Syria worse and worse

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Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Syria Region


Ba'ath party logo


Ba'ath party flag

The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Syria Region is a ba'athist regional organisation founded on 7 April 1947 by Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din al-Bitar and followers of Zaki al-Arsuzi. This regional organisation was a part of the original Ba'ath Party (1947–1966) and changed its allegiance to the Syrian-led Ba'ath movement (1966–present) following the 1966 split within the Ba'ath Party. It has ruled Syria continuously since the 8 March Revolution of 1963 which brought the Ba'athist to power.

Status

Role

According to Subhi Hadidi, a Syrian dissident, "The Ba'ath is in complete disarray. [...] It's like a dead body. It's no longer a party in any normal sense of the word." Hanna Batatu notes that "Under Assad the character of the Ba'ath changed... Whatever independence of opinion its members enjoyed in the past was now curtailed, a premium being placed on conformity and internal discipline. The party became in effect another instrument by which the regime sought to control the community at large or to rally it behind its policies. The party's cadres turned more and more into bureaucrats and careerists, and were no longer vibrantly alive ideologically as in the 1950s and 1960s, unconditional fidelity to Assad having ultimately overridden fidelity to old beliefs."
It is rumored that al-Assad discussed the possibilities of abolishing the Ba'ath Party when he took power in 1970. According to Volker Perthes the Ba'ath Party was transformed under Assad, he said "It was further inflated such as to neutralise those who had supported the overthrown leftish leadership, it was de-ideologised; and it was restructured so as to fit into the authoritarian format of Asad's system, lose it'd avant-garde character and became an instrument for generating mass support and political control. It was also to become the regime's main patronage network."

Military Bureau

The Military Bureau, which succeeded the Military Committee, oversees the Syrian armed forces. The Military Committee, shortly after the 8 March Revolution, became the supreme authority in military affairs. The party has a parallel structure within the Syrian armed forces. The military and civilian sectors only meet at the regional level, as the military sector is represented in the Regional Command and sends delegates to regional congresses. The military sector is divided into branches, operating at the battalion level. The head of a military party branch is called a tawjihi (guide).[7]
In 1963 the Military Committee established the Military Organisation, which consisted of 12 branches, resembling their civilian counterparts. The Military Organisation was in turn led by a Central Committee, which represented the Military Committee. These new institutions were established to stop the civilian faction's meddling in the affairs of the Military Committee. Military Organisation met with the other branches through the Military Committee, which was represented at the Regional and National Congresses and Commands. Just as with the Military Committee, the Military Organisation was a very secretive body. Members were sworn not to divulge any information about the Military Organisation to officers who were not members. The reason for this secrecy was to strengthen the Military Committee's hold on the military. In June 1964 it was decided to not introducing any new members to the organisation. In theory, the Military Committee was built on a democratic frame work, and a Military Organisation Congress was held to elect the members of the Military Committee. The problem, however, was that only one congress was held.
The lack of a democratic framework led to internal slits within the Military Organisation amongst the rank-and-file. Tension within the Military Organisation increased, and came to light when Muhammad Umran was dismissed from the Military Committee. Some rank-and-file members even presented a petition to the Regional Congress which called for the democratisation of the Military Organisation. The National Command, represented here by Munif al-Razzaz, were unable to grasp the importance of this petition before Salah Jadid suppressed it. However, the Military Committee decided to reform, and the Regional Congress passed a resolution which made the Military Organisation responsible to the Military Bureau of the Regional Command. In contrast to the Military Committee the Military Bureau was only responsible for military affairs.

Local organs
The party has 19 branches in Syria: one in each of the thirteen provinces, one in Damascus, one in Aleppo and one at each of the four universities. In most cases the governor of a province, police chief, mayor and other local dignitaries make up the Branch Command. However, the Branch Command Secretary and other executive positions are filled by party whole-timers.

Al-Assad Era: 1970–present

After the 1967 Six-Day War, al-Assad and his associates strengthened its hold on the military; from late 1968, it began dismantling support networks for the head of government of Syria, Salah Jadid, facing ineffectual resistance from the civilian branch of the party that remained under his control. This duality of power persisted until November 1970, when, in another coup, Assad succeeded in ousting Atassi as prime minister and imprisoned both him and Jadid. He then set upon a project of rapid institution-building, reopening parliament and adopting a permanent constitution for the country, which had been ruled by military fiat or provisional constitutional documents since 1963. The Ba'ath Party was turned into a patronage network closely intertwined with the bureaucracy, and soon became virtually indistinguishable from the state, while membership rules were liberalised; in 1987 the party had 50,000 members in Syria, with another 200,000 candidate members on probation. The party simultaneously lost its independence from the state, and was turned into a tool of the Assad government, which remained based essentially in the security forces. Other socialist parties that accepted the basic orientation of the government were permitted to operate again, and in 1972 the National Progressive Front was established as a coalition of these legal parties; however, they were only permitted to act as junior partners to the Ba'ath, with very little room for independent organization.

al-Assad died in office as President of Syria and Secretary General of both the Regional Command and the National Command on 10 June 2000, his son Bashar al-Assad succeeded him as President and as Secretary General of the Regional Command on 17 June while Abdullah al-Ahmar succeeded him de facto as Secretary General of the National Command through his office of Assistant Secretary General – Hafez, even if dead, is still the de jure Secretary General of the National Command. Since then, the party has experienced an important generational shift, and a discreet ideological reorientation decreasing the emphasis on socialist planning in the economy, but no significant changes have taken place in its relation to the state and state power. It remains essentially a patronage and supervisory tool of the government elite. The Ba'ath today holds 134 of the 250 seats in the People's Council (the Syrian parliament), a figure which is dictated by election regulations rather than by voting patterns, and the Syrian Constitution stipulates that it is "the leading party of society and state", granting it a legally enforced monopoly on real political power. The 2011–2012 Syrian uprising may force the Ba'ath Party and Bashar from power, if the conflicts ensues. Because of the uprising a referendum on a new constitution will take place which removes the clause that the Ba'ath Party is "the leading party of society and state".

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Coat of arms of Syria

Political parties in Syria

While not formally a single-party state, all political life in Syria is controlled by the Baath Party through a political "front", much like in Communist countries. Article 8 of the constitution provides that "the Arab Socialist Baath Party leads society and the state". Since 1972, other parties that accept the leadership role of the Baath Party and support the government's socialist and Arab nationalist orientation have been allowed to operate under severe restrictions, as members of the National Progressive Front. Most of them are essentially reduced to tools of the government. In 2005, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party was licenced; it is the first legal political party that is neither socialist nor Pan-Arab to be legalized. A considerable number of opposition parties operate outside the law, more or less clandestinely. While some socialist and liberal opposition parties now enjoy a limited degree of toleration, Kurdish and Assyrian parties remain more repressed, and the ban on religious parties is very strictly enforced. During the Syrian uprising a New Parties Law gave the right to create Political Parties outside National Progressive Front , until now 3 parties had been Licenced.

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Social_Nationalist_Party
pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syryjska_Partia_Socjalno-Narodowa
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrische_Soziale_Nationalistische_Partei
ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Сирийская_социальная_националистическая_партия

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Muslim Brotherhood logo


Logo of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood

History of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was founded in the late 1930s or mid 1940s. In the first years of independence it was part of the legal opposition, and in the 1961 parliamentary elections it won ten seats. After the 1963 coup brought the secularist, pan-Arabist Baath Party to power, it was banned. The Brotherhood played a major role in the mainly Sunni-based resistance movement that opposed the Baath Party, (since 1971 dominated by the Alawite Assad family, adding a religious element to its conflict with the Brotherhood). This conflict developed into an armed struggle in the late 1970s that climaxed in the Hama uprising of 1982, when thousands were killed by the military.
Since then, the Brotherhood has ceased to be an active political force inside Syria, but it retains a network of support in the country, of unknown strength, and has external headquarters in London and Cyprus. In recent years it has renounced violence and adopted a reformist platform, calling for the establishment of a pluralistic, democratic political system. The leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni, who lives as a political refugee in London. Membership of the Syrian Brotherhood became a capital offence in Syria in the 1980 (under Emergency Law 49) and remains so.


The leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni.

Origins

Towards the end of the 1930s, the ideas of Hassan al-Banna reached Syria as young Syrians, who had graduated from university in Cairo and participated in the Muslim Brotherhood there, returned home and founded associations called "Muhammad's Youth" (Shabab Muhammad), which were to become the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was founded in the 1930s or in 1945, a year before independence from France. By 1954, the Syrian association led by Mustafa al-Siba'i offered assistance to its Egyptian sister organisation, which Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser was then subjecting to severe repression.


Hassan al-Banna

However, it was not until the 1960s that the Syrian Brotherhood came to play a major role in politics, as part of a broad-based resistance movement, which developed into armed struggle, against an authoritarian system. After the Ba'thist military coup of 8 March 1963, the new administration drastically restricted political freedoms, and concentrated power in the hands of the military and awarded prominent positions to the country's Alawite minority. Sunni Syrian Islamists - from the majority faith - did not have representation in the government. From the start, Islamic political groups, of which the Brotherhood was the most prominent, represented the strongest opposition to the government. The outlawing of Brotherhood in 1964 resulted in its radicalisation. In 1964 and 1965, strikes and mass demonstrations spread throughout Syria's major cities, especially in Hama, and were crushed by the military. In 1971, General Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, seized power; in 1973 violent demonstrations broke out again in response to a proposed constitution that did not require the president to be a Muslim. Syria's intervention in the Lebanese civil war in 1976 on the side of the Maronites sparked renewed agitation in Syria, and assassinations began to target members of the Syrian government and prominent Alawites; the Muslim Brotherhood later claimed responsibility for most of these.

1976-82 Islamic insurgency

On 16 June 1979, the Muslim Brotherhood carried out an attack on cadets at the Aleppo Artillery School, officially killing 83. Allegedly, the government of Iraq provided logistical and military support to the Brotherhood. Around this time, professor Yusef al-Yusef was assassinated in Aleppo, an event often cited by secular activist Wafa Sultan as the reason she came to oppose Islam in general. The Syrian government responded by sentencing to death about 15 prisoners, already accused of being Iraqi agents, for belonging to the Islamic resistance movement. Terrorist attacks then became a daily occurrence, particularly in Aleppo and other northern cities. The government tended to ascribe these attacks to the Brotherhood, but as the armed resistance gained widespread popular support and more loosely defined armed groups appeared, especially in poor neighborhoods, it became difficult to determine the extent of the Brotherhood's involvement.

In November 1979, a Brotherhood leaflet stated:

"We reject all forms of despotism, out of respect for the very principles of Islam, and we don't demand the fall of Pharaoh so that another one can take his place. Religion is not imposed by force...."

In the days leading to 8 March 1980 (the seventeenth anniversary of the Ba'thist coup), nearly all Syrian cities were paralysed by strikes and protests, which developed into pitched battles with security forces. Many organisations, both religious and secular, were involved, including the Muslim Brotherhood. The regime responded with overwhelming military force, sending in tens of thousands of troops, supported by tanks and helicopters. In and around Aleppo, hundreds of demonstrators were killed, and eight thousand were arrested. By April, the uprising had been crushed.
A newspaper article by the president's brother, Rifaat al-Assad, stated that the government was prepared to "sacrifice a million martyrs" (over a tenth of Syria's population at that time) in order to stamp out "the nation's enemies". On 7 July 1980, the government passed a law making membership in the Brotherhood punishable by death. Typically, however, the administration practiced indiscriminate, collective punishment: in August, the army executed 80 residents of a block of flats in response to an attack on soldiers stationed in Aleppo. In April 1981, the army executed about 400 of Hama's inhabitants, chosen among male loyalists over the age of 14. This was as a retribution after a failed terrorist attack on an Alawite village near Hama.
During a 50-day moratorium on the application of the 7 July law, over a thousand Muslim Brothers turned themselves in, hoping to escape the death penalty; information published about them in the official press may give some insight into the composition of the Brotherhood's membership at that time. Most of those who gave themselves up were students under twenty-five years of age, from Damascus and other large cities; others were schoolteachers, professors or engineers.

In August, September and November 1981, the Brotherhood carried out three car-bomb attacks against government and military targets in Damascus, killing hundreds of people, according to the official press. On 2 February 1982, the Brotherhood led a major insurrection in Hama, rapidly taking control of the city; the military responded by bombing Hama (whose population was about 250,000) throughout the rest of the month, killing between 10,000 and 30,000 people. The tragedy of Hama marked the defeat of the Brotherhood, and the militant Islamic movement in general, as a political force in Syria.

Post-Hama era

Having suppressed all opposition, Hafez al-Assad released some imprisoned members of the Brotherhood in the mid-1990s. After his death in 2000, Assad was succeeded by his son, Bashar al-Assad, who initially signalled greater openness to political debate. In May 2001, encouraged by a new political climate, the Muslim Brotherhood published a statement in London rejecting political violence, and calling for a modern, democratic state. Many political prisoners, including Muslim Brothers, were pardoned and released. However, this reform was short-lived; in the same year, the few political freedoms that had been granted were abruptly revoked.

Although its leadership is in exile, the Brotherhood continues to enjoy considerable sympathy among Syrians. Riyad al-Turk, a secular opposition leader, considers it "the most credible" Syrian opposition group. The Brotherhood has continued to advocate a democratic political system; it has abandoned its calls for violent resistance and for the application of shari'a law, as well as for Sunni uprisings against Alawites. Al-Turk and others in the secular opposition are inclined to take this evolution seriously, as a sign of the Brotherhood's greater political maturity, and believe that the Brotherhood would now be willing to participate in a democratic system of government.
In a January 2006 interview, the Brotherhood's leader, Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni, "said the Muslim Brotherhood wants a peaceful change of government in Damascus and the establishment of a 'civil, democratic state', not an Islamic republic." According to Bayanouni, the Syrian government admits having detained 30,000 people, giving a fair representation of the Brotherhood's strength.

According to leaked American cables, Syrian President Bashar al Assad allegedly called Hamas an "uninvited guest" and said "If you want me to be effective and active, I have to have a relationship with all parties. Hamas is Muslim Brotherhood, but we have to deal with the reality of their presence.", comparing Hamas to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood which was crushed by his father Hafez al Assad. He then allegedly claimed Hamas would disappear if peace was brought to the Middle East.

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www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17290058