The Alawites, Ethnic Cleansing, and Syria’s Future. By Franck Salameh. The National Interest, September 30, 2013.
Imagining a Remapped Middle East. By Robin Wright. NJBR, September 29, 2013.
The Border Between Israel and Palestine: The Elephant in the Map Room. By Frank Jacobs. NJBR, September 21, 2013.
Small Homogeneous States Only Solution for Middle East. By Mordechai Kedar. IMRA, April 1, 2011.
The Arab Collapse. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, May 20, 2013. With related articles on the possible fragmentation of the Middle East on ethnic and sectarian lines.
Salameh:
Whatever
the outcome of the current Syrian crisis, the sectarian killings that have been
raging for the past two and a half years, and which might have reached new
paroxysms of savagery in August 2013, all bear the telltale markings of ethnic
cleansing, impending fragmentation, and ultimately the Balkanization of a
country formerly known as Syria.
“Ethnic
cleansing” is not a phrase to be uttered in vain; its tortured tales are
stained with heartbreak and bloodshed, its sad trails spattered with chronicles
of dispossession and forced population movements. As a concept, “ethnic
cleansing” traces its semantic origins to the Balkans during the early 1990s,
but its inglorious history is as old as history itself, its deeds recorded in
the sacred writs and annals of nations, its crimes premeditated, designed to
eliminate undesired populations with the aim of building ethnically,
religiously, or culturally homogenous regions in once mixed or disputed
territories. Syria, as a complex of ethno-religious and linguistic mosaics,
living a brittle and uneasy peace under the rule of an apprehensive and
historically oppressed community, falls within the patterns of deeply divided
societies susceptible to ethnic conflagrations. And so, since the early days of
the insurgency in early 2011, Syria’s troubles were pointing in the direction
of an impending sectarian boiling point. And Assad, a child of the catacombs,
an accursed minoritarian, an Alawite upstart whose family made good and
bequeathed him the throne of the Sunni’s overlord, was not about to throw it
all away and deliver a redeemed community back to its oppressors. Some
Pollyanna in 2011 might have thought it opportune to ride the winds of an
ill-conceived “Arab Spring”, doodling some rosy freedom slogan on a wall in
Daraa. But Assad’s appetite was not for self-immolation so as to feed the flame
of someone else’s freedom. Safeguarding one’s own trumps all other virtues in
the creed of persecuted Levantine minorities, Alawites included, and Assad was
not about to betray that sacred writ. Indeed, he has yet to have a “bad day” as
he continues to prosecute this fight for self-preservation, and as he forges
on, coming ever closer to carving out an Alawite heartland. But that “bad day”
came and went, with Obama’s posturing and abrupt retreat, and Assad triumphed
yet again. Today, with the regional and international response to his brutality
as incoherent as ever, Assad remains the winner of this conflict, and he
endures, more determined, consolidating an eventual rump state.
The
opposition to Assad remains a motley assortment of Islamists, with some
reformers and liberals interspersed in-between, most of whom loathe each other,
perhaps more than they hate Assad himself. What’s more, Assad’s military
remains largely loyal and determined, his popular base remains intact and
committed, and American policy—or lack thereof—remains his greatest ally, and
so he remains firmly ensconced at the helm. Like his father Hafez before him,
Bashar al-Assad is a skilled strategist and a patient master of time; he is
wily, deliberate, coolheaded, and coldblooded; a crafty murderer and a seasoned
statesman at once, qualities that a flamboyant hothead like Muammar Qaddafi, a
kleptocratic oligarch like Zine al Abidine Ben-Ali, and a fossilized military
veteran like Hosni Mubarak all lacked. And so it is unlikely that Assad’s fate
will come anywhere near Qaddafi’s, Ben-Ali’s, or Mubarak’s—although predictions
are the praxis of the foolhardy in the Eastern Mediterranean.
A
medical doctor by training, Bashar al-Assad has a cruel and criminal mind with
a tender, dorky patina and an endearing speech impediment. But it is a grave
mistake to dismiss him as dim-witted, delusional, or an unwilling figurehead;
nor is he a thug or run-of-the-mill despot lashing out arbitrarily and in
despair. The fact that he has lasted this long, fending off legions of international
jihadis and bottomless supplies of Saudi and Qatari petrodollars streaming into
Syria, all speak to the possibility that Assad may be doing something right.
What Assad began claiming in early 2011, about battling foreign Islamists, has
become a reality. Even if this had not been the case then, today Assad is
clearly fighting a sinister and determined coalition of vicious Islamists and
triumphalist divine warriors.
Assad’s
use of chemical weapons, and the reluctance and incoherence met in the world’s
(especially America’s) response, clearly fit into his calculus and his adept
reading of American policy. In fact, not only is Assad comfortable with Obama’s
inaction—and lately, Obama’s decision to outsource America’s dealing with the
Syrian crisis to Russia—but Washington’s (non)policy is an important component
of Assad’s survival, and possibly his eventual triumph. The more mixed signals
Assad continues to receive, the more emboldened he will become to finish the
job.
In the
end, partition, anathema as it may be to those still emotionally attached to
the Sykes-Picot order, may end up being the more humane solution to the Syrian
crisis. An undefeated Assad ruling over the entirety of Syria will likely be
more vicious than the current chemical Assad. Conversely, a united (or even a
fragmented) Syria under the bevies of jihadiscurrently roaming its landscape is
a nightmare of apocalyptic ramifications; a horrifying prospect not only to
Alawites, but also to moderate Sunnis, liberals, and minorities who are not
particularly enthralled with the idea of an Islamist Syria. Jihadisare also a
bane to Syria’s neighbors, diverse countries whose societies are as fragmented,
disparate, and variegated as Syria’s.
For the
time being, Assad’s most immediate concern appears to be maintaining control
over the “north-south highway” linking Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo. Holding
on to this corridor, and clearing out resistance or pushing it further east, is
crucial to the fortification and safeguarding of the future state that he seems
to be envisaging. It is not per chance that the most important battles raging
in Syria today have been occurring along this corridor—for all intents and
purposes, the eastern flank of the Alawite State.
Even if
Damascus should fall to the rebels—keeping in mind that Damascus remains
ultimately a prize of primarily symbolic, not strategic, importance—the
Damascus-Aleppo highway would remain the more important rampart of the Alawite
sanctuary and, perhaps equally importantly, its passageway to the Shiite areas
of eastern Lebanon—namely the Bekaa Valley and ultimately the Lebanese
port-city of Tripoli. That was the whole idea behind the battle for Qusayr this
past summer, and Hezbollah’s involvement in that fight alongside Assad’s
forces. Now, whether Assad overtly declares an Alawite canton or keeps feigning
a desire for a whole, unified Syria, the battles around the aforementioned
corridors and the maintenance of this side of Syria under Assad’s control are
of crucial importance because: 1) keeping these regions will mean that Assad
and his community have survived the Sunni onslaught, and 2) this prospective,
armored, Russian- and Iranian-supported rump state will eventually become an
important bargaining chip for Assad and his community should a peaceful
negotiation for an end-of-conflict (and a return to a unitary Syria) become an
eventuality.
Another
issue of crucial importance in this calculus is not only the future of Syria
alone, but the fact that Syria’s reconfiguration into sectarian mini-states
will have an effect on the remainder of the Levantine mosaic. For, even if the
rebels do not defeat Assad, they are likely to remain in their areas of
influence—more or less as demarcated by the current front lines—preventing a
reversion to a Syrian status quo ante. Furthermore, the Alawites and other
Syrian minorities, having remained largely in Assad’s camp, have no place in
any configuration of a future unitary Syria. This is an eventuality that Assad père had foreseen and began planning for
in the early 1980s, after the Hama massacre.
One
must not lose sight of the fact that, historically speaking, and contrary to
prevalent belief, the Alawites wanted no part of the “Unitary Syria” that
emerged out of Franco-British bickering in the Levant of the interwar period.
Indeed, when the French inherited the Ottoman Vilayets (governorates) of Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and
Alexandretta in 1918, they opted to turn them into six autonomous entities
reflecting previous Ottoman administrative realities. Ergo, in 1920, those
entities became the State of Greater Lebanon (which in 1926 gave birth to the
Republic of Lebanon), the State of Damascus, the State of Aleppo, the State of
the Druze Mountain, the State of the Alawite Mountain (corresponding roughly to
what the Alawites are reconstituting today), and the Sanjak of Alexandretta
(ceded to Turkey in 1938 to become the Province of Hatay.)
But
when Arab nationalists began pressuring the British on the question of “Arab
unity,” urging them to make good on pledges made to the Sharif of Mecca during
the Great War, the Alawites demured. In fact, Bashar al-Assad’s own
grandfather, Ali Sulayman al-Assad, was among leading Alawite notables who,
until 1944, continued to lobby French Mandatory authorities to resist British
and Arab designs aimed at stitching together the States of Aleppo, Damascus,
Druze, and Alawite Mountains into a new republic to be christened Syria.
Dismayed by the prospects of the Alawite State ending up as an addendum to a
future Syrian entity, the elder Assad held repeated meetings with French
diplomats and intellectuals, and dispatched a stream of memos to the Quai d’Orsay demanding that the State of
the Alawite Mountain—given legal recognition in 1920—be attached to the
Republic of Lebanon, rather than any future Syrian federation. In one such memo
addressed to French PM Léon Bluhm, Ali Sulayman al-Assad argued that any future
united Arab Syrian entity would put in place a regime dominated by fanaticism
and intolerance toward non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities. He stressed that
“the spirit of hatred and fanaticism imbedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims
against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the
Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change.
Therefore, the abolition of the Mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to
the dangers of death and annihilation.” A united Syria, concluded Assad’s 1936
memo,
will only mean the enslavement of the
Alawite people; [the French] may think that it is possible to ensure the rights
of the Alawites and the minorities by treaty. We assure you that treaties have
no value in relation to the Islamic mentality in Syria. […] The Alawi people
appeal to the French government […] and request […] a guarantee of their
freedom and independence within their small territory,” [in the confines of the
Alawite Mountain.]
Echoes
of this can be felt in Bashar al-Assad’s conduct today. Memories run deep in
the Middle East, especially among persecuted minorities. The Assads remain
haunted by the trauma and deprivation that have checkered their history. A mere
generation ago, their daughters in a Syria dominated by Sunni Arabs were being
sold into servitude, to suffer a lifetime of toils in the households of urban
Sunni notables. This is not a past that the Alawites want restituted in a
future Sunni-dominated Syria. And if it means breaking Syria in order to avoid
such subjugation, then this is a small price to pay for Alawite dignity and
security.
For
nearly half a century, Syria’s Alawites have dodged persecution and
humiliation, and they have safeguarded communal sanity and identity by
dominating Syria. They did so by co-opting power centers and ruling a unitary
state under the guise of Arab nationalism, an ideology that they flaunted with
ostentation and bombast, even though they might not have been true believers.
Today the lip-service that they paid to this failed ideology, and the image
that they built for themselves as committed Arab nationalists, are coming
undone. Ghosts of Sulayman al-Assad are coming back to life. And so, retreating
to a fortified Alawite state may be the only option left in Bashar al-Assad’s
bag of tricks. Anything less is tantamount to communal suicide. Anything
feigning reconciliation, or power-sharing, or repackaging and brandishing once
more vain Arabist credentials, will be lost on Assad’s foes. The Arab
nationalist train, with its redeemed Alawite community, has already left the
station, and a return trip does not figure on the schedule.
And so
the battles that continue to rage on in Syria, and the cruelties that seem
unlikely to abate, will be waged for the purpose of geographic, and demographic
rearrangements—ethnic cleansing by another name. At the pinnacle of their
power, the dynasts of the house of Assad had encouraged Alawite internal
migrations to major urban centers such as Damascus and Aleppo. But they also
maintained their traditional heartland and its Mediterranean littoral as almost
exclusively Alawite—a core territory stretching from Tartus in the south, near
the Lebanon border, to the outskirts of Turkey’s Antakya in the north. One
might guess that of Assad’s main concerns today, besides the protection and
reinforcement of the Alawite canton, would be maintaining safe havens and passageways
for an Alawite “diaspora” scattered about the hinterland, laying down the
groundwork for an eventual return and a secure “ascent” to the Alawite
Mountain.
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| The ethno-religious divisions of Syria. Map of the French Mandate. Wikimedia. |
