Bashar's Syria: The Regime and its Strategic Worldview Shmuel Bar ...

372 S. Bardemocracy” must be founded on Syrian history, culture and “personality.” In Bashar’s eyes,“Freedom and democracy are only instruments, just like stability. The goal is progress andgrowth.” 47 Along with this definition of the “proactive” goal of the regime, the “defensive”goal is preservation of “unity” and “stability.” Popular participation is manifested in theinvolvement of the people in promoting the country’s growth according to the plans of theregime, not in defining the very identity or nature of the regime. The instruments for popularparticipation are the same ones that the regime has used for decades for effecting socialcontrol.Syria, according to Bashar, is much too fragile for “instant democracy”; opening thedoor wide for freedom of speech is tantamount to permitting intercommunal conflict andchaos. Since the “unity” and “cohesion” of the people and the stability of the nation are theloftiest of national values and goals, the charge against members of the opposition is that theyimpinge on these very values in the service of foreign enemies of Syria. Western sponsorshipof a Syrian “civil society” is presented as an attempt to replace the indigenous Syrian “civilsociety,” based on government-regulated clubs and charities and tribal institutions, witha foreign concept. The result of such chaos will not be the victory of liberal forces thatthe West is trying to sponsor, but of radical Islamic forces that are lying in wait to takeadvantage of a breakdown of the regime. The cases of Algeria since the early 1990s and thecivil war in Lebanon and Iraq after the fall of the Ba’th regime are cited to prove the follyof uncontrolled democratization. In many of his meetings with western representatives, hehints at a period of 3–5 years needed to “prepare” Syria for democracy and asks for theWest to be forbearing with him, not to pressure him for reforms and to allow him to makeprogress toward democracy at a pace that suits the social and economic make-up of Syria.The “Damascus Spring” came to an end after less than a year. It was followed by “TheDamascus Winter” of January 2002, with the arrest of Syrian intellectuals and parliamentarybackbenchers. The nature of the renewed suppression, however, was different from thatwhich Syria knew in the past; instead of summary arrests and disappearances of dissidents,the regime initiated public trials, albeit with forged evidence and predetermined verdicts,but open and with ostensible legal defense and media cover. In doing so it appears that theregime felt that it could ward off some of the international criticism of its actions.The emphasis on institutionalized repression, as opposed to the more arbitrary useof force that Syria was accustomed to, was also manifested in Bashar’s “anticorruption”campaign. Officials who had fallen from grace were accused of corruption. 48 Some weremade an example of through “due process,” while others were accused through leaks to theLebanese press, 49 but none were either summarily executed or surreptitiously incarcerated.The crackdown on civil society was accompanied by a declared “reactivation” of theBa’th party; members of the regional command council were sent to mobilize support forthe regime’s actions. Bashar’s reactivation of the party as a central instrument for achievinglegitimacy reflects his need to augment his legitimacy. Unlike his father, Bashar relieson the party and needs to coopt it. Moreover, the party plays an important role in Bashar’ssociopolitical worldview; he perceives it as occupying the societal space that the civil-societymovement claims for itself. Therefore, revitalization of the party is not a mere propagandaploy but an attempt to replace the civil-society movement with a government-controlled“civil society.”While the role of Bashar in initiating the reform process is not debated, his role in thedecision to put a halt to it is. Analysts sympathetic to Bashar and his reformist credentialshave interpreted the regime’s abrupt halt of the liberalization process as occurring for variousreasons. The main explanations include: (1) pressures on the president from the “old guard”and the Ba’th party, who feared a Gorbachev syndrome and demanded an immediate halt