Assad wins, Syria loses

Consider what will happen if Bashar al-Assad fulfills the promises he has made to the United Nations and the Arab League. According to the deal, mediated by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he must pull his tanks and artillery out of the cities he has been shelling for the past five months on 10 April. If he really does that, the resistance fighters will emerge from their houses and reassert control over their neighborhoods.

Then there is supposed to be a general cease-fire forty-eight hours later. After that, if he kept his word, Assad would not even be allowed to shoot down small groups of protesters, and they would take control of all Syria’s significant towns except Aleppo and Damascus. (They would also take over some of the suburbs of Damascus itself.) He would end up controlling less than half of the country. After a while, he would probably control none of it.

So it isn’t going to happen. Assad will pretend to comply with the agreement, and the indiscriminate artillery bombardments of disobedient Syrian cities may stop for a while. But that just means that he will maintain control using less visible means, employing his intelligence services and “special forces” to murder local opposition leaders (and random civilians in rebel areas), in order to cow the rest into submission.

That would have been a better strategy for him from the start: shelling your own cities is bound to attract unfavorable attention abroad. Maybe he did that because it’s what his dad did the last time a Syrian city rebelled, slaughtering at least 20-25,000 people in Hama in 1982. But murdering people one by one in their homes or dragging them off for torture is probably just as effective, and a lot less likely to mobilize foreign opinion against you.

The problem with the new, low-profile strategy is that it requires very large numbers of state agents to carry it out, and lots of them will get killed doing it. Shelling cities with tanks and artillery was a highly inefficient way of restoring government control over them, but it kept the casualties down on the regime side. Now the regime may have to take lots of casualties – but it has enough loyalists that it can afford to pay that price.

The Alawite minority who are the backbone of the regime predominate in the intelligence services and the special forces, even though they comprise only 10 percent of Syria’s population. For fifty years they have ruled the country, much to their own advantage, and they fear that there will be a terrible revenge if they lose control. They believe they have their backs to the wall, so they will take their casualties and carry on killing.

The only reason Assad agreed to the UN proposal in the first place was that Russia and China needed some diplomatic cover if they were to go on vetoing any action against Syria by the Security Council. But the brutal truth is that no country is willing to pay the price in lives of a military intervention in Syria anyway, so it doesn’t matter all that much what the Security Council says. The respite from city bombardments may be short-lived.

So have Assad and the Baath Party he leads won, despite the deaths of at least 9,000 protesters and resistance fighters? Probably. The prospect of a non-violent transition to a democratic Syria that commands the loyalty of all the country’s ethnic and religious groups has vanished. The people who tried to make that happen were astoundingly brave and persistent, but now most of them have either been killed, or they have taken up arms.

The remaining options are both bad. If Assad succeeds in suppressing all resistance, Syria will be an even more oppressive and unjust place than it was before. If he only partially succeeds, it will open the way to an all-against-all civil war like the war that devastated Lebanon in 1975-1990. There is no plausible third option.

Non-violent resistance to tyranny is an extraordinarily powerful tool, but there is no political technique that works every time without fail. The Baath Party in Syria was always a hard target, because it combined the cohesion of a single-party regime with the last-ditch defiance of a minority that fears catastrophe if it loses power. As hard a target, in fact, as Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq would have been if it had survived into the present.

The Baath Party in Iraq was the estranged twin of the Baath Party that still rules Syria, but in Iraq the minority who controlled the regime (and were its main beneficiaries) were the Sunni Muslims, some 20 percent of the population. Even the American invasion – which at least had the virtue of putting the blame for the overthrow of Sunni rule on foreigners – did not prevent the aftermath in Iraq from being a bloody religious civil war.

Am I saying that an Assad victory is Syria's best remaining option? No, I cannot bring myself to say that. But I think that I am writing the epitaph of Syria’s attempted non-violent revolution.*

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

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