Supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad take part in a rally to support him at al-Umawiin square in Damascus June 21, 2011, in this handout photograph released by Syria’s national news agency SANA. Several large government rallies took place across the country to support him. Al-Assad issued a general amnesty on Tuesday, a day after he promised wide-ranging but vague reforms to counter a three-month popular revolt against his autocratic rule. REUTERS/Sana

It had to happen, sooner or later.  As it turned out, it was later.  The June 14, 2011 New York Times contained an article by
Anthony Shadid which disclosed an old, well-known Levantine malady:  sectarianism.  No surprise here and no kudos to Mr. Shadid for discovering
what has been right under our noses, droning like a scratched LP in our heads
for millennia.

When the “Arab Spring” came to Syria in the form
of a protest march in the southern, agro-city of Deraa, it seemed as though the
protesters were reacting to the arrest of 13, or so, juvenile delinquents who
were spraying graffiti on the walls of a public school.  It is illegal in Syria to deface public
property just as it is in Detroit or any other place in the world.  The juveniles were taken into custody
and, according to some, were mistreated by the security police.  (Some journalists used the word
“tortured”).  The tumult
which ensued was unprecedented for an Hourani city known more for its grapes
and wheat than for its intellectual traditions.

The government reacted with considerable trepidation and
sent a delegation led by Dr. Faisal Miqdad, the deputy foreign minister of
Syria, to assuage any damaged sensibilities.  There were promises of an investigation to determine if the
police officers who arrested the teenagers acted properly.  But the government’s response seemed to
have been viewed as a sign of weakness in that the result was increased rancor
in the form of demonstrations. In Deraa, no hint of sectarianism could be
detected (yet) in the slogans printed or voiced by the marchers.  Theirs was a message of greater freedom
and democracy with a demand for rescission of an unpopular 1963 emergency law
that gave the security services carte blanche arrest powers.  The government even acceded to
residents’ wishes that the very unpopular governor of the province, Faisal
Kulthoum who belonged to the Bureau of Political Security (Al-Amn Al-Siyaasi),
be dismissed.

When the government of Syria noted that the demonstrations
were becoming disconcertingly frequent, especially after Friday prayers, blunt
military action was taken.  This
resulted in demonstrations across the Syrian littoral, in some major
agro-centers and cities in the north-east – all in solidarity with the people
of Deraa.  And yet, there was
something curious about the make-up of the demonstrators.  It seemed, at first blush, that the
unrest spanned all sectors of Syrian society; subsuming social classes and all
religious sects.  But as time
passed, it became evident that the demonstrators were all Sunni Muslims with a
new message calling for the violent overthrow of the government. This is a
crime in the United States, Turkey and Syria.

Now, in all fairness, it appears that not all Sunnis support
the demonstrators.  The merchant
class in the country is heavily Sunni and would have expected a banner year
when the tourists and emigrants arrived. 
The turmoil has devastated their hopes for such profit and may have
embittered them toward the demonstrators. 
Other Sunnis in the large cities and elsewhere seem to be sitting it
out, in the hope that security will be restored with promises kept for reform.  From the small size of the demonstrations,
it is beyond doubt that most Sunnis do not overtly support the marchers. 

Supporters wear T-shirts with pictures of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a rally to support him at al-Umawiin square in Damascus June 21, 2011, as several large government rallies take place across the country to support him. Al-Assad issued a general amnesty on Tuesday, a day after he promised wide-ranging but vague reforms to counter a three-month popular revolt against his autocratic rule. REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri

Sunnis are fully aware that the president is from the Alawi
community, which is centered mostly in the coastal mountain area of the
country.  They are aware that his
wife, the First Lady, is herself a Sunni Muslim from Homs.  In addition to this, certain
well-known, extremely influential personalities in the government, military and
security services are Sunnis.  They
include: General Ali Mamlouk, chief of General Security Directorate (Al-Amn
Al-‘Aam); General Deeb Zeitoun, chief of political security (Al-Amn
Al-Siyaasi); General Ali Habib, defense minister; General Rustom Ghazaali,
military intelligence chief for Damascus rural environs; General Hassan
Turkmani, retired defense minister, now deputy vice president for military
affairs and the president’s chief advisor on military matters; Major Manaf
Tlas, a commander in the Republican Guard and chief military advisor to the
president; Ibrahim Al-Sha‘ar, minister of the interior with jurisdiction over
three security agencies; Walid Mouallem, foreign minister; Abdallah Al-Ahmar,
long-serving deputy secretary general of the Baath Party – Pan Arab Command;
Farouk Al-Sharaa, first vice president of the Republic.

The list is really much longer.  Even in the sphere of business, Rami Makhlouf’s financial
fortune pales when compared to that of the Sunni Jood family of Latakia.  Mr. Makhlouf, as everyone has heard, is
a millionaire entrepreneur who happens to be the maternal first cousin of the
president and the brother of Col. Hafez Makhlouf, commander of the General
Security Directorate in Damascus. 
Mr. Makhlouf has been a lightning rod for the government during the
unrest in Deraa when offices of his cell-phone monopoly “Syriatel”
were burned by angry protesters near the Al-Umari mosque, effectively
destroying the financial lives of their fellow Sunni franchisees.  The message, one supposes, could have
been:  “No, to
nepotism!”   Even the
covertly sectarian website, “Free Syria,”  (Suriyya Al-Hurra), devotes page after page of livid,
purplish-prose with detailed coverage of Rami Makhlouf’s  business ventures as though he were
some soap opera star; a J.R. Ewing with visible horns.

But nepotism is endemic to the Levant.  Deraawis too conduct their affairs in
the same way, nepotistically, with tribal chiefs appointing those who are
closest to them by blood.  There is
nothing new here for anyone born in this part of the world.  So why the attacks on Mr. Makhlouf’s
offices?  And why in a rural area
like Deraa?  Is it possible that
the Age of Reason, which settled in Europe and completely missed the Near East,
sent a soupçon of enlightenment only to Deraa?….. Hardly.

One slogan shouted in April by demonstrators in the other
famous intellectual center of Syria, Qamishli, was: “..‘Alawiyyeh ‘Ala
‘Al-Taboot, wa-‘Al-Maseehiyyeh ‘Ala Bayrout.”  Or, in translation: “Alawis to the grave and Christians
to Beirut.”  No effort here to
hide the message.  It was brazen
and menacing.  Other centers of
enlightenment also raised signs claiming that Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shi’i
military-political  organization,
was also a target.  It cannot be
doubted that members of Syria’s minority groups were alarmed by this mantra of
hate and began to line up behind the government even though many secular
Sunnis, Christians, Druzes, Alawis, Shi’is, Ismailis, Armenians and Turkmans
had their own bones to pick with Dr. Assad’s administration.  The truth was that the unrest was not a
movement for democracy and freedom, but instead, was pure sedition cloaked in a
mélange of platitudes that would energize Baath-hating and Irano-phobic
Westerners.

A particularly interesting phenomenon in the way the media
handled reportage for the Syrian unrest was the role human rights organizations
started to play in relaying information. 
Whether it was “Insan” or “The Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights” based in London, reporters from the New York Times, the BBC
and others flocked to these exiles in order to gather what “facts”
they may have concerning developments. 
Inasmuch as some Western news outlets enjoyed a measure of reliability
and authority before the unrest, they completely lost that when they started to
rehash dogmatic and perseverative, anonymous telephone conversations with
“sources” inside Syria who, as far as their readership was concerned,
might as well be ghosts.

That the Syrian human rights organizations’ attitude to the
Baathist government of Dr. Assad was negative is not something new.  What was really new was liberal
organizations, like the Observatory, unwittingly siding with the Muslim
Brotherhood, salafists, takfiris, armed gangs and ordinary lumpen-proletariat
to threaten a secular government which is precisely what these organizations
espouse.  As the violence in Syria
started to escalate with armed elements firing live ammunition at soldiers and
security personnel, liberal commentators started to warn that not all
demonstrators were honorable or even “intelligent.”

As of this writing, pro-government demonstrators are clashing
with anti-government activists in several Syrian cities.  The pro-government people are more
numerous than the opposition.  From
this author’s own  contacts with
people in Latakia and Aleppo,  the
pro-government demonstrators are mostly Sunnis with a substantial smattering of
the religious and ethnic groups mentioned earlier.  There can be no question that the Syrian Sunni merchant
class is fed up with the turmoil and wants to save what it can of the summer tourist
season.  The seemingly endless
unrest must be put to a stop.

The demonstrators are encouraged by one thing alone: Western
interest in changing Syria’s relationship with the aggressive political Shi’ism
in Iran and Lebanon.  As long as
Americans and Europeans think that by applying sanctions and, even indicting
the Syrian president will accomplish that goal, some die-hard fanatics in Syria
will continue this farcical show right up to its painful finale.  What the Americans and Europeans must
face eventually, however, is the morally certain argument, that if anyone
should be indicted for war crimes, it is not Dr. Assad.  After all, he’s only responsible,
maybe, for one thousand and three hundred deaths and some 10,000 temporary
refugees in Turkey, all in an effort to preserve the unity of his country.  Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
Blair are uncontested champions in this arena.  There are now 2,000,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan
and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead all thanks to Anglo-American
machinations.

The unrest in Syria appeared, at first, to be a legitimate
movement for positive change. 
Later, as arms started to flow in by way of Lebanon and Turkey, the
movement took on the trademark of radical Islamism exemplified by the savagery
of the fighting in Jisr Al-Shughour. 
This town, again, is not where liberal revolutions start.  This city has been a defiant center for
anti-minoritarian sentiment for decades. 
The people of Jisr Al-Shughour are unbending in their unwillingness to
live in harmony with other, non-Sunni citizens of Syria.  They now claim that they fear a return
to their town because of the government’s desire for revenge.  The president has mollified their
anxieties in his last speech.  That
he can be so forgiving is a good sign that change may come to Syria.  Others, not so forgiving, may want to
borrow a page from the Roman general, Scipio Africanus or the English Air
Marshall Arthur Harris.

The writer currently resides in Dearborn.