Taking a (blood) Baath in Syria

Michael Slackman has an article in The New York Times about Syria:

Military troops opened fire on protesters in the southern part of Syria, according to news reports quoting witnesses, hurtling the strategically important nation along the same trajectory that has altered the landscape of power across the Arab world.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators in the southern city of Dara’a, on the border with Jordan, and in some other cities and towns around the nation took to the streets in protest, defying a state that has once again demonstrated its willingness to use lethal force. It was the most serious challenge to forty years of repressive rule by the Assad family since 1982, when the president at the time, Hafez al-Assad, massacred at least 10,000 protesters in the northern Syrian city of Hama.
Human rights groups said that since protests began seven days ago in the south, 38 people had been killed by government forces, and it appeared that many more were killed on Friday. Precise details were difficult to obtain because the government sealed off the area to reporters and denied access to the country to foreign news media.
“Syria’s security forces are showing the same cruel disregard for protesters’ lives as their counterparts in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
The new round of protests and bloodshed came one day after the Syrian government tried to appease an increasingly angry popular revolt with talk of improved political freedoms and promises of restraint. Instead, it unleashed its forces, firing on peaceful demonstrators trying to march into Dara’a, according to The Associated Press and videos posted on YouTube. There were reports of security forces firing on civilians in cities around the country, as well.
In Sanamayn, a city of 27,000 people about forty miles north of Dara’a, a video posted on YouTube showed at least seven bodies lying on stretchers, bloodied, at least three clearly with gunshot wounds. Residents speaking to The A.P. said as many as twenty people had been killed, figures that could not be independently confirmed.
In the capital, Damascus, several hundred opposition protesters tried to rally, too, but were quickly dispersed by security forces as pro-government supporters took to the streets honking car horns and waving photographs of the president, Bashar al-Assad. It did not appear that the growing wave of anger and protest had yet taken hold in the capital as it had in the south and east, though there were reports of troops opening fire on demonstrators in the suburbs of Damascus.
A longtime minister and adviser to the president, Bouthaina Shaaban, appeared to edge close to an apology for the deaths, insisting that the president had ordered security forces not to fire. Ms. Shaaban then laid out what she framed as concessions, saying that the government promised to consider lifting a state of emergency in place for decades and would consider more political freedoms, offerings dismissed out of hand by the public because they had been put forth before, in 2005, and never carried out. “President al-Assad doesn’t want the bloodshed at all, and I witnessed his directives on not using live bullets whatever the circumstances as he is keen on every citizen,” Ms. Shaaban said. “This doesn’t mean that there are no mistakes or practices which were not unsatisfactory and not up to the required level.”
Less than 24 hours later, witnesses reported that live fire was again turned on unarmed protestors. “This is exactly what has been happening around the Arab world,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, a Syrian opposition activist who is living in self-imposed exiled in the United Arab Emirates. “Sixty percent of Syrian society is less than 24 years old, and they want to be part of drawing and designing their future.”
Syria has few resources, but a strategic location bordering Iraq, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan that its leaders have often tried to leverage. It has rankled the West and its Arab neighbors by forging close ties to Iran and by helping to sponsor Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas, the militant group controlling the Gaza Strip.
The cascading events in Syria bear a remarkable resemblance to the course taken in other Middle East nations, where a relatively small incident, in this case the arrest of children who scrawled graffiti, The people want the fall of the regime in Dara’a, led to protests and a lethal government response. That, in turn, sparked wider rage, prompting government talk of concessions that were too little, too late.
“They tried to use the classic Ba'athist method: You wave a few carrots with one hand, while the other one is holding a huge stick,” said Karim Émile Bitar, a researcher at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations in Paris. “But the massacres in Dara’a are only going to strengthen the protest movements.”
Syria has a liability not found in the successful uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt: it is a majority Sunni nation that is ruled by a religious minority. The ruling Assads and their circle are Alawite, a sect of Shi'ite Islam. The former president, Hafez al-Assad, forged his power base through fear, co-optation, and sect loyalty. He built an alliance with an elite Sunni business community, and created multiple security services staffed primarily by Alawites. Those security forces have a great deal to lose if the government falls, experts said, because they are part of a widely despised minority, and so have the incentive of self-preservation.
The killings in Hama, when the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative Sunni organization, moved against the government, resonate to this day, both for a resentful populace and for a government that fears revenge for its past actions.
“These minority regimes are galvanized against defections and splitting,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They believe if the regime comes down, they fear being slaughtered by the Sunni majority after what happened in the past. It makes it likely if these protests get bigger, it will be very bloody.”
Sectarian tensions did not motivate this conflict, not initially. But they have begun to emerge. Mr. Tabler and Joshua M. Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said the demonstrators had started chanting: No to Iran, to Hezbollah. We want a leader who fears God. That, they said, is a direct reference to the Alawite faith of the leadership. “In the minds of the religious minorities, this evokes the specter of sectarian battle,” Mr. Landis said.
Dara’a, a drought-stricken section of Syria’s farm belt, is an unlikely place for Syria to face its own version of the uprisings that have rocked the region. Dara’a is in a region is known as loyal to the Assad family, Mr. Tabler said. The area tends to be more tribal and is not fond of the more religious conservative Sunnis in the north, he said. “What makes this all surprising at this point is this is an area of Syria that is traditionally pro regime,” Mr. Tabler said. “So what the regime has been doing is suppressing a major Sunni base, all because a group of kids wrote graffiti on the wall.”
The government had initially insisted that the protests and deaths were the work of criminals brought across the border from Jordan. A vice president and former foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, who is from the Dara’a region, said: “We are not opposed to the Islamic currents that are rational and broad-minded which understand their true roots, but as for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which take their instructions from America, and pretend that they are against it, they are condemnable.”
And while such logic may sound contrived in the West, perhaps fantastic, Mr. Landis said, it plays differently in Syria, where people are deeply distrustful of the United States. “That sounds Qaddafi-esque to an American, but it’s not so weird in Syria,” he said.