Protesters gather near the Omari Mosque in the southern old city of Deraa March 22, 2011.Syrian forces killed at least six people on Wednesday in an attack on the Omari mosque in the southern city of Deraa, site of six days of unprecedented protests challenging Baath Party rule, residents said. Picture taken March 22, 2011. REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri

The Syrian government is struggling to contain a week-old
uprising in the southern city of Deraa, the deepest popular unrest since
president Bashar al-Assad took office a decade ago. Syria will
“study” ending an emergency rule in place since 1963 and look into
licensing political parties, a presidential adviser has said, after a week of
deadly protests in the country’s south.

“I am happy to announce to you the decisions made today
by the Arab Baath party under the auspices of President Bashar al-Assad …
which include … studying the possibility of lifting the emergency law and
licensing political parties,” the president’s media adviser Buthaina
Shaaban said at a news conference on Thursday.

The current emergency law allows people to be arrested
without warrants and imprisoned without trial.

The announcement came after one week of protests in the
southern city of Daraa against Assad’s government which has left scores dead.

Soon after the promises of reforms were made, the prisoners
detained in the city during the protests were released. There were also reports
of orders being issued by the president for the army to pull out of Daraa.

Motee al-Batten, a Daraa resident, told Al Jazeera that the
army was still present in the city on Thursday night, and that the situation
was peaceful.

He said a majority had reacted positively to the
announcement from the president’s office but that the people of Daraa still
want to know the whereabouts of missing people and bodies and why they were
held or killed.

Rula Amin, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in the Syrian capital
of Damascus, said many of the pledged measures address demands Syrians are
talking about.

“She announced a raise in salaries for all workers in
the public sector and health insurance for them,” she said.

“Saying there will be a study to lift emergency law is
a major step, as is the promise of a new law for the media to increase
transparency.

“But will this be enough? I think for some this is a
good sign, others will want more measures to be undertaken immediately.”

About 20,000 Syrians were marching in Daraa on Thursday,
calling for liberty. Defying a security crackdown, they took to the streets
during funerals for nine protesters killed a day earlier by security forces.

It is not the first political rumbling in Syria this year:
Several small protests took place across the country last month, including a
demonstration against police brutality in Damascus, the capital, which ended
when the interior minister showed up and promised to punish the offending
officers.

But it is the Deraa protests which bear the most resemblance
to the rallies that have swept Arab countries since December. Protesters have
chanted “God, Syria and freedom,” and “the people demand the
downfall of corruption,” the latter a variant on the familiar slogan
(“the people demand the downfall of the regime”) which has become the
standard of this year’s Arab revolts.

Syrian officials, clearly unnerved, flew thousands of
security forces into the city and brutally cracked down on demonstrators. They
have blamed the protests on foreign powers, accusing organizers of stockpiling
smuggled weapons from Israel.

Concessions and crackdowns

Popular protests have been slow to kick off in Syria, where
many have bitter memories of former president Hafez al-Assad’s brutal
repression of opposition groups in Hama in 1982.  Assad dispatched elite army units to quell that uprising;
tens of thousands of people were massacred, and much of the city was demolished
by tanks and aerial bombardment.

The younger Assad has taken something of a middle path in
Deraa. He has deployed thousands of security forces to the city, with lethal
effect: at least ten people have been killed since protests began, in addition
to many others wounded or arrested.

At the same time, though, he has made a few conciliatory
gestures to protesters, like releasing the children whose arrests — they were
detained for writing pro-democracy graffiti — helped spark the protests, and
sending a delegation of government ministers to meet with protesters.

So a key question, it seems, is whether he can contain the
protests in Deraa. They have not spread widely outside of the city, save for
scattered (and small) demonstrations in Damascus, Homs and Banias. Syria’s
restive Kurdish minority has shown little interest in joining the fray.

The protesters in Deraa have chanted pro-democracy slogans,
but they also have more localized grievances: farmers are struggling with water
shortages, and the city is straining to cope with an influx of migrants from
dried-up agricultural towns in eastern Syria. The city’s leaders have also
demanded the sacking of the governor and the local security chief.

Ameliorating those grievances could buy the Syrian
government a reprieve from protests.

Layers of insulation

Assad likes to insist that Syria is different than its
neighbors. As he told the Wall Street Journal in January, “we are not
Tunisians and we are not Egyptians.”

It is a true enough statement: there are notable differences
between Syria and its Arab neighbors, many of which tilt in the regime’s favor.
It is a predominantly Sunni country ruled by an Alawite minority, for example,
a dynamic which gives Assad an extremely loyal power base in the government and
military.

Perhaps the most notable difference is Assad’s foreign
policy, which has (to an extent) insulated him from popular protest. Foreign
policy has been a common theme of several Arab uprisings: In Egypt, for
example, it was common to hear slogans criticizing former president Hosni Mubarak’s
relations with the United States and Israel.

 Assad has made
overtures towards Israel, but always insists on the return of the Golan Heights
as a precondition for talks; while the Syrian-Israeli border has remained quiet
on his watch, he continues to support Hizbullah; and he has refused to align
himself too closely with the U.S. or Europe. All of these policies have proved
fairly popular at home.

Tensions with the West also give Assad a useful foil for
Syria’s economic troubles, which he can attribute to the effects of
international sanctions.

Assad alluded to this in his Wall Street Journal interview,
when he mentioned a friend whose medical lab is unable to import equipment from
the United States because of sanctions.

“That influences the life of the people if you don’t
have the right calibrator for lab analysis, for example,” Assad said.
“This means that you are giving wrong results to people. You diagnose
somebody with cancer while he doesn’t have cancer. What did the people do to
the United States to deserve this?”

A microeconomic gap

Assad told the newspaper that he expected to sustain five
per cent annual economic growth rates for the next five years. But despite the
cheerful proclamations from Damascus, the Syrian economy is undoubtedly
troubled on a micro level: the unemployment rate is between 12 and 20 per cent,
depending on who you ask, and 14 per cent of the population lives below the
official poverty line.

Youth underemployment is a particular problem; it’s not
uncommon to find taxi drivers with advanced degrees in Damascus or Aleppo.

And there is perhaps growing frustration with the divide
between rich and poor: At one rally, there were chants of “down with
Makhlouf” – a reference to Rami Makhlouf, the president’s first cousin and
a businessman who controls billions of dollars of Syria’s economy.

Makhlouf’s riches are endemic of the corruption within
Syria’s ruling elite, a growing point of frustration for many in the country.
His connections earned him lucrative deals for oil exploration and power
plants, and give him virtual veto power over foreign firms seeking to do
business in Syria.

Syria does not have quite the same grinding poverty that’s
on display in, say, the slums of Cairo, but officials are clearly worried that
a worsening economy will lead to political unrest. The government unveiled a
new unemployment aid fund last month, and Syrian officials acknowledged that
they sped up its launch in response to the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

In an editorial “on change or reform in Syria,”
Ibrahim al-Amin, the editor of Lebanon’s influential Al-Akhbar newspaper,
argued that future economic reforms in Syria would be inevitable.

“What happened and is happening in the Arab states
proves the impossibility of keeping things as-is in Syria, or in any other Arab
country, when it comes to the level of freedom or to economic policies,”
he wrote.

Al Jazeera/The Arab American News

PHOTO: Protesters gather near the Omari Mosque in the
southern old city of Deraa March 22, 2011.Syrian forces killed at least six
people on Wednesday in an attack on the Omari mosque in the southern city of
Deraa, site of six days of unprecedented protests challenging Baath Party rule,
residents said. Picture taken March 22, 2011.                                        
   REUTERS/Khaled
al-Hariri

PHOTO: Protesters gather near the Omari Mosque in the
southern old city of Deraa in this picture taken with a mobile phone March 22,
2011. Hundreds of people marched in southern Syria for a fifth straight day on
Tuesday, protesting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad and
shouting “Freedom, freedom. Peaceful, peaceful.” Protesters gathered
near the Old Omari mosque in Deraa and in the nearby town of Nawa in the
strategic Hauran plateau, close to the border with Jordan, catching a wave of
Arab unrest that has toppled leaders in Tunisia and Egypt.                                                                     REUTERS/Khaled
al-Hariri