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.
Much was made of Syria’s sectarian configuration, which is
indeed one of the most challenging in the region. The steady stream
of reports about sectarian killings in Homs suggests mounting
tensions and troubles for the future. Yet, even if stripped of all
its minorities down to the bare Sunni heartland, the post-Assad
Syria is still very likely to be resistant to any notion of unity
and stability.
As a poor man’s revolt, the uprising in Syria, which by
all accounts remains predominantly Sunni, is often blessed with the
involvement of the most backward and conservative sections of the
society. The Syrian opposition abroad may be represented by the
finest intellectuals and members of all Syria’s minorities.
However, a Voice of America reporter, recently allowed into one of
the opposition’s strongholds in the area of Damascus-Douma,
couldn’t help noticing how the place was
teeming with fully veiled women.
Many parts of the Syrian periphery are severely
impoverished and many are heavily tribal. The tribes in Deir ez-Zor
are officially allowed to carry arms as a counterweight to the
Kurdish population in the North. Tribes in Deraa and other
provinces are also quickly becoming militarized.
The potential for internal conflicts over the country’s
limited resources remains enormous. The same Deir ez-Zor, for
example, is Syria’s poorest province. Yet Deir ez-Zor accounts for
70% of Syria’s oil production. Once the regime falls, the tribes in
the province should be expected to demand their share of the oil
revenues, either sending the rest of the country to beg the Saudis
for a bailout, or starting a new “periphery against center”
conflict.
None of this is to say that the survival of Bashar Assad’s
regime is necessarily in the interests of the West, Syria’s
neighbors and even the Syrians themselves. If only because it’s not
obvious that Syria in its current configuration can survive at all.
However, while the Western media can keep cheering on the Arab
Spring and the triumph of liberal democracy in the Middle East
until it’s blue in the face, the basic fact remains that this march
to freedom in many parts of the region looks more like a modern
species of a classic Malthusian collapse. Syria’s immunity to the
Arab Spring was a short-lived notion. However, those who think that
a better future beckons for the Middle East
had better hope that by the time that future arrives
Syria will be still hanging around.
