11 May 2011
This is not 1982: a History Lesson
This is not 1982. This is not a repeat of Hama. The differences are huge, greater than any similarities.
There, I’ve said it and now I will spell out what that means.
Virtually every uninformed western pundit I’ve seen keeps referring in all the discussion of what’s happening now here, in Syria, especially in Dera’a and Banyas and Homs (while I’m writing this, areas of Homs are being shelled by tanks), to it being a replay of 1982 and what happened in Hama then. It isn’t. Every time someone does that, in my opinion, they just show that they really know nothing at all about Syria except what they’ve gleaned from other uninformed people.
If there’s anyone I do blame for this propagation of nonsense, it would be Tom Friedman. He’s the New York Times columnist who writes about how he met a cabdriver who told him how clever he was, saw an iPhone in Mali (or whatever the gimmick of the day is), blah blah blah …. Anyway, he might know something about Israeli politics and he might know something about building shopping malls, but he definitely knows very little about Syria! So forget that whole ‘Hama rules’ bs … it’s crap …
What really happened then was grim but it isn’t the story propagated in most of the western media and, I suspect, actively encouraged by the regime. What really happened was we actually came close to full on civil war. Not peaceful protests, not even mostly peaceful protests, but full on war. And it had two clear sides.
On the one hand, there was the Muslim Brotherhood – or rather a portion of it. They’d actually had a split in their leadership in the 1970’s between one faction that was mostly based in Damascus (and hence called the Damascus Group) that saw a path to power as coming from peaceful means; elections, that sort of thing; and a second group from the north, mainly in Aleppo and Hama that believed the Brotherhood should follow a path of armed insurrection and revolution to seize power by force of arms. The two groups squabbled over which was the better course much as factions of any polical movement does.
Meanwhile, the government of the country had steadily moved from, at independence, essentially a coalition of wealthy, urban Sunni civilian grandees to army officers involved in Pan-Arabist political parties. Those officers were heavily recruited from rural, nin Sunni populations – Alawi, Druze and Ismaili mainly – and those groups were also heavily overrepresented in the Baath Party. The Baath – or rather its military members – had finally seized power in 1963 and then, in 1966, had an internal coup. The new leadership were hard-line socialists, admirers of the Soviet Union and overwhelmingly from the Alawi minority. They attempted to socialize the economy, taking over factories and estates largely owned by the old Sunni notables, and tied the country closer to the Soviet Union in politics. Under Salah Jadid’s leadership, the less radical (and less Alawi) Baathis were purged and he and his defense minister, one Hafidh al Assad, deliberately set out to provoke a war with Israel … and when it started, the defense minister had the military radio broadcast – before any Israeli attack on the Jaulan – that the Jaulan had fallen. Many soldiers heard this and, thinking they were the last survivors, fled from the front. (Incidentally, my father’s older brother was a Sunni army officer then. We’ll never know whether he and his soldiers heard those broadcasts as they all died at their posts. My grandfather blamed Assad and my dad left for the USA after that)
You would think that after that, a first order of business would be to sack the Defense Minister responsible for the fiasco that had led to humiliating defeat and to tens of thousnads of Syrians made refugees, right? Well, not with that government. Assad and Jadid grew stronger but eventually fell out when, again, a crisis came; Black September. Jadid wanted to support the Palestinian uprising against the Jordanian monarchy, Assad did not. Syrian tanks entered Jordan under Jadid’s direction but Assad refused to allow the air force to support them; another military fiasco and the defense minister becomes President while waving the little red book …
The Sunni majority, of course, chafed under these governments but did little more than grumble until 1976. Then, civil war had broken out in Lebanon; on one side, Christian militias fought to defend a political system where a minority were guaranteed a permanent control over the state and, on the other, nationalists, leftists, and Muslim and Druze groups joined together in a ‘National Movement’ to create a non-sectarian Lebanon. They started winning and controlled 80% of the country …. When Assad sent the Syrian military in to restore the Christian monopoly on power (Syrian troops stayed on for almost thirty years and eventually fought against and alongside every faction in the country at some point or other).
So …. This didn’t play well with the majority of people in Syria itself, especially the Sunni population. As a general thing, we think of ourselves and the Lebanese people as a single population, divided by a colonial border. Seeing a popular and democratic uprising put down by Syrian troops imposing a minority’s rule was something many Syrian Sunnis saw as deeply wrong and as the final insult.
Not least among these were some in the Muslim Brotherhood, especially in Aleppo. They decided to take up arms against the government with the goal of sparking a revolution and seizing power as a vanguard movement. Bombs began going off at places like the military academy in Aleppo (at the time, almost entirely Alawi and Baathi) ; assasinations were carried out against prominent Baathis and Alawis in the cities of the north … and counter-attacks happened as a ‘dirty war’ began; the regime arrested and tortured anyone suspected of being in the Brotherhood, killed most of those that they knew were …
Violence against civilians happened on both sides in those years. Alawis were shot dead by Muslim Brothers while Baathis murdered random Sunnis. At one point, in Damascus, Baathi irregulars went out and stopped all cars, looking for any women who were wearing hijab, a mark that they were Sunnis, and stripped them and beat them in the streets.
It was a slow moving war. In Aleppo, by 1979, the Brotherhood had the support of much of the Sunni population and controlled the old city; the regime sent soldiers in and killed thousands as they battled house to house. Huge parts of the city were destroyed.
And it finally came to an end in February 1982; the militant wing of the Brotherhood decided to make a stand in Hama, a last hope to make a final bid to seize power … militants slipped into the city and arms caches were built up (incidentally, largely supplied by the Jordanian government, then, as now, a close ally of the USA (just as the Assad regime was probably the closest non-Communist regime to Brezhnev’s USSR)). The regime noticed and accepted the challenge.
What followed was not a massacre; it was a battle, a desparate battle, and the Brothers hoped to make it their Stalingrad … they lost and Hama lost. Huge portions of the old city were levelled … thousands were killed. Estimates run from 5,000 to 38,000 dependig on who you ask and what axes they have to grind. My own guess is that realistically, about 10,000 people died; among them were several thousand government troops. Hardly a massacre of civilians! There are mass graves there; the Sham Palace Hotel by the banks of the Orontes is supposed to have been built on top of the largest of them.
That was essentially the end of the struggle. In that final battle, though, it wasn’t Alawi troops that did the slaughtering; most of the foot soldiers were from Kurdish and Bedouin backgrounds. They were Sunnis, not Alawis, contrary to myth; the Brotherhood had never really built much support for itself beyond the Sunni population of the cities and the larger towns and the faction that had made the stand was not even the more popular among those. The regime had realized that and had played off faction against faction, to isolate one group until they could be contained. They were but the regime didn’t want to put out how hard it had been for them to win so they encouraged the myth that the naive Friedmans propagated.
The mastermind of the slaughter was Hafidh’s righthand and brother, Rifaat … and Rifaat tried to seize power a year later … he was forced to flee and lives in exile. Spain and Britain among others have given him shelter while he and his son plot to return and seize power.
Afterwards, the broken Brotherhood split and rebuilt; the Damascus faction had been proven right. If change were to come, it would be by the ballot, not the bullet. In exile, they began to work towards that day.
Except not all the Brothers saw it that way. One faction made the point that the reason they had failed was because the so-called Islamic Republic in Iran had supported the ultra-secularist pro-Soviet Baath over an Islamic movement; that moment spelled the end of any real notion of Iran leading a pan-Islamic revolution or exporting anything beyond the scattered Imami Shia ….
Another faction, the smallest of all, split off and claimed the failure was due not to taking up arms against a better armed opponent but by not taking up enough arms. They left the Brotherhood in a huff, claiming that the Revolution was betrayed by the Hypocrites in the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership who didn’t want to fight to the death, who didn’t want to kill all Alawis. They made threats and carried out violence against the Brotherhood leadership. That faction, by the way, largely headed to Afghanistan and became one of the kernels of another group that’s been I the news lately; many of the ur-texts of that other group were written first as denunciations of the Brotherhood …
SOOOOOO ….
Having recounted that history, does anyone still think that what’s going on now is in any way parallel to what happened then? Does anyone think that Tom Friedman’s recent comment that "It's different from Hama. They're doing it now in slow motion, bit by bit,” shows him as anything but the Michael Bolton of Punditry? I mean, really?
What’s happening now isn’t one faction of one opposition group in one part of the country taking up arms, much as the regime might wish it were, but, instead, a real national uprising. It’s city and country, women in short sleeves and women in niqab, kurds and arabs, bedouin and medini and fellaheen, liberals and conservatives, Muslims and Christians and Druze … and we aren’t planting bombs and doing assassinations …
THE REGIME KNOWS THIS; they just don’t want you to know. You can tell by the way they send troops; they send over-armed crowd control in armored personnel carriers and the backs of trucks by the platoon; what I saw last night was not an assault force preparing for war but an over-reacting police force to an unarmed opposition. They want the world to think it’s crazy heavy bearded guys back from Afghanistan or up from Najd come to destabilize; it isn’t at all. And the people know they are lying.
That is why we will win.
The wheel will turn.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Brilliant analysis! I knew that the Ikhwan was involved in terrorism and that Hama wasn't exactly peaceful, but I had no idea this was basically a mini civil-war. Thanks so much!
Good historical run down, but I have two comments:
1- Hama 1982 was a terrible, terrible massacre of civilians. True,the MB made a last stand in a populated city, but the regime did not discriminate between insurgents and women /children. In fact, it relished the opportunity to teach Hamwis, former feudal lords over a largely Alawite peasantry, a very bloody lesson.
2- Hama was attacked by the "Defense Companies"(Saraya Al-Difaa3) and it was almost 100% Alawi.(By the way, Saraya Al-Difaa3 is the progenitor of the present Fourth Army led by Maher Al-Asad.)
...also, please read the Syrian Human Rights Council's report on Hama http://www.shrc.org/data/aspx/d5/2535.aspx
Thank you for the commentary. May Allah keep you safe and out of harm's and haraam's way.
May I ask why you have chosen such a conservative estimate of those killed in Hama? There are several credible sources that place the number killed much higher than 10,000, including the architect of the massacre itself: Riffat Al-Assad as well as the Muslim Brotherhood themselves, as both were the primary parties involved and both agree on the no. killed I am interested to knbow why you differ with them?
Other than that, the horror and suppression of the situation, whether then or now, hardly comes across in your writing. Why?
Araf Reach me I needed to talk to azizkaynar@gmail.com mmail Send me
Hi Amina. I am Mojtaba SAmienejad. blogger and journalist of Iran
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojtaba_Saminejad
I Can not Found your email. plz send me a message
madyar.s@gmail.com
Be safe dear. I pray for you and for your father
If you don't like Thomas Friedman, below is a link to a very funny parady of his writing.
http://www.thefinaledition.com/article/friedman-my-world-is-flat-right-now.html
You say that Jordan supplied the brotherhood in Syria. Being Jordanian I know that King Hussein and Asad had agreed not to meddle in each others internal affairs. Are you sure that Jordan broke the deal or is the same as today where Syria is claiming that Der'a is getting men and weapons from Jordan?
Post a Comment