The last time Syrians took on their ruling Ba’athist regime it was 1982. The protesters then were Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood. Hafez al-Assad was president. And there was no such thing as a camera phone. Assad mercilessly crushed the revolt in the city of Hama, killing perhaps 10,000 , and according to local lore, turning one mass grave into a car park, such being his contempt for those who dared defy him.
In 2011, Hafez’s son and political heir Bashar al-Assad seems to be following in his father’s footsteps, responding to calls for greater freedom with crushing force. Yet Syria 2011 is not Syria 1982. The regime is still ruthless, but this time the rebellion is not restricted to one city or one sect. The constant stream of amateur video spilling over social media is also documenting events — despite the regime’s best efforts to smother information by banning journalists — suggesting that, if there is not a future reckoning, there will at least be a future record.
There are other differences. While the father had time on his side , the son doesn’t. The volume of international condemnation is rising, and domestically, he may not be able to continue his ferocious crackdown without cracks in his regime or the military.
Minor divisions have already surfaced, with the weekend resignation of two lawmakers and a mufti from the southern city of Dara’a, where the uprising began more than a month ago. Still, Assad won’t lose sleep over the largely symbolic departures. “Threats to the regime can only come from the army and the security services,” Ammar Qurabi, head of the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria told TIME from Cairo. “They will not resign or try to change things because they are the ones committing the massacres.”
The Assads, both father and son, have appointed co-religionists from their minority Alawite sect to the top positions in the military’s brass, ensuring a close-knit protective shield based on kinship and shared interests. When protests erupted in Dara’a in mid-March, for example, it was the 4th Armored Division, led by Bashar’s younger brother Maher, that was deployed to quell the unrest. The fates of many senior officers are closely tied to that of the regime. Still, according to Radwan Ziadeh, a Washington-based Syrian dissident and visiting scholar at The Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University, lower-ranking officers are defecting. “They’re not following orders,” he told TIME. “The regime knows who it can rely on, the 4th and the Presidential Guards. We hope that the military will play a role,” he added, “but if senior politicians don’t resign, it won’t encourage military commanders to do the same.” There are at least 15 different security agencies, and so far they are showing few signs of abandoning Assad.
But even the Assad’s sect may not be fully depended upon. The Alawites comprise no more than 12% of Syria’s 22 million people. They hold privileged political and military positions, along with a select group of elites from other sects, spoils they may not wish to risk by keeping the Assads in power, according to a Syrian rights activist in Damascus who requested anonymity. “Many of the Alawites are rich people, they are very well off, but they will have to decide what role they want to play in the future of Syria and if they want to risk it for one family.”
The secular Ba’athist regime has long touted itself as the guarantor of the rights of Syria’s many minorities, including Christians and Druze. The Assads have wielded an iron fist but also given the country decades of domestic stability, something a majority of Syrians may be loathe to risk, given the country’s pre-Ba’athist history of coups and counter-coups. The lack of any clear alternative to the Baathists, given their effectiveness at extinguishing dissent, also makes some Syrians wary of moving too quickly to replace them.
State media has helped fuel such concerns, by portraying the people on the streets as foreign instigators, criminals and ultraconservative Sunnis — even as government TV, radio and newspapers point out that, among these “dark forces,” there are a small legitimate group calling for reforms. It’s a view echoed by many of the regime’s supporters, like Imad Shueibi, an analyst and president of the Data and Strategic Studies Center in Damascus. “You cannot say that they are demonstrators for freedom or Al-Qaeda or killers only,” Shueibi told TIME from the Syrian capital. “They are all of them.” It’s unclear how many people may share his view.
