Syria’s New Story

01 January, 2012

DECEMBER MARKED NINE MONTHS since the wave of Arab spring uprising hit Syria, a country that continues to be under the decade-long harsh dictatorship of its president, Bashar al-Assad. Over this period, Assad’s government has vacillated between offers of political reforms, rejected as sham by the protestors, and brutal crackdowns. According to the UN Human Rights Commissioner, the death toll in these protests stood at more than 5,000 till mid-December 2011.

In its official narrative, the Syrian government continues to reject the protest movement as a foreign plot to overthrow the regime. In an interview with the American news channel ABC News, which was telecast in early December, Bashar al-Assad denied any responsibility for the killings and blamed foreign agents for the violence.

“We don’t kill our people,” he said in the interview, adding, “No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person.”

On other instances, the government has tried to portray the clashes as religious conflicts between the Sunni majority—74 percent of the population—and the 13 percent Shi’a minority. Al-Assad and his supporters belong to the Alawi sect of Shi’i Islam; they have managed to rule the country—occupying all positions of power—through an alliance with the Sunni elites that keeps the Sunni majority at ground level.

Whether blaming it on the ‘foreign agents’ or viewing it through the lens of sectarian conflict, the Syrian government has worked hard to develop a political narrative that muddles the real reason behind the protests—that of people’s power and will to freedom from Assad’s rule—in an obstinate determination to enforce their legitimacy and extract compliance.

Bashar al-Assad inherited the dictatorship from his father, Hafez al-Assad, who was president for three decades (1971-2000). It’s not uncommon for dictators to enforce obedience and extract complicity by building a cult around themselves. Syria under Hafez was perhaps the epitome of this strategy of domination by deification—and he was, like his son, an unbending secularist.

American political scientist Lisa Wedeen, in her book Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999), described how the Syrian regime worked hard to build a larger than life cult of Hafez al-Assad, where he was turned into a godlike figure, and whose claims to immortality were often accompanied by great pomp and pretence. In the official rhetoric, Hafez al-Assad was simultaneously portrayed as the ‘father’, the ‘combatant’, the ‘first teacher’, the ‘leader forever’, the country’s ‘premier pharmacist’, teacher, doctor and lawyer.

Wedeen explored how through the use of official imagery, rituals of obeisance and enforced participation, Assad was depicted as being omnipresent and omniscient.

One such incident that Wedeen narrated in her book, which she claimed was narrated to her by a friend of someone who had been witness to it, purportedly took place at a regiment of the elite Syrian Presidential Guard in the spring of 1989. The incident goes:

One day a high-ranking officer visiting the regiment ordered the soldiers to recount their dreams of the night before. A soldier stepped forward and announced: “I saw the image of the leader in the sky, and we mounted ladders of fire to kiss it.” A second soldier followed suit: “I saw the leader holding the sun in his hands, and he squeezed it, crushing it until it crumbled. Darkness blanketed the face of the earth. And then his face illuminated the sky, spreading light and warmth in all directions.” Soldier followed soldier, each extolling the leader’s greatness.

Wedeen cites this incident as an example of how the regime forced its people to participate in the official narrative of the superhuman cult of Hafez al-Assad and showcase their (excessive) devotion to their leader. No one in his right mind, not even the high-ranking official of the regiment who was extracting the statements, ever believed that the soldiers actually dreamt of their leader the previous night. However, everyone participated in this charade, forcing subordinates and peers to overtly subscribe to it and even trying to outdo one another with exaggerated lauding.

The entire Syrian society became a self-serving system dedicated to building the cult of Hafez al-Assad and self-enforcing obeisance to him. Every person was simultaneously participant and propagator of the official political discourse.

It would be an understatement to say how different today’s Syria is from that spring of 1989 of Wedeen’s description. The Syrian people have gained voice since then, increasingly expressing their resentment of Hafez’s son’s government, and shunning the official narrative. With every passing week, more soldiers are defecting to the antigovernment movement, weakening the power of the narrative of a president installed by a plebiscite without other candidates. One of the characteristics of Syrian society under Hafez al-Assad was a social structure in which citizens were complicit in building and preserving a totalitarian system. It is clear this ecology of false esteem is finally breaking in Syria.

Anant Nath