of the U.S. military commander in Musil, Colonel David Petraeus. The influx of resources prompted the Ministry of Industry to invite foreign investors to set up joint operating agreements with public enterprises in several areas of manufacturing,15 and plans were drawn up to reduce average tariff rates as a means to promote trade. But by early 2004, escalating violence in northwestern Iraq made routine transactions between the two countries almost impossible. The permanent cut-off of Iraqi oil, combined with the absence of alternative outlets for Syrian industrial products, threatened to send the local economy into a tailspin. The one bright spot in the local economy was the arrival of well-to-do refugees from Iraq, who pushed up real estate prices in the cities and boosted demand for staples and household items.
State officials undertook a variety of initiatives to cope with the prospects of a prolonged economic downturn. In February 2004, the government announced that it would no longer guarantee permanent employment for all university graduates. The announcement propelled students in the College of Engineering at the University of Aleppo into the streets in a rare public protest. The Council of Ministers then introduced a plan whereby state employees who held only a secondary school diploma would be retired from their posts with a lump sum payoff so that positions could be freed up for university graduates. At the same time, the government disbanded the Economic Security Courts, whose primary task had been to enforce the laws against the holding and use of foreign currency. In mid-February, Syrian officials contracted with Iran’s largest automobile company to build an assembly plant outside Damascus.16 The first quarter of 2004 also saw the initial set of three private banks receive clearance to start operations, while consumption taxes were eliminated on a wide range of goods and services later in the year.
That April, responsibility for setting the prices of key commodities was transferred from a mixed commission made up of officials from the Higher Economic Committee, the Ministry of Supply, and the provincial administrations to the Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade, which immediately signaled that it was going to rely more heavily on market dynamics to set prices. Meanwhile, public-sector enterprises were authorized to collaborate directly with foreign companies. The Syrian Arab Electronics Industries Company and the General Organization of Tobacco both signed contracts to carry out combined operations with external partners.17 In October, the Syrian government at last accepted the terms of the Euro-Mediterranean economic partnership and initialed a formal agreement to deregulate trade and investment with the European Union. And a month later, the General Authority for Free Zones announced plans to construct a dozen new duty-free markets at various border crossings.18
None of these measures succeeded in generating a sustained economic recovery, so in February 2005 President al-Asad traveled to Moscow for talks with senior Russian officials about the future of bilateral relations. He persuaded his hosts to write off almost three-quarters of Syria’s outstanding debt and returned home with an agreement whereby Russian companies would take the lead in exploring for new hydrocarbon deposits inside Syria.
Efforts to stimulate the economy were overshadowed by outbreaks of unrest among Syria’s previously quiescent minority communities. During a March 2004 soccer match in the northeastern city of al-Qamishli, Kurdish fans of the home team taunted Arab supporters of the visiting team by waving the flag of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq and chanting slogans in praise of U.S. President George W. Bush. The Arabs then assaulted the Kurds, and fighting spilled outside the stadium into the surrounding streets.19 The incident precipitated rioting in several northern towns, which threatened to spread to the predominantly Kurdish suburbs of Aleppo; there were even reports of agitation in Dumar, a largely Kurdish enclave on the outskirts of Damascus. Security forces stepped in and arrested hundreds of Kurds, prompting civil rights activists to organize sporadic demonstrations to restore constitutional liberties. Restiveness then percolated into other minorities: Assyrian Christians around al-Hasakah in the northeast took to the streets in an unprecedented public demonstration in October 2004, followed by an outbreak of rioting at Masyaf in Hamah province that pitted Isma‘ilis against ‘Alawis.
Simmering tensions across the northern provinces set the stage for the appointment of a new minister of interior, Ghazi Kan‘an, who had commanded Syrian security forces in Lebanon since 1982 and had been acting as head of Political Security in Damascus since October 2002. The change followed the resignation of Minister of Defense Mustafa Tlas, who was replaced by the chief of staff, Hasan al-Turkmani. In March 2005, President al-Asad’s brother-in-law ‘Asif Shawkat took over as chief of Military Intelligence. The new security team adopted a hard line in dealing with civil rights activists at Tishrin University in Latakia as well as with Kurdish activists who staged a sit-in outside the High Court in Damascus; in both cases cadres of the Ba‘th Party’s student union armed with clubs were dispatched to break up the protests.
Kurds in the northeastern provinces took to the streets once again in April 2005 to celebrate the election of the historic leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Jalal Talabani, to the presidency of Iraq. Kurdish activists at the same time entered into discussions with prominent civil rights activists, which led to the formation of the National Coordination Committee for the Defense of Basic Freedoms and Human Rights, Syria’s “most inclusive opposition alliance to date.”20 In early June, a prominent religious figure in the Kurdish community, Muhammad Ma‘shuq al-Khaznawi, went so far as to tell a reporter, “Either the regime must change or the regime must go. . . . The reason I and others can speak out is because the Americans are trying to get rid of dictators and help the oppressed” of the region, including the Kurds.21 Al-Khaznawi dropped out of sight on May 10, sparking renewed protests in al-Qamishli.
Delegates from all parts of Syria gathered in Damascus in June 2005 for the first general congress of the Ba‘th Party to take place in five years. On the first day of the congress, Vice President ‘Abd al-Halim Khaddam unexpectedly resigned his post. Other major changes followed in quick succession: Vice President Zuhair Musharaqah was relieved of his office; the party disbanded its pan-Arab leadership, the so-called National Command, and reduced the size of the Regional (Syrian) Command from 21 to 14 members. The head of the State Planning Organization, ‘Abdullah al-Dardari, was promoted to the post of deputy prime minister for economic affairs despite not being a member of the party. Moreover, there were intimations that the state of emergency that had been in force since March 1963 might soon be rescinded and that political parties outside the Progressive National Front might be permitted to contest the People’s Assembly elections scheduled for 2007.
Perhaps the most salient outcome of the 2005 party congress was the transformation of the Ba‘th Party’s long-standing socialist program into a pledge to construct a “social market economy.” The adoption of social market principles signaled a renewed commitment to encourage private enterprise throughout the domestic economy so long as profit-oriented companies acted in a socially responsible way. No explicit guidelines were drafted to say what exactly was entailed by the notion of the social market economy. Consequently, Deputy Prime Minister al-Dardari and other proponents of deregulation sat down to hammer out a Tenth Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) that would meld economic reform, export promotion, investment in agriculture, and support for existing social welfare programs into a more or less coherent package.22
More important, the 2005 party congress marked a change in the distribution of power between the armed forces and the security services. Bassam Haddad points out that prior to the congress, the Regional (Syrian) Command had always included among its members the minister of defense and chief of the general staff. These two figures found themselves dismissed from the Regional Command during the course of the gathering and replaced by the heads of General Intelligence and Military Intelligence.23 At the same time, the Republican Guard, under the command of the president’s younger brother Mahir, established itself as the central actor inside the military establishment, further undercutting the position of more senior officers in regular combat formations.
Hints that the Ba‘th Party might relinquish its monopoly over party politics prompted a group of liberal notables in Aleppo to announce plans to form a new political organization, the Movement of Free Patriots.24 Civil rights activists in October 2005 issued a more ambitious manifesto, known as the Damascus Declaration. This document demanded an immediate end to the 40-year state of emergency, along with the appointment of a constitutional commission to draw up a basic law that would guarantee the liberties of citizens. The declaration was signed by representatives of a broad range of organizations, including Kurdish political parties and the outlawed Muslim Brothers. According to Joe Pace and Joshua Landis,
Socialists, communists, liberals and Islamists were willing to unite over a single platform of democratic change and respect for one another. Civil society activists who had previously turned their noses up at political parties joined forces with them and a deliberate effort was made to ensure that signatories of the declaration hailed from a majority of Syria’s provinces.25
State officials responded to the call for political liberalization by demonizing the individuals and groups that had affixed their signatures to the Damascus Declaration. The signers were denounced as traitors to the nation and stooges of the United States and Israel. “Unfortunately,” Pace and Landis remark, “indictments of the opposition’s loyalty still resonated with an anxiety-ridden public.”26 The presence of the Muslim Brothers among the sponsors of the declaration greatly diminished the appeal of the civil rights movement for many citizens, particularly in the wake of armed clashes at Hamah and al-Hasakah between the security forces and a radical Islamist organization, the Army of Syria (jund al-Sham). Other military operations that targeted cells of Islamist radicals took place in early December in poor districts of Aleppo and the countryside around Idlib.
Renewed disorder in the north-central provinces was eclipsed by former Vice President ‘Abd al-Halim Khaddam’s scathing condemnation of the Ba‘th Party–led regime, which was broadcast on regional television at the end of December 2005. Khaddam, who had decamped to Paris following his resignation, three months later presided over the inaugural conference of an umbrella opposition alliance, the National Salvation Front. The front appealed to dissident Ba‘this, Muslim Brothers, civil rights activists, and Kurdish nationalists to work together to overthrow the family-based clique that was ruling Syria and replace it with a pluralist political system.27 Prominent critics of the Ba‘thi order inside Syria tended to keep their distance from the National Salvation Front, partly due to lingering suspicions about Khaddam—who had played a key role in terminating the “Damascus Spring” of 2000–2001—and partly out of mistrust of the Muslim Brothers. Nevertheless, the emergence of the front prompted the authorities to crack down hard on local civil rights activists, particularly individuals who had established relations with outside governments and international human rights organizations.28 The systematic arrest and imprisonment of leading dissidents continued into the spring and summer of 2006.
Forcible suppression of civil rights activists and Islamist militants accompanied redoubled measures to liberalize the domestic economy. In early 2006, price supports for gasoline and cement were drastically reduced, leaving prices for these two crucial commodities to fluctuate in accordance with local demand.29 A Council of Ministers consisting primarily of technocrats was formed in February; the new government finalized the Tenth Five-Year Plan, which mandated a substantial reduction in the number of products that would be subject to import duties. The curtailment of tariffs precipitated a sharp rise in Turkish manufactured goods entering the local market, almost all of which competed directly, and successfully, against items produced by Syria’s public-sector enterprises.
State officials also emphasized religious themes and symbols more forcefully as the spring of 2006 went by. President al-Asad told a congress of Arab socialist parties in early March that their strength derived from “Islam, which is strongly connected to Arabism.”30 Andrew Tabler reports that “on March 13, Syria held its first competition for reading the Koran in the auditorium of Damascus University—a venue traditionally reserved for Ba‘th Party occasions and presidential speeches.”31 On April 1, the Ministry of Defense announced that Islamic scholars would be permitted to discuss religious matters with military personnel in their barracks; four days after that, a presidential decree authorized the creation of an Islamic college in Aleppo. Ceremonies to commemorate the founding of the Ba‘th Party were auspiciously held on the Prophet’s birthday rather than the usual date of April 7, and President al-Asad joined other senior members of the party along with Grand Mufti Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassun in praying at the Hassibi Mosque to mark the anniversary. More important, several Islamic societies, some of which had exercised considerable political influence during the 1970s, were allowed to resume operations; these included Islamic Civilization (al-Tamaddun al-Islami), the League of Religious Scholars of the Levant (Rabitah ‘Ulama Bilad al-Sham), and the League of Advocates for the Good in the Blessed Levant.32
Officials in the Ministry of Finance announced in the summer of 2006 that the Commercial Bank of Syria would be accorded greater flexibility to pursue promising investments. The bank’s total capital was increased, and its managers were authorized to use these monies to purchase shares in private financial institutions. The troubled state-run Industrial Bank received a massive injection of capital as well.33 The turn toward market dynamics in the financial sector was supervised by the Syrian Central Bank, whose authority to regulate public and private banks steadily expanded as sanctions imposed by foreign governments crippled the Commercial Bank. At the end of 2006, the governor of the Central Bank issued a revised set of regulations that raised the minimum capitalization required of all private banks to US$100 million.34
New laws designed to encourage private manufacturing and trade were issued on a regular basis during the course of 2007 and 2008. These included Law No. 8 of 2007, which guaranteed that foreign investors could repatriate all of their profits overseas and own the land on which their operations took place, and a revised commercial code that updated the one that had been drawn up in 1949. April 2008 saw the promulgation of Law No. 3, which set rules for mergers and acquisitions in the private sector, and the even more significant Law No. 7, which was designed to promote competition and eliminate monopolies. The latter prohibited the formation of cartels or other forms of collaboration that interfered with the operation of the market, and it directed that market dynamics—not state agencies—should set prices. The law created a Competition and Anti-Monopoly Committee to enforce its provisions, made up of eight government officials, three representatives of the chambers of commerce and industry, and one member each from the General Federation of Workers’ Unions and General Farm Laborer’s Union.35
Meanwhile, the Council of Ministers encouraged public-sector enterprises to engage in public-private partnerships.36 Such arrangements initially took shape in areas related to infrastructure: housing, electricity, water, and sanitation projects steadily slipped into the hands of foreign companies working hand in hand with state-run enterprises. Next, the General Organization of Free Zones announced that it was going to collaborate with private companies to build and manage five additional industrial and commercial enclaves. In the summer of 2008, the Construction Projects Holding Company formed a joint venture with a Saudi manufacturer to produce prefabricated steel buildings,37 while the Syrian-Iranian Company for Automobiles opened a second assembly facility outside Homs. Several public-sector industrial enterprises subsequently unveiled plans to shut down underused facilities and contract with private tourism companies to transform them into tourist resorts.38
Developments in the countryside held a good deal less promise for the future. Agriculture’s share of total gross domestic product slipped from approximately 25 percent in the years before 2007 to less than 20 percent after that date. By 2008, it was estimated that three-fifths of the population in the agricultural areas of the northeast were living in poverty.39 The UN Food and Agricultural Organization reported that three-quarters of farms in the provinces of al-Raqqah, al-Hasakah, and Dair al-Zur experienced “total crop failure” during the 2007–2008 growing season.40 In an effort to prop up flagging output, the Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform in 2008 created the Agricultural Support Fund to rationalize the distribution of crop subsidies and low-interest loans to small farmers. The fund’s governing board was given the authority to decide which crops would be granted state support each year, a major change from earlier policy, which specified that only profitable crops were eligible for subsidies.41 Fiddling with the allocation of loan monies did little to offset the damage done to farmers by the government’s decision to reduce price supports on diesel fuel. The resultant jump in prices made it impossible for many cultivators to keep their irrigation pumps running, much less to transport produce to the cities.
Elections to the People’s Assembly in April 2007 sparked violent protests in Homs, al-Raqqah, and al-Hasakah after local officials took steps to rig the balloting in favor of proregime independents. Nine Kurdish parties boycotted the electoral process, charging that the authorities had tried to undermine them by putting pressure on government employees to vote for candidates from parties in the Progressive National Front. On the other hand, moderate Islamists won several seats with support from the newly revived religious societies.42 Shortly after it convened, the assembly nominated President al-Asad for a second seven-year term; the referendum that took place in late May accorded the president almost 98 percent approval. The successive electoral campaigns accompanied a wholesale crackdown on civil rights activists: Anwar al-Bunni, Kamal Labwani, and Michel Kilu were all sentenced to prison on charges of defaming the nation and, in Kilu’s case, for “inciting sectarian sentiments.”43
At the end of September 2007, an influential figure in the country’s Islamist movement, Mahmud Qul Aghasi, popularly known as Abu al-Qa‘qa, was assassinated in Aleppo. Aghasi had urged his followers, who called themselves the Strange Ones of Syria, to engage in militant struggle (jihad) against U.S. military forces throughout the Muslim world. Rumors spread that he had been killed on orders from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, although knowledgeable observers speculated that the culprits were instead radical Islamists who had been incensed by his calls for reconciliation between Sunnis and Shi‘is. In a bid to quiet the waters, President al-Asad issued a decree in October that awarded a 50 percent salary increase to all government employees and military personnel. Complementing this carrot, the security forces in early December rounded up 40 civil rights activists, who had constituted themselves as the National Council of the Damascus Declaration group.44
Hydrocarbons constituted the pivotal sector of the Syrian economy as the first decade of the twenty-first century came to a close. As world oil prices plummeted in 2008, so did the country’s economic growth rate. In addition, the inexorable exhaustion of local petroleum deposits diminished the likelihood that the rebound in world prices that occurred in mid-2009 was going to generate enough revenue to continue to subsidize industry and agriculture. In an effort to increase efficiency in the hydrocarbons sector, a pair of new agencies, the General Organization of Oil and the General Organization for Oil Refining and Distribution of Petroleum Products, was established by presidential decree in February 2009 and given responsibility for managing all upstream operations. The Petroleum Ministry observed that the two agencies would devote particular attention to “the construction of new oil refineries, in joint venture with private investors, as well as the establishment of petrol stations operated by international firms.”45
Global financial difficulties depressed manufacturing in Syria during the winter of 2008–2009. Turkish manufactures continued to flood into the country, while even cheaper goods from the People’s Republic of China had started to penetrate local markets as well. As a result of such trends, “domestic demand for most [Syrian-made] industrial products crashed (falling 80 percent between October 2008 and March 2009).”46 Forty-one textile factories in Aleppo shut their doors during the last quarter of 2008, followed by as many more during the winter of 2009–2010.47 State officials responded by raising tariffs on imported textiles and setting up a special commission to come up with ways to augment industrial exports. Prime Minister al-‘Utri pledged at the end of March 2009 that no public-sector workers would lose their jobs as a result of the economic slump. Nevertheless, the General Federation of Workers’ Unions reported that inflation had gobbled up the recent raises that its members had received, and a pronounced rise in unemployment led to an unprecedented surge in armed robberies and other violent crimes across the north-central cities.48 Minibus drivers in Damascus carried out a two-day strike in September 2009 after the municipality prevented them from raising fares to keep up with soaring gasoline prices.49
By the fall of 2009, broad areas of the northeast and the central plains were suffering from persistent drought, which brought agricultural production to a halt.50 Villages along the Euphrates River and its now-barren tributaries the Balikh and Khabur Rivers turned into ghost towns as local residents fled to Aleppo and Damascus in search of sustenance. The effects of the drought forced the government to open the domestic market to imported wheat for the first time since the early 1990s, while UN agencies distributed emergency supplies of food, fodder, and seed. To make matters worse, yellow rust struck the wheat fields of al-Hasakah province during the summer of 2010, wiping out between one-third and one-half of the summer harvest.51 In an attempt to come up with alternative jobs for rural laborers, President al-Asad issued a decree in September 2009 that granted manufacturers a 10-year tax exemption on all new projects set up in al-Raqqah, al-Hasakah, and Dair al-Zur.52
Growing desperation in the northeastern provinces exacerbated tensions between Kurdish activists and local officials. Members of the Yakiti and Azadi parties organized a demonstration in Damascus in November 2008 to protest new restrictions on Kurdish landowners in districts along the border with Turkey. In March 2010, riot police shot into a crowd celebrating the new year (Nawruz) in al-Raqqah after demonstrators refused to exchange the Kurdish flags they were waving for Syrian ones.53 In mid-June the security forces rounded up a large number of Kurds who were suspected of sympathizing with the radical Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Seven months later, two members of the Organization of Western Kurdistan were killed in al-Raqqah, sparking protests in cities and towns across the northeast that threatened to spread as far as the predominantly Kurdish suburbs of Aleppo and Hamah.
January 2011 brought reports that President al-Asad had instructed the Ba‘th Party to give greater weight to district and provincial elections in selecting representatives to the upcoming party congress. At the same time, a series of presidential decrees raised the penalties on a variety of crimes against women, including familial retaliation against women alleged to have engaged in extramarital sexual activity. Local access to the Internet websites Facebook and YouTube was unexpectedly opened in early February. As popular uprisings gathered momentum in Egypt and Bahrain, state officials reduced import duties on a wide range of staples and lowered taxes on rice, sugar, tea, coffee, and cooking oil. These measures sparked an epidemic of hoarding by local distributors and shopkeepers, which pushed prices for these commodities to unprecedented heights.
Widespread popular disorder shook Syria throughout the spring of 2011 (see Chapter 4). As clashes between protesters and the security forces escalated, Minister of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform ‘Adil Safar was appointed to the post of prime minister, despite having been severely criticized for his handling of problems associated with the ongoing drought. Several outspoken proponents of economic liberalization were dismissed from their administrative posts; salaries for government employees and public-sector workers were hiked another 30 percent; the subsidy on heating oil was increased substantially; and state funds were earmarked to provide electricity and water to the shantytowns that had sprung up around Aleppo and Damascus as newly impoverished farmers and rural laborers flocked to the two metropolises looking for work.54 At the same time, deposits in Syria’s private banks plummeted55 and foreign investment dried up.
As economic difficulties mounted, popular resentment focused on the activities of the “children of authority.” Rami Makhluf, who had made his fortune running the country’s largest private telecommunications company, elicited particular opprobrium and was blamed for a sharp drop in the value of the Syrian pound at the end of April 2011.56 The fact that two of his brothers occupied command positions in Air Force Intelligence and State Security helped to keep public anger within limits, although Makhluf announced in June that he was going to give up his career in business and devote his energies to charity work in future.57
June 2011 also saw the publication of a revised political parties statute, which envisaged the creation of a multiparty order in place of the Ba‘th Party’s long-standing monopoly of the electoral system. The statute complemented a draft media law that proposed the dismantling of the Ministry of Information and guaranteed “independence and freedom” to all forms of mass media.58 Both laws were reported to reflect the proclivities of President al-Asad but aroused the antipathy of hardliners in the state administration and Ba‘th Party.59 A collection of former government and party officials then met to form a nascent rival to the Ba‘th; former Minister of Information Muhammad Salman emerged as head of the prospective party and in a public statement called on President al-Asad to convene a national congress to deal with the crisis that was gripping Syria, asserting that “the Ba‘thi leaders who reached power and leading positions after 2000 are unworthy of leading the country and being in charge of top positions in the [Ba‘th] party.”60
Confronted with a highly uncertain future, government officials once again tried to revitalize the public sector. Subsidies on staples were reinstated and plans drawn up to increase employment in state-run enterprises.61 Preliminary reports indicated that the Eleventh Five-Year Plan would target investments at the public sector, particularly in manufacturing and infrastructure.62 The General Organization for Desert (al-Badiya) Management and Development was set up to find ways to improve economic conditions in the wastelands around Palmyra, while a Fund for Mitigating the Impact of Drought and Natural Disasters on Agricultural Production was created to deal with the problems plaguing the northeastern provinces. President al-Asad ordered the state-run Industrial Bank to permit faltering manufacturers to reschedule their outstanding obligations. The draft 2012 budget raised total government expenditures by almost 60 percent over the previous year’s level.63
In addition, the Ministry of Economy and Foreign Trade ordered a “temporary” ban on the importation of a wide range of consumer and luxury goods as a way to preserve scarce holdings of foreign currency. As a result of this initiative, imports dropped off dramatically and remained suppressed as sanctions imposed by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States started to take effect. Prices for locally produced foodstuffs, coffee, and sugar quickly skyrocketed, prompting officials in the economy ministry to warn that they would “step in and regulate the markets whenever there is an artificial price increase” in staples.64 An immediate outburst of anger on the part of private wholesalers and shopkeepers persuaded the government to lift the import ban within days.65 Shortages of diesel fuel and heating oil nevertheless pushed the cost of operating machinery and heavy vehicles, not to mention keeping houses and workplaces warm, out of the reach of most citizens.66
Even as fighting raged across broad swaths of the country, local council elections took place in mid-December 2011. The authorities pointed to the voting as the first outcome of the revised political parties statute; in deference to the new order, candidates who represented minor parties in the Progressive National Front changed their affiliation to the National Unity List.67 As 2012 opened, a presidential decree transferred several thousand Ba‘th Party functionaries to permanent positions in the state bureaucracy; the directive also moved the staff of the party newspaper al-Ba‘th into the Ministry of Information, while officials in the party-affiliated popular front organizations were assigned new jobs in the government ministries that were most closely connected to their respective unions.68
Meanwhile, persistent fighting in Homs and Hamah forced recent migrants to return to the parched countryside of the northeastern provinces. Despite adequate rainfall during the winter 2011–2012 growing season, insecurity along the highways and surging fuel prices prevented farmers in al-Raqqah and al-Hasakah from obtaining vital seeds and fertilizer and kept most irrigation pumps silent.69 Shortfalls of grain production ended up being aggravated by international sanctions, which blocked the importation of wheat and barley from Russia.70 Economic deprivation in the countryside contrasted sharply with the windfall profits that were reaped by private building contractors as a wave of unlicensed construction washed through the cities and towns. The virtual closure of the private banks generated even greater profits for a well-organized network of informal lenders and moneychangers.71
As campaigning for seats in the People’s Assembly got underway in April 2012, a large number of candidates from minor parties in the Progressive National Front abandoned the race in deference to representatives of the National Unity List.72 The Syrian Social National Party formed an electoral alliance with the National Committee for Unity of Syrian Communists, which presented itself as the primary opposition bloc.73 In total, nine new political parties took part in the contest under the terms of the revised parties statute. Nevertheless, the number of assembly seats allocated to independents remained unchanged, boosting the degree of rivalry between candidates who were sponsored by the new parties and nonpartisan candidates.
Thanks to the termination of reserved seats for parties in the Progressive National Front, the Ba‘th Party ended up winning greater representation than ever before. Of the opposition parties, only the Syrian Democratic Party emerged victorious, winning one of the electoral districts for Aleppo. The People’s Assembly elections set the stage for the June 2012 appointment of a senior Ba‘th Party figure, Riyad Hijab, to the post of prime minister. Hijab had served as governor of Latakia from February to April 2011 and after that as minister of agriculture and agrarian reform. The Council of Ministers that surrounded Hijab included only one new face: Qadri Jamil of the Popular Will Party became deputy prime minister in a nod to Russia, where his family had extensive investments.74
Hijab took on the premiership in the context of spiraling prices for fuel, which hobbled transportation and led many households to revert to kerosene for heating and cooking. Reports that the ubiquitous butane gas canisters were being modified for use as bombs led the authorities to restrict the distribution of gas even more tightly.75 A combination of fuel shortages, transportation difficulties, and general chaos across many regions of the country resulted in a plunge in agricultural output, particularly in Homs province (poultry), the north-central plains (fruits and vegetables), and the far northeast (wheat and cotton). Imports of foodstuffs and industrial raw materials from Lebanon correspondingly soared.76 Syria’s growing dependence on trade with Lebanon reflected not only short-term disruptions associated with the 2011–2012 uprising but also and more profoundly the country’s economic connections to the outside world, which had steadily proliferated and deepened during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Shortly after Hijab took office, General Manaf Tlas, the commander of the 105th Division of the Republican Guard, fled across the border to Turkey. It was rumored that he had fallen out with other key military commanders for attempting to negotiate with opposition forces operating in the Damascus suburbs of Harasta and Duma at the outset of the uprising instead of resorting immediately to force to crush the revolt. On July 18, 2012, another four senior officers were fatally wounded in a bombing at the headquarters of the National Security Council in Damascus. Minister of Defense Daud Rajiha, Chief of the Bureau of Crisis Management Hasan al-Turkmani, and Deputy Minister of Defense ‘Asif Shawkat were all killed instantly by the blast, while the head of the National Security Council, General Hisham Ikhtiyar, died in hospital two days later. General Fahd al-Fraij was then appointed defense minister; General ‘Ali Ayyub, who had preceded Manaf Tlas as commander of the 105th Division, became chief of staff; and General ‘Ali Mamluk assumed the post of head of national security.
Prime Minister Hijab defected to Jordan on August 6. He was succeeded by Minister of Health Wail Nadir al-Halqi, a 48-year-old Sunni from Dir‘a province.
1. Eyal Zisser, Commanding Syria: Bashar al-Asad and the First Years in Power (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 41.
2. al-Sharq al-Awsat, August 5, 2000.
3. Abdulrahman Alhaj, State and Community: The Political Aspirations of Religious Groups in Syria 2000–2010 (London: Strategic Research and Communication Centre, n.d.), 11, note 3.
4. Myriam Ababsa, “Agrarian Counter-Reform in Syria (2000–2010),” in Agriculture and Reform in Syria, eds. Raymond Hinnebusch, Atieh El Hindi, Mounzer Khaddam, and Myriam Ababsa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press, 2011), 84.
5. Salwa Ismail, “Changing Social Structure, Shifting Alliances and Authoritarianism in Syria,” in Demystifying Syria, ed. Fred H. Lawson (London: Saqi Books, 2009), 18.
6. Middle East International, July 26, 2002.
7. Middle East International, June 28, 2002.
8. Associated Press (AP), December 19, 2002.
9. Julie Gauthier, “The 2004 Events in al-Qamishli: Has the Kurdish Question Erupted in Syria?” in Demystifying Syria, ed. Lawson, 107.
10. ArabicNews.com, January 18, 2003.
11. Ferdinand Arslanian, “Growth in Transition and Syria’s Economic Performance,” in Samer Abboud and Ferdinand Arslanian, Syria’s Economy and the Transition Paradigm (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 67.
12. Alhaj, State and Community, 64.
13. Syria Report, May and July 2003.
14. Arslanian, “Growth in Transition,” 65.
15. Syria Report, January 2004.
16. Syria Report, March 2004.
17. Samer Abboud, “The Transition Paradigm and the Case of Syria,” in Abboud and Arslanian, Syria’s Economy, 19.
18. Syria Report, November 1, 2004.
19. Carsten Wieland, A Decade of Lost Chances (Seattle: Cune Press, 2012), 112–13.
20. Joe Pace and Joshua Landis, “The Syrian Opposition,” in Demystifying Syria, ed. Lawson, 129.
21. Agence France Presse (AFP), June 2, 2005.
22. Oxford Business Group, July 13, 2005.
23. Bassam Haddad, “Syria’s Curious Dilemma,” Middle East Report, no. 236 (Fall 2005); Bassam Haddad, Left to Its Domestic Devices: How the Syrian Regime Boxed Itself In, Working Paper 43/2005, Real Instituto Elcano, March 10, 2005, 7.
24. Asia Times, July 21, 2005.
25. Pace and Landis, “Syrian Opposition,” 130.
26. Ibid., 131.
27. Ibid., 136–38.
28. Ibid., 136–38.
29. Syria Report, first quarter 2006.
30. Andrew Tabler, In the Lion’s Den (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2011), 134.
31. Ibid.
32. Alhaj, State and Community, 67–68; Thomas Pierret, Baas et Islam en Syrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), 258.
33. Syria Report, third quarter 2006.
34. Syria Report, fourth quarter 2006.
35. Joshua Landis, “Will the Anti-Trust Law Make a Difference in Syria?” Sada, May 12, 2008.
36. Samer N. Abboud and Fred H. Lawson, “Antinomies of Economic Governance in Contemporary Syria,” in Governance in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Abbas Kadhim (London: Routledge, 2012).
37. Syria Report, third quarter 2008.
38. Syria Report, fourth quarter 2008.
39. Husain Ammash, Hazimah al-Aman al-Ijtima‘iyyah fi Suriya (Damascus: Syrian Economic Society, March 2008). I owe this reference to Samer Abboud.
40. Syria Today, May 2009.
41. I owe this information to Samer Abboud.
42. Thomas Pierret and Kjetil Selvik, “Limits of Authoritarian Upgrading in Syria,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (November 2009): 600–1.
43. Tabler, In the Lion’s Den, 178.
44. Ibid., 209.
45. Syria Report, first quarter 2009.
46. Bassam Haddad, “The Political Economy of Syria: Realities and Challenges,” Middle East Policy 18 (Summer 2011): 52.
47. Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), March 10, 2009; Syria Now, March 4, 2010.
48. Haddad, “Political Economy,” 54; IWPR, April 23, 2009.
49. IWPR, October 29, 2009.
50. Daily Star, February 20, 2010.
51. “Syria: Yellow Wheat Rust Hits Supplies,” Integrated Regional Information Networks (Nairobi) (IRIN), August 19, 2010.
52. IWPR, September 14, 2009
53. Daily Star, March 30, 2010.
54. Jihad Yazigi, “No End in Sight to Syria’s Economic Woes,” in Syria’s Revolution: Society, Power, Ideology: Perspectives No. 3 (Beirut: Heinrich Böll Stiftung February 2012), 24.
55. al-Akhbar, August 24, 2011.
56. Cham Press, April 29, 2011.
57. al-Akhbar, June 17, 2011.
58. RIA Novosti, June 7, 2011.
59. al-Quds al-‘Arabi, July 15, 2011.
60. al-Rai al-‘Amm (Kuwait), August 9, 2011.
61. Guardian, May 23, 2011.
62. IRIN, October 27, 2011; Haddad, “Political Economy,” 48.
63. Syria Report, September 26, 2011.
64. al-Akhbar, October 3, 2011.
65. New York Times (NYT), October 4, 2011; Syria Report, October 10, 2011.
66. al-Akhbar, December 15, 2011.
67. al-Watan (Damascus), December 12, 2011.
68. al-Quds al-‘Arabi, January 5, 2012.
69. IRIN, February 17, 2012.
70. Reuters, May 8, 2012.
71. Reuters, March 21, 2012.
72. al-Watan, April 30, 2012.
73. al-Akhbar, May 15, 2012.
74. al-Sharq al-Awsat, June 24, 2012.
75. al-Akhbar, June 23, 2012.
76. al-Akhbar, June 13, 2012.
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Bassam Haddad. Business Networks in Syria. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Fred H. Lawson, ed. Demystifying Syria. London: Saqi Books, 2009.
David W. Lesch. The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
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