After the leader of the undemocratic, post-1970 Baath
military coup regime from 1970 to 2000—Hafez al-Assad—died on June 19, 2000,
his son—Bashar al-Assad—became the Baath Party secretary-general on June 17,
2000 and the next president of Syria on July 17, 2000. Coincidentally, “after
the elder Assad died,” the Syrian Baath regime’s “parliament amended the
constitution, reducing the minimum age for” Syrian “president from 40 to
37—which was, not coincidentally, Bashar’s exact age,” according to James
Gelvin’s The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs To Know; and “soon
after acceding to power, Bashar oversaw the brief `Damascus Spring,’ a period
of time when the government took a rather benign view of unsupervised political
organization and full expression,” according to the same book.
Yet according to Alan George’s Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom,
under the Baath regime’s economic and political system in 2001, the
unemployment rate in Syria was between 25 and 30 percent and the illiteracy
rate for Syrian females was still 39 percent. The same book also noted that in
2000 around 74 percent of Syria’s then-population of 16.7 million people were
Sunni Muslim in religious background, around 12 percent were Alawi Muslim in
religious background, around 3 percent were Druse, around 10 percent were
Christian—mostly Greek Orthodox—in religious background, and 9 percent of
Syria’s population was Kurdish--including 200,000 to 360,000 stateless Kurds.
In addition, around Damascus was a community of 400,000
Palestinian refugees; and between 1946 and 2000 the number of Syrians of Jewish
religious background who still lived in Syria had decreased from 30,000 to only
100 by 2000.
But Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom
also observed that at the beginning of the 21st-century the Baath
regime was still “secular” and included “key figures from all of Syria’s main
communities,” although “its core, especially in the security and military
service,” was still Alawi in religious background. The same book also indicated
how the Baath regime apparently initially responded positively to some of the
Syrian secular political opposition’s demands for democratization of Syrian
society, after Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father as Syrian president, during
the `Damascus Spring” of 2000:
“In the second half of 2000…the [Syrian] authorities took a
series of steps which were seen as a response to the rising clamor for reform.
In June and July [2000] dozens of Islamists and leftists were freed from
prison. Most were members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood that had openly
confronted the regime in the early 1980s, and the Communist Action Party. On
Nov. 15 [2000] [Bashar] Assad issued a decree releasing 600 political
prisoners, of whom 380 were Muslim Brotherhood members and most of the rest
were leftists, including 22 from the Communist Action Party…Four days later
Assad decreed the closure of the notorious Mezzeh prison in Western
Damascus;…built by the French in the 1920s. On Nov. 22, 2000 a sweeping general
pardon for non-political prisoners was announced…”
According to Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom, at
the beginning of the 21st-century, Syria was still “essentially an
agricultural country,” with the main crops grown being cotton, wheat, barley,
fruit and vegetables; and 32 percent of Syria’s labor force was involved in
farming. In addition, “half of the 16.7 million Syrians in 2001 were rural
dwellers,” according to the same book; and “textile and food processing plants”
were still “the main section of Syrian manufacturing,” in which only 13 percent
of Syria’s labor force worked, compared to 27 percent of the Syrian labor force
that worked in Syria’s public sector.
But between the early 1980s and 2000, the oil industry of
Syria began to play a more important role in Syria’s economy. As Syria:
Neither Bread nor Freedom observed in 2003:
“…The most significant recent structural change in the
economy…has been the expansion of oil output following the development of major
new oilfields in the Euphrates valley in the 1980s. Oil revenues in recent
years have accounted for 60 to 70 percent of export and 40 to 50 percent of the
[Syrian] state budget.”
During the month following the release of some of Syria’s
political prisoners and the general pardon for Syria’s non-political prisoners
by Bashar Assad’s Baath regime in November 2001, the Baath Party’s Regional
Command then announced on Dec. 2, 2000, “the approval of plans to establish the
country’s first private bank and a stock market and to float the local
currency, marking the end of a 40-year state monopoly on banking and foreign
exchange transactions” in Syria, according to the same book.
By 2001, however, Bashar Assad’s Baath regime began
repressing and arresting some Syrian civil society and Syrian ngo activists in
Syria. Yet Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom characterized the level of
popular support which then existed for Syrian civil society groups and ngos in
2003 in the following way:
“…However much one may admire the ideals and courage of the
[Syrian] civil society movement, it would be foolish to pretend that it
commands wide support. The regime denigrates the activists as a tiny minority
of middle-class intellectuals, and plainly they are—although that does not mean
that their ideas will not eventually triumph. For most Syrians, the priority is
the daily struggle to make ends meet. It is on its economic performance rather
than its record on democracy or human rights that the regime is most vulnerable.”
(end of part 24)
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