Assad and demographic surgery
I was
intending to write this article last year but I got busy and I did not get the
chance to work on it until now. Thus, it might seem outdated but the article
still discusses the events of the besieged districts of various cities in late
2016, this article employs a new academic term that identifies a type of
behaviour in conflict situations, yet though the term is recent the behaviour
itself is not new. This article is no sense discriminatory to any group
whatsoever, and does not target any group that constitute a part of the Syrian
population.
As I watch
the situation in Syria getting worse day after day, I asked myself why the
Assad regime is recently turning to evacuating the people in various cities
like Hama, Hums, Daraya, and recently Aleppo. I would like to refresh your
memory first with Assad’s words
in a speech he gave in front a group of “religious scholars, in 23rd of April 2014 to be exact, he said the
following: “If we started from one truth, that we are in front of tens of
thousands of terrorists, I’m not talking about terrorists coming from abroad,
I’m talking about terrorists from inside of Syria -children of this society,
and when we are talking about thousands of those terrorists this means that we
are talking about ‘social couveuse’; there is a family, there is a relative,
there is a neighbour, there is a friend, there are other people which means
that we are talking about hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of Syrians,
and even if it is one million let’s say millions. It might not be a big number,
but when we are talking on the national level about one million or more, or
hundreds of thousands, in a society of 23 million people this means that we are
in front of a case of moral failure, a social failure, and which means, in the
end, failure on the national level. So, on who does this failure lie?”
This was the
exact words spoken by Assad himself. These words have always remained in my
memory the first time I listened to them. What struck me, as a Syrian, was his
describing of “hundreds of thousands, or millions” of those Syrians as
“terrorists”. This statement clarifies a lot of how Assad views the situation
in Syria.
Assad
inherited a police state forged by his father, Hafiz Assad, based on extensive
security devices, and a coalition of minorities which was based on their
loyalty to the police state. What his father did was basically to neutralize
any figure that has the potential to stand against him. He injected these
minorities, especially the Alawites into the state apparatus particularly in
the security devices.
In
1982, an uprising started by the Muslim brotherhood, which culminated with the
Hama Massacre. Hafiz besieged the city of Hama for 27 days and the result? An estimate
of 10 to 25 thousand deaths, later Friedman wrote the following:
“The
Syrian regime of President Hafez al-Assad, which was responsible for carrying
out the massacre, did little to dispute these figures or to tidy up Hama before
reopening the main highway that ran through it from Damascus in May 1982. am
convinced that Assad wanted the Syrian people to see Hama raw, to listen
closely to its silence and reflect on its pain”.[ii]
Hafiz
was able to use fear as a tool to silence dissent. However, the same recently
is being done by his son, Bashar, however not by instilling fear which he tried
but did not work with him. Since Bashar cannot do today, what his father
did to 20 thousand Syrians, to those “hundreds of thousands, or millions” of
terrorist, he resorted to a different strategy. Instead of killing these
people, he employs a different tactic; he forces them to evacuate the area so
by that he gets rid of any dissent against him in the newly gained territory.
A
recent term coined by Ferrara[iii] can help us understand
what actually is going on in Syria. Ferrara argues that there are certain
events that do not fall under the concept of ethnic-cleansing or genocide,
instead there are instances where a people who lived in a certain part of a
land are driven out or in another word; forcibly migrate from their homes, and
those people are not targeted based on ethnic lines but rather simply out of
political calculations. Under such conditions, such events Ferrara describes
them as demographic surgeries, he further goes on explaining that:
“Demographic
surgery is characterized by its being a policy aimed at whole categories of
people that are singled out as “dangerous” or “harmful”; its victims are not
persecuted individually, but rather en masse and often on grounds of prevention
rather than retribution. Even if the measure is conceived (or justified) as a
collective punishment, it is usually administered through executive rather than
judicial decisions – a fact that can have significant legal and political
implications.”
I
came to believe that this is actually what the Assad regime is doing recently. Ferrara
in his article gives many historical instances where such actions took place, he
gives the example of the Soviet “decossackization” policies in 1919-1920, or
the Soviet deportations of the people in the annexed territories during WWI. Similarly,
the Assad regime besieges an area and then begins with a process of
purification under which the regime forces the population out of the besieged
area, this depopulated area is later used to the advantage of the regime by
populating the area by people who are supportive to the regime policies.
By
this way, the Assad regime seeks to restructure the Syrian society in a way
favourable to its policies, this way is less expensive and benefits the regime
in the long run had the outcome of the crisis turned in its favour. Using such technique,
the regime makes sure that in a future Syria where the regime is still dominant
no threat would exist on its territory. However, to argue that such actions
indicate the weakness of the regime, I think is not true, a simple reflection
on the historical instances given in Ferrara’s paper it can be seen that most
of the actors who employed such technique had the upper hand, the ability to
carry out such actions requires systematic coordination which is usually
lacking in most insurgencies this is specially the case in the Syrian
insurgencies where most of them are divided, and each has different political
goals.
[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ueif2DLx6gw
[ii] Thomas L. Friedman, From
Beirut to Jerusalem, (New York: Picador, 1989), p.77.
[iii] Antonio Ferrara, Beyond Ethnic Cleansing:
Demographic Surgery in European History, IWM, http://www.iwm.at/publications/5-junior-visiting-fellows-conferences/vol-xxix/beyond-ethnic-cleansing-demographic-surgery-in-european-history-1/
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