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Special Report
Demography Is Destiny in Syria
The “peripheralism” and Malthusian underpinnings of an unexpected uprising.
Among the second wave of Arab Spring uprisings that followed Tunisia, Syria was the most spectacular “out of the blue” that suddenly arose in the face of the media and analytic community. Just days before Deraa exploded with protests last March, some analysts were still scrutinizing Syria’s circumstances and declaring the country to be immune from the Arab Spring. Nor did reporters who visited the country spot signs of a brewing storm.
In fact, throughout the Arab Spring, the media and experts repeatedly fell into the same trap of confusing the capital city with the whole country. On the eve of the Islamist landslide in Egypt’s elections various polls and informed individuals were putting the popularity of radical Salafis at between 5% and 10%. The Salafis have indeed won about 10% of the vote… but only in Cairo. Nationwide they took almost 30%, beating even those unrepentant pessimists who were betting on a Muslim Brotherhood spring. In some provinces they grabbed all of 50%.
This routine of the periphery ambushing the media and analysts during the Arab Spring and making a mockery of their reports and predictions has reached such grotesque proportions in Syria partly thanks to the media restrictions imposed by the regime, but mostly owing to the very peripheral nature of the Syrian uprising itself. This “peripheralism” has also laid waste to the best efforts of Iranian advisers who came to Syria to share with their Syrian colleagues the know-how accumulated by the regime in Tehran in crushing the Greens.
In truth, the escalation in Syria took by surprise only the people who never bothered to examine Syria’s population pyramid. It was no “out of the blue” to anybody even slightly familiar with the basic facts on demography and climate in the region. In the Middle East’s long list of hopeless basket cases Yemen is surely beyond competition. However, for quite a while Syria has positioned herself as a formidable contender for respectable second place.
In some respects, the seeds of the current disaster were planted as far back as 1956, when Youssef Helbaoui — head of economic analysis in Syria’s Planning Department — famously declared: “A birth control policy has no reason for being in this country. Malthus could not find any followers among us.” Since then Syria has been living in a state of one uninterrupted demographic cataclysm. The regime was so obsessively pro-natalist that in the early 1970s, the trade and use of contraceptives in Syria were officially banned. By 1975, the birth rate reached 50 live births per 1,000 people, with Hafez al-Assad asserting that a “high population growth rate and internal migration” were responsible for stimulating “proper socio-economic improvements” within the development framework.
Even when other nations in the Middle East began to take measures to curb their population growth as the danger of demographic collapse started to loom over the region, the regime in Syria was struggling to make up its mind on the issue. Only in recent years has the regime introduced some measure of family planning, but by now the sheer amount of population momentum accumulated in previous decades has kept the population swelling to new highs. It’s true that the average Syrian woman entering the child bearing age now is expected to have no more than three children in her lifetime. Yet, the sheer proportion of such young people in the population continues to propel the population forward. And the workforce is still expanding at a neck breaking rate of 4%.
The impact of the rapidly mounting population pressures on the economy has been exacerbated by the steady depletion of natural resources that, critically for the regime, included declining oil production, with an output of 385,000 barrels per day (bpd) as of 2010 against the peak of about 583,000 bpd back in 1996. To give the reader some perception on the decline, even after hitting the bottom the oil sector still accounted for a majority of the country’s export income and about a quarter of government revenues.
The final blow came during the last decade. With Malthus sending broad smiles in the direction of Syria from his grave, the climate change that has hit the region has wrecked Syria’s countryside. Shifts in rain patterns have led to prolonged droughts all around the Middle East in recent years. But their impact was particularly devastating in Syria, where agriculture remains a major part of the economy and the lifestyle of a large section of the population, some 20% of Syria’s GDP being generated by this sector. With water shortages reported in many parts of the country, some rural areas have become impoverished disaster zones. Whole villages and fields have been abandoned, while slums around Syrian cities have been swelling with hundreds of thousands of climate refugees.
In 2009, the International Institute for Sustainable Development noted that a decline in rainfall and subsequent aggravation of water scarcity led to the abandonment of around 160 villages in northern Syria in the period 2007-2008. In eastern Syria, the Inezi tribe saw some 85% of its livestock killed between 2005 and 2010 because of prolonged drought. In 2010 the United Nations estimated that more than a million people have left the northeast of the country, “with farmers simply not cultivating enough food or earning enough money to sustain them.”
Basically, Syria’s GDP per capita was declining during the 1980s and stagnating in the 1990s. This trend was reversed only with the beginning of market reforms in 2000s, but the economic renaissance was largely confined to Damascus and Aleppo and struggled to spread to other parts of the country. A measure of prosperity brought into some cities by the economic liberalization, unevenly distributed in any case, was simply not enough to balance out the tremendous demographic and social pressures that were piling up in provinces like Deraa and Deir ez Zor and spilling into the center from the periphery. Regardless of whether the urban classes in Damascus and Aleppo were fully aware of their precarious existence living by the side of this volcano, they showed limited enthusiasm for fireworks once the volcano finally erupted and sent its flames towards the suburbs of their cities.
To be sure, the peripheral character of the uprising in Syria makes the task of ensuring the survival of the Assad regime rather difficult compared with the experience of its patrons in Tehran. However, getting rid of the regime would be an easy task for the country compared to surviving the post-revolution.
The uprising in Syria has many characteristics of a poor man’s revolt and a “periphery against center” conflict at the same time and as such it’s the exact opposite of the kind of unrest the regime in Tehran was facing in its big cities in 2009.
While the protest movement in Iran was led by the urban classes of the capital and major city centers, the Syrian uprising is very much powered by the same underclass that in Iran is providing the bulk of the recruits for the Baseej squads that eventually crushed the Green opposition. In Iran, Tehran was the epicenter of the protests, but the Syrian revolution started in the heavily Bedouin and undeveloped Deraa, and from its very beginning the uprising featured a rather unusual degree of mobilization in the countryside against the regime. Protests were regularly reported in villages and small towns. During the siege of Deraa and Hama, nearby villagers were reported trying to break blockades with supply convoys and clashing with security cordons.
Even where the Syrian regime was successfully keeping city centers clean of protesters, the unrest persisted in suburbs and the countryside. In far-flung provinces, towns and localities have been changing hands several times, with protesters and the Free Syrian Army reinfiltrating them immediately after the army had departed. The regime is clearly overstretched and struggling to contain such a widely geographically distributed and increasingly militarized unrest, as shown by the recent reports of unrest creeping in towards the centers of Damascus and Aleppo. More critically for the regime, the challenge of defending the country’s energy infrastructure over vast expanses of such a big country seems to be overwhelming the Syrian army, with attacks on oil and gas pipelines escalating.
On the other hand, the very same demographic and social pressures that made this bastion of pan Arab resistance succumb to the temptations of the Arab Spring are set to persist for years to come, long after the regime is gone.
About the Author
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University. His website is http://www.aymennjawad.org.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (28) | Leave a comment
More Articles by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
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Jack in Wi.| 2.6.12 @ 7:46AM
Leave Syria alone. Let them settle their own problems. The CIA and the Mossad are pushing the radicals in an effort to make Syria another basket case. They are just making radical Isalm the predominent force in the Muslim world. They pushed the radicals in Egypt and Libya. How did that work out? This young chap at Oxford is another necon wantabee. Son stay away from the Neocons. They are a tiny hated minority, headed for the Hague for their lies and crimes.
RCV| 2.6.12 @ 2:22PM
You, China, Russia and Ron Paul are all in agreement, Jack.
Dimitry Aleksandrovich| 2.6.12 @ 7:34PM
Well China, Russia, Ron Paul and Jack are RIGHT RCV.
Alan Brooks| 2.6.12 @ 6:35PM
Assad wont end up as Gaddhafi/Khaddafi (however one spells it) did, Assad has valuable connections and will go into exile to write his memoirs.
He'll do better out of power than in.
Skippy| 2.6.12 @ 7:25PM
Note to the article author:
Neocon is just another synonym for Jew.
Jack has a Judenhass thing going on.
Bob K.| 2.6.12 @ 9:15AM
If demography is such a big issue it will not bode well for Israel if the Alawite's and other Shia's who run Syria are replaced with the Sunni majority. Israel will then be surrounded by hostile Sunni run countries financed by a Sunni House of Saud. Saudi Arabia is Israel's most hostile enemy.
RCV| 2.6.12 @ 2:24PM
Israel is much more threatened by the Shia crescent of Iran, Hezbollah Lebanon and Syria than Saudi Arabia. Israel know it, Saudi Arabia knows it, and we know it.
Dimitry Aleksandrovich| 2.6.12 @ 7:39PM
If the Christians get massacred to keep Israel safe is that a price you are willing to pay RCV because as a Russian Orthodox Christian with many Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters in Syria I would rather be allies with Iran and Hezbollah and Assad than see my people ethnically cleansed from Syria to make Israel "more secure".
John Navratil| 2.6.12 @ 9:31AM
A typically Malthusian piece... a troika of falling oil production, population explosion, tribalism and (rimshot, please) climate change.
Things do not look good for Syria and the author has advanced a new "periphery against the center" view to explain it.
Other than cataloguing a set of problems, the author has provided nothing worth reading.
Susan Benton| 2.6.12 @ 9:34AM
On the whole I enjoyed the article and learned something from it. But the climate change thing is really off - the agricultural problems in Syria are caused by mis-management not climate change. Modern management methods of resources instead of primitive, or at best early 20th century practices in terms of water management, etc. would make a world of difference.
jaytrain| 2.6.12 @ 10:06AM
On the whole an informative analysys save the climate change bit . But take note , as an Oggstord man , AGW is in the water and a little charity is called for . There are two further points which might be made . First is inevitable disintegration of these Sykes-Picot 'nations' as is ,will, happen in Iraq as well as Syria . Second , note the similar political consequences of the collapse of rural life and resultant urbanization that has taken place in Turkey . I fear that Syria will follow down the path of Islamization and any hopes for a liberal democracy and free market economy will remain only hopes . The sad truth is that the Arab world follows one false god after another : nati0nalism and then Pan-Arabism and now Islam . And those who can leave , will leave ,as apparently the author has already , to the benefit of the West . But as to the Arab world ,sox to be you .
Bob K.| 2.6.12 @ 10:06AM
Another analysis of the situation from "Asia Times" which mentions the start of "Plan B" in the last parapgraph:
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NB07Ak02.html
And another analysis of what Russia might be planning to do.
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NB07Ak03.html
richard ryan| 2.6.12 @ 12:33PM
I'm confident these people will be able to pull themselves up and live in harmony.
Vern Crisler| 2.6.12 @ 1:17PM
The one important fact left out of the essay is the following: "Syria is under authoritarian military-dominated Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party regimes since March 1963." (US State Dept.)
There's no need to blame "climate change" (global warming), as countries have always experienced bad weather; nor Malthus, whose economic pessimism was in fact a response to socialist utopias, and who in fact greatly underestimated the ability of capitalism to produce prosperity beyond mere subsistence.
If you want to understand why a country is in such bad economic straits, just look for the tell-tale fact, often unreported, as to whether the country in question is dominated by socialists. That tells you just about everything you need to know.
JP| 2.6.12 @ 2:32PM
Another way to look at this is that for 30 years there were born a glut of producers, consumers, writers, engineers, poets, mechanics, doctors, and teachers. In a free society large populations are considered an asset.
But in an autocratic society like Syria what is another baby? The choice is between being a subsistence farmer and a suicide bomber.
Melvin| 2.6.12 @ 2:52PM
If Daddy Assad was still around we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
cicero| 2.6.12 @ 4:50PM
The Arab countries have never been able to "pull themselves by their bootstraps", because they have no way to improvise, adjust, or implement change. Islam allows for no independent thought. As a result, they will go from one disaster to another, unless or until they give their people some freedom of thought.
Eric| 2.6.12 @ 6:11PM
Their not overpopulating Syria, they're just birthing the next generation of European colonizers. As Old Europe dies, Islam will take its place. Nature abhors a vacuum.
John786| 2.6.12 @ 6:29PM
An article from the twilight zone. It will have Malthus turning in his grave. It really is scraping the bottom of the barral. The turning of Syria will be decisive to the Arab revolution. The future for Arab looks bright and more Islamic.
Skippy| 2.6.12 @ 6:58PM
Syria will descend into the same Islamic basket-case as every other Arab sewer.
They are incapable of creative innovation except where IED's are concerned.
A hundred generations of marrying your cousin will do that.
As each European or American traveling the ME over the last 2 centuries has noted, Arabs are to a man filthy, lying thieves.
I hold zero hope that anything of value will arise from that region.
I suggest turning it all into a testing range.
Dimitry Aleksandrovich| 2.6.12 @ 7:51PM
Skippy you are a piece of work. Earlier you commented that anyone mentioning "neo-cons" really means "JEWS" (basically accusing anyone who calls a neo-con a neo-con a bigot and anti-semite) yet in your last post you call Arabs "filthy, lying thieves". So maybe you are the real bigot? Oh wait a minute I forgot...in this upside down Western society only the Jews are not bigoted...Yeahhhh right.
My main question to you would be this. What would you say is an acceptable number of Syrian Christians, Druze, Alawites, Shia and other minorities massacred at the hands of Sunni Islamists is acceptable to you to rid Israel of a long time enemy (Assad's Syrian government)?
Dimitry Aleksandrovich| 2.6.12 @ 7:32PM
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it was the United States and its allies (namely Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar) have been behind the Syrian uprising from the start of it. Those trying to overthrow Assad are primarily Sunni and don't doubt for a minute that there are staunch Islamists of the Salafist/Wahhabist type (not unlike Osama Bin Laden) actively involved in trying to topple the Assad government by violent means with the backing of the United States and its allies. That's right we are using "radical Islamists" in an attempt to overthrow a regime we don't like. Also as I noted before the Christians, Alawites, Druze and other Syrian minorities who are largely backing Assad will face fierce persecution if not ethnic cleansing and massacre if the Assad regime falls to the Sunni opposition.
Thank God for Russia and China maybe such a Westerm induced tragedy can be avoided at least for now.
Levantine| 2.6.12 @ 9:41PM
The article is informative, but flawed in a key respect. The 165 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) observers reported from on the ground. They’re not Syrian forces doing all the killing, but heavily armed gangs of foreign mercenaries. The report was suppressed by the GCC. But it’s available here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~haube.....ission.pdf
Ed Jazairi| 2.6.12 @ 10:27PM
Mr. Tamimi & Mr. Svadovsky: Nice article but the Mathusian argument is secondary to the Syrian anomaly. You have left out the main argument and that is " Personal Dignity" to live as human beings on the surface of this Earth. Some years ago I came across a Professor of Sociology at the University of Houston. His main argument regarding the explosive rate of birth rate in "backward" cultures and socities is as follow and I am going to paraphrase him. Human beings anywhere strive for personal dignity and self pride followed by personal achivements regardless how small or big it is and worth. In countries where human populations are suppressed and treated like animals or close to animals, you will find an explosion in birth rate. The reason why!? Because the only thing that left to these populations, that reminds them of themselves as human being is to have sex and to reproduce. That way they can feel human....yes no kiddings. Now, as far as Syria is concerned, the brutal dictatorship of Syria was not only harming the Syrian body...but it was and still is harming the minds and the Psyche of the entire nation. Fifty years of psychological harrassment and supression left scarred marks on the Syrian society, culture and the minds. The Syrian population is a good example put forward by this academic. Meaning, they are reproducing in quantity beacuse that was and is the only way they feel humans. Or members of the human realm!!! Syria is not a country my friends, it is the largest open prison humanity has ever known.
Now, any question on why all of them erupted like a volcano in a short period of time.
Yours truly.
Dimitry Aleksandrovich| 2.6.12 @ 11:29PM
Ed Jazairi all Syrians are not erupting like a volcano. It clearly appears that this uprising is a Sunni uprising while Alawites, Druze and Christians still stand behind President Assad. How do you explain that. What kind of freedoms do the opposition want? How are they being oppressed in the Ba'athist state of Syria other than the fact that Assad is an Alawite and they are Sunni? How do we know that if Assad goes that the other minorities of Syria that I mentioned above as supporting Assad won't be massacred when the Sunni's take power?
Ed Jazairi| 2.7.12 @ 3:17PM
Mr. Aleksandrovich: The subject of the article was about the exploding Syrian demographic. Meaning the high birth rates of Syria and the causation that brought Syria to the forefront of nations with such an anomaly. The authors of the articles suggested Matltusian mechanism at work and I have suggested a "personal dignity" theorm that is not mine to begin with. As I noted above in my counter argument to the excellent application of Malthusian logic put forward by the original authors of the essay. I highly suggest that you should go back and study, carefully, the article again.
POST American| 2.6.12 @ 11:56PM
Speaking of demographics,
one and all, as they begin to awaken
to the effects of more than half a century
of 'covert though aggressive' Rockefeller
et al EUGENICS for incremental extermination
---BEHOLD Japan's plight!
Massive sterilization and dysfunction
now further worsened by the ever more
dubious FUKISHIMA world nuclear disaster.
The Globalists and 'Free traitors'
hailing the disaster as a wonderful oppurtunity
to 'open' Japan to VAST immigration from
RED China and elsewhere in the third world.
Seems the source of japan's problems is
that it's just too darned ---Japanese.
AGAIN -------this is TREASON
Globalist-USURY TREASON pursuing
its age old, deadly sinister agenda
-------------FOR CULTURAL GENOCIDE------------
AGAIN ---these monsters are 'DIE-recting'
the world unchallenged --unindicted.
AGAIN-------------"NEW-Remburg AGAIN"
Jimbobogie| 9.17.12 @ 11:23PM
Isn't it wonderful that America introduced freedom and democracy to the Middle East? :) As the saying goes "Be careful what you wish for..."