Has the Wave Reached Syria?

Demonstrations in any of Syria’s cities are usually small, and the secret police almost always outnumber demonstrators. However, after arriving back in Damascus after a seven-day trip through Jordan last week, I learned that there were a number of unusually large protests around the Old City. An intern working in the Belgian embassy, which has tasked itself with observing the demonstrations, didn’t have an accurate count of the number involved but he confirmed that at least 35 protestors were arrested; their names were not released and their families have not been notified. Another protest is planned for Friday outside the Omayyad mosque.

The trouble that protest-organizers in Damascus have is that there is not a unified opposition leader or organization that is able to overcome the complicated religious, socio-economic, familial and regional quilt of Damascene society. To make matters more arduous, it is difficult to plan an event without someone tipping off the secret police who arrest dissident leaders before they can raise their voices. They show up to demonstrations—even before the protestors—and intimidate everyone in the area. These are only a few of the many complicated reasons that Syria has been deemed less likely to be caught up in the wave of Arab mass protests.

Comparing these matters to the fabric of society in Tunisia, Bassam Haddad wrote on March 9, “the regime and government did not overlap nearly as much as those of Syria do, and certainly the Tunisian coercive apparatuses and army were not as closely knit around the heights of power as they are in Syria… The Syrian regime has promoted a new cross-sectarian business class often with considerable roots in traditional city quarters.” This makes Egypt-sized demonstrations in Damascus unlikely as things stand now, but what about Syria’s other areas where the security presence is relatively lower and regime ties much thinner? Could the economic woes, which are even worse outside of Damascus, equate to a call for regime change? Haddad estimates that, “As matters stand today, the calculus of the ordinary Syrian does not favor going to the streets – absent an unexpected incident of regime brutality, of course.”

Mobilizing in Deraa

Well, an unexpected incident of regime brutality is exactly what happened on Friday south of Damascus in Deraa, where a peaceful protest calling for increased freedoms resulted in the death of at least five protestors at the hands of President Assad’s security force.  The result was a massive protest in Deraa yesterday where more than 10,000 protestors gathered (the New York Times reported 20,000) in a funeral march and demonstration explicitly against the Assad Administration. Filling Deraa’s citizens with even more anger, police recently arrested 15 school children that painted graffiti with slogans against the Assad government. Word on the street at the moment in Damascus is that a communications building and courthouse have been set ablaze in Deraa tonight and the protests are ongoing. At least four more protestors have been killed and more than a hundred injured. Communications with the city have been completely severed and movement in or out is impossible. There are rumors now that the protests have spread north of Damascus to Homs, Hama and Aleppo, but I’ve heard nothing on the size of these demonstrations.

So far there have been no protests in Damascus regarding the Deraa events, which may remain the case. The citizens in Deraa are of a different tribe than most in Damascus and their protest was a separate movement with different intentions than those earlier this week. However, some think that this may be the spark that unites Syrians, perhaps under the umbrella of a broad Islamic movement that has been brewing recently and gaining support from many sides on social media websites.

That is an unlikely case, a Syrian friend tells me. “The people in Damascus are either not charged enough or they are too scared,” he says. This is a revealing statement about Damascus; those who are not “charged”—having the social connections and standing that grant them respectable wages and comfortable lives—have no reason to want change or to be scared while those who struggle day in and day out do not have the resources, time, or ability to overcome the threat of the secret police. But do they have the will?

That is just one of the many questions observers have right now. In Syria, which Haddad says “combines the heavy-handedness of the Tunisian regime, the economic hardships of Egypt, the hereditary rule aspects of Morocco and Jordan, and a narrower leadership base than any other country across the Arab world,” will a widespread movement sprout from Deraa, or is it an isolated event that will soon go away? Will the different elements of Syrian society (religious, economic, tribal) overcome their divisiveness and join in a unified movement?

Again, most analysts think it is unlikely. Haddad writes that, “The heterogeneity of Syrian society (in terms of politics, region, community, sect, and ethnicity) exacerbates divisions among those affected and discourages cohesion among the opposition. Snowballing demonstrations that would dramatically raise the cost of brutal reaction in Syria are thus unlikely for the time being.” However, as Malik al-Abdeh wrote recently, “Middle East experts are good at many things; prophesying is not one of them… It is at the street level that the rumblings of the next revolution will first be detected.” Those rumblings have just begun.