In taking on the Assad family mafia and paying with blood to do so, Syrians have rediscovered their struggle for freedom
I was five when emergency law was imposed in my native Syria. I am now 53. During this intolerably long period, my country was turned step by chilling step by the ideologues and security service enforcers of the Ba'th party into the totalitarian state it is today. When Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez, came to power through yet another violent army squabble leading to his coup of 1970, an alarming cult of the leader was systematically formed around him, modelled on Ceausescu. The Romanian dictator was Assad's political ally, strategic adviser in matters of popular repression, and close personal and family friend.
This cult was no easy thing to achieve in rowdy, opinionated and sardonic Syria, with its valiant history of fighting the xenophobic Turkish nationalism that came with the last years of the Ottoman empire and led to the hanging of so many Arab patriots in Marjeh Square. The brutal French colonialism sought to divide and rule the country, bombing Damascus twice and burning down a residential quarter that was home to many resistance fighters, including my paternal grandfather, Tawfik Kabbani. To this day the area is called Hariqa, or "fire", in memory of the thousands of civilians wounded or killed.
Though the French tried to create sectarian statelets, the Druze of the Hawran plateau – where bleeding Deraa lies today – gave this policy its first ferocious setback, inspiring the great Syrian revolution. It is no coincidence to those who know their history that the flashpoints of the uprising we are now witnessing began in a street in Hariqa, and exploded in Deraa. The entrenched and Assad regime is viewed by so many Syrians as an internal colonialism that, much like the external colonialism of the past, has robbed them and bombed them and impeded them from joining the free peoples of the world.
In the government school I attended in Damascus between 1971 and 1974, a process of wholesale brainwashing had begun. It was designed to create a population with no political personality or affiliation – other than to the head of what would become, in my children's generation, a vindictive family mafia, monopolising business and power with the crudest of propaganda machines and the most lethal of security services. Small wonder that Syria's missing still number 17,000.
Or that in its notorious jails political prisoners, deprived of all rights, must contend with torturers and sewer rats, and are often crammed so tightly they must sleep standing on their swollen feet. I was told this by released prisoners, including Riad Turk – Syria's Mandela – who I interviewed in 2005 after he was released from 17 years of solitary confinement, during which he was all but buried alive in an underground cell that was shorter than the length of his body and no higher than a coffin. Turk had dared challenge Hafez Assad's campaign to eradicate dissent once and for all – using the Muslim Brotherhood's insurgency to crush communists, liberals, teachers, activists, writers, artists – indeed, anyone who still had some independent thought left in them.
When Syrians watched the depraved Gaddafi turn his air force and tanks on his own people, they were reminded of their own experience in 1982 when the city of Hama was made to pay the most gruesome of prices by the regime, with a bombardment that left more than 15,000 civilians dead. For three decades the trauma of the Hama massacre made the Syrian people too frightened to revolt, despite the immense provocation the rank hereditary rule of the Assads gave them.
Like all mafia families, they are now divided among themselves as to what they must do if they are to survive in a country that has broken the barrier of fear, and has paid in blood to do so. There is talk of deep disagreements between the brothers, the brother-in-law and sister, and between them and their maternal cousins, the Makhloufs – who long have vied with Tunisia's Trabelsi family (now thankfully deposed) for the title of most avaricious and unprincipled monopolising operators.
The Syrian people had been rendered poor and isolated. They had been fed the increasingly threadbare propaganda of the Assads' "steadfast" Arab nationalist stance. This fits oddly with a regime that sided with Iran against Iraq; and cold-bloodedly divided Palestinian ranks; agitated murderously within Lebanon's borders, while rigorously enforcing a cold "peace" with Israel (except, of course, in standard fiery speeches that make most Syrians yawn). Even Assad's anti-US position is compromised by his compliance with the Bush administration's programme of extraordinary rendition, as Maher Arar and others know too well. Despite all this, Syrians have come out en masse to demand rights they have been denied for so long.
Their protest has a very high cost. They are subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without trial, or trial by military court. Despite having no independent judiciary to defend them, no freedom of speech and no right to demonstrate, they are resolved to change their country for the better, whatever it may take. The most recent concession is the resignation of the cabinet. This and the staged pro-regime demonstrations that have just taken place are an indication not of how strong the Assads actually are, but rather of how weak and surpassed by political events they have become – much like the Mubaraks, Ben Alis, Gaddafis and Salehs of this new Arab world, which has been suddenly sentenced to hope.