The Genocidal Extent of the Syrian Civil War.
How the Government Perpetrated Violence that has been Raging the
Country since the Spring of 2011 Turned Genocidal.
Author: Vera Huisman
Master’s Thesis: Holocaust and Genocide Studies Supervisor: Dr. Uğur Ümit Üngör
Second Reader: Dr. Kjell Anderson Date: 2 April 2015
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction……… 2
2. Syrian Political History……….. 7
Introduction 7
The Politics of Hafiz al-Asad 8
Bashar al-Asad 15
Conclusion 22
3. Massacres………... 24
Introduction 24
A Contested State: The Theory 25
Syria 29
Conclusion 35
4. The Purpose of Atrocities: Rape and Torture……… 37
Introduction 37 Rape 38 Torture 43 Conclusion 47 5. Syria’s Children………. 47 Introduction 48
Destroying the Future 50
Children’s Identities 55 Conclusion 58 6. Conclusion………. 60 7. Literature……… 63 Introduction 63 History 64 Massacres 66
The Purpose of Atrocities: Rape and Torture 67
Syria’s Children 69
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1. Introduction
In March 2011, a group of fifteen Syrian schoolboys, the youngest ones only ten years of age, spray-painted a graffiti piece on a wall in Daraa. A very amateurish looking piece that held a more ambitious message: ‘Down with the regime of Bashar al-Asad’. The boys got caught. They were taken away by the security service and held in detention, with no one knowing when or if they would ever be released. Locals gathered to demonstrate against the fate of these young boys, the first of many more demonstrations to come.1 Freedom calls echoed on the streets; “Yalla Erhal Ya Bashar”2 (Come on Bashar, Leave) was chanted as people were fed up with
the repressive regime. It was not just Syria that experienced social turmoil and the uprising should be seen as part of a bigger picture. The Arab Spring had reached Syria. Throughout the Arab world protests were held demanding more rights and greater freedom of speech. Syria seemed to escape the Arab Spring at first, as large scale demonstration did not happen here until late in March. But when they happened, the crackdown was fiercer and bloodier than anywhere else in the Middle East. With estimates of more than 200,000 deaths and the country in ruins, the end of the conflict is not yet in sight.3 Like in the other Arab countries, Syrians want change.
They want to have a voice. The Asads have been in charge for over four decades now, ever since Hafiz al-Asad took over power in a coup d’etat in 1970. He reigned over the country until his death in 2000, when his son Bashar al-Asad took over. Many hoped the new ruler would bring with him new rules, that he would change the game. Yet liberalization did not happen. Still, even when the protests broke out in the spring of 2011, Bashar al-Asad was believed to give the protesters at least some of what they were demanding, to ward of a revolution.
The fifteen boys were finally released, but showed signs of torture, their bodies bruised and bloodied, some of them even had their fingernails pulled out. The brutal treatment of the children caused revulsion throughout the country and triggered more spontaneous demonstrations. They were ruthlessly crushed. The crackdown was massive: Bullets, tanks, arrests, killings, and torture were the methods preferred by the Asad regime.4 But the more ruthless the crackdown, the more ferocious became the protests, eventually leading in to a full-blown civil war fought between the national army and pro-government militias on one side, and
1 ‘Syria’s Torture Machine’, Channel 4 documentary, 11 December 2011. Duration 47:56. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/syrias-torture-machine/4od#3289060
2 Fouad Ajami, The Syrian Rebellion (Stanford 2012) 6.
3 Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, ‘200.000 Dead? Why Syria’s Rising Death Toll is So Divisive’, 15 January 2015.
http://syriahr.com/en/
4 Reuters, Syria page, ‘Death Toll’, 11 August 2014. http://www.reuters.com/places/syria.
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the protesters-turned-rebel-armies, supported by foreign militias on the other. Those defying the regime are rounded up and taken into detention. What was meant to end the repressiveness of the Asad regime, only intensified the repression to the point of a civil war. Much of it is being filmed by protesters and by soldiers, and footage of the violence is easy to get by online. Millions of videos can be found on Youtube alone showing the harsh reality of the Syrian conflict.5
The western world has been awfully passive during the last four years and many people have no clue what exactly is going on in Syria. Because access to Syria for journalists, aid workers, medical personnel and others is limited by the government and the militias, information is scarce. What we know comes from refugees who managed to escape the country, and journalists brave enough to sneak into Syria. Agencies like the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and many more, along with journalists refugees and defectors from the pro-government forces have reported on the grave crimes against humanity that are taking place.6 Already in February 2012, Genocide Watch issued a warning saying that “the evidence is now conclusive that the al-Asad regime is committing international crimes against humanity…If the Alawite government of al-Asad believes it is about to lose all power in a zero-sum, winner take all revolution, its massacres could turn genocidal.”7
Understanding the conflict is the first obstacle to overcome. What we have is multiple layers of sectarian and ethnic strife, with a rogue regime turning against its own, heavily divided people. Of the country’s roughly 22 million people, some 72 percent are Sunnis, including most of the Kurdish minority that is concentrated in the northeast. The Alawites constitute only around twelve percent of the population, and when combined with the Shia and Ismailis of the country, non-Sunni Muslims average around a mere sixteen percent. Syria furthermore houses some two million Christians of several churches, some ten per cent of the population, including Orthodox and Maronite. Finally, the Druze make up for the final three percent.8 The Syrian
5 Just by searching ‘Syria War’ over 1.5 million videos come up on YouTube. Latest search done at 18 January 2015.
6 Amnesty International alone has issued hundreds of publications on violations of human rights since the beginning of the protests, which is sadly enough only an intensification of the pre-protest time when Amnesty International already issued many reports on the poor human rights status in Syria. For these reports see the Amnesty International website. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights has also issued many reports concerning the deteriorating human rights situation in Syria. Same holds true for Human Rights Watch, Genocide Watch and many other organizations concerned with human rights, which has resulted in an overwhelming volume of information and reports on the matter.
7 Genocide Watch, ‘Genocide and mass atrocities alert – Syria’, February 2012. http://www.genocidewatch.org/Syria.html
8 Given the volatility that generally accompanies sectarianism, Syria deliberately avoids conducting censuses on religious demographics, making these numbers mere estimates.
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government is monopolized by the secular, socialist Ba’th party, which is in hand of the Alawites and led by Bashar al-Asad, backed up by the support of other minority groups. The Syrian military is a direct reflection of this Alawite hegemony over the state. The strategy during the protests has been one of divide and conquer, using Christian and Druze troops and security personnel against Sunni protesters to create a wedge between the Sunnis and the country’s minority groups. This strategy of course runs the risk of backfiring if sectarianism escalates to the point where the regime can no longer assimilate the broader Syrian community, exactly what we have seen happening in the last four years.
The situation in Syria is escalating. People are being killed, people are being tortured, and people are being taken away by the infamous house-to-house sweep operations where suspected dissenters are rounded up and put in detention, or worse. And this is not only happening to men, women and children are getting arrested, tortured and killed too. War Child UK documented how Asad’s forces take children from their parents and transfer these children to detention centres or military units. “Children and young people have been summarily massacred; illegally detained; sexually abused; used in combat; abducted and tortured; denied schooling and access to humanitarian aid; and deliberately targeted in violent attacks.” 9 Living
a normal life in Syria has become impossible. Meeting basic needs to sustain everyday life is becoming increasingly difficult.10 To make matters worse, in every town visited by Amnesty
International that had witnessed military assailment or operations, the army had caused a level of unbelievable damage. Homes were struck by tank shells fired indiscriminately, often when no armed confrontations were taking place in the vicinity. Houses were systematically burned down, in an obvious deliberate manner. The heavily damaged hospitals are proof of this indiscriminate campaign of shelling by the Syrian army. Furthermore, military defectors have also provided Human Rights Watch information about the denial of medical assistance to wounded protesters, the use of ambulances to arrest the injured, and the mistreatment of injured detainees in hospitals controlled by the security services and the military.11 The effect of this is that people are afraid to get help, resulting in many unnecessary deaths. But medical personnel is targeted too and a network of volunteer doctors, nurses and first-aiders who have provided help to the wounded in secret safe houses has come into being. To avoid an arrest, many
http://www.indexmundi.com/syria/demographics_profile.html 9 War Child UK, ‘Syria: A War on Childhood’, 22 July 2012.
10 United Nations General Assembly, Human Rights Council, ; Report on the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic’, 22 February 2012.
11 Human Rights Watch, ‘”By All Means Necessary!” Individual and Command Responsibility for Crimes Against Humanity in Syria’, 4 December 2011, 54-55.
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wounded avoid the hospitals and rely on this underground network instead. The conditions in these makeshift field hospitals are anything but favourable and they have to be constantly moved to avoid detection by the authorities.12
Heavy repression is something the Syrians are, in a way, almost used to by now. But Asad’s exclusionary politics could not last forever, especially not in an Arab world where people are demanding more rights. If the Syrian government wanted to commit genocide, as Genocide Watch warned it might when they see no other solution, it could easily do so as the preconditions are already set: an ideological framework of exclusionary politics and an infrastructure of fear and repression created by the intelligence agencies.
The research question that will be answered in the following pages is:
To what extent has the violence perpetrated by the government forces and pro-government militias, that has been devastating Syria since the Spring of 2011, turned genocidal?
In order for this questioned to be answered, one must first establish a definition of genocide. Politicians, scholars and lawyers all seem to have a different view of the exact meaning of the term genocide.
In order to pursue a thorough scholarly investigation of genocide, two prerequisites must be met: (1) a governing conceptual definition of genocide, and (2) a common guiding schemata (anatomy) of genocides. The former is the key to reliable identification of genocidal events; the latter assures symmetrical comparisons of genocides. To date genocide studies processes neither; it lacks both a satisfactory conceptual definition and a consensus as to the inner makeup of genocide.13
This is not the place to come up with the grand solution to this debate. Therefore, an existing working definition will be used that helps answering the research question. The definition to be used is by Jacques Semelin, who defined genocide as: “an organised process of destruction of civilians directed at persons and their property.”14 Semelin uses the concept of massacre, which
12 Amnesty International, ‘All-Out Repression. Purging Dissent in Aleppo, Syria’, Amnesty International Report, 1 August 2012.
13 Henry Huttenbach, ‘Towards a Conceptual Definition of Genocide’, The Journal of Genocide Research 4 (2002) 167-176, 167.
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he defines as “a form of action that is most often collective and aimed at destroying non-combatants”15, to analyse cases of mass violence against civilians with the intention of
determining “at what point and in what circumstances a massacre becomes genocide.”16
Genocide for Semelin is only one stage of a destruction process.17 It is only in this “final stage of total eradication”, that we should talk about genocide.18
This thesis will identify what point in the destruction process the situation in Syria has reached by looking at four aspects of the violence: massacres, torture, sexual violence, and children.19 To reach a deeper understanding of this complicated conflict the first chapter will give a detailed account of Syria’s recent political history. Much attention will be given to the repressive role of the two succeeding Asad regimes and the context that shaped their oppressive policies. In the second paragraph, the specifics, meanings and consequences of the committed massacres will be discussed in depth, as they are happening on a grand scale in Syria. The third paragraph will look into two important issues that are related to each other as being weapons of terror; torture and sexual violence, which the regime is said to use on a systematic scale against its own population. Both play a crucial role in identifying to what extent a conflict has turned genocidal as they have an enormous impact on people, and affect the whole victim group, not just the victims of these crimes. Finally, the last chapter deals with children, who constitute a large section of victims. Children are the most innocent of the victims which makes it hard to understand why someone would want to hurt them. Yet doing so carries more meaning with it and has a similar terrifying effect as torture and sexual violence. This purpose and the effect tell us a lot about the true motivations of the perpetrators.
15 Semelin, Purify and Destroy, 4. 16 Ibidem, 323.
17 Ibidem, 324. 18 Ibidem, 340.
19 Because the events researched here are so recent and are still ongoing, not much literature is available and much of the research will be based on reports by various organizations (governments, the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch etc.), and unconventional internet sources like YouTube and online blogs.
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2. Syrian Political History
Once the archetypal leftist, Arab nationalist regime, Syria is now the test case for the battle—whose outcome has the most serious implications for America--between Arab nationalist dictators, radical Islamist revolutionaries, and liberal reformers over the fate of the Arab and Muslim worlds. In our era, this contest is the most important struggle determining the direction of the entire world.20
Conflict and repression are nothing new for Syria. The country’s many minority groups have for long been an issue on the political agenda. For over fifty years now the power has been in the hands of the Ba’th party, which meant a great leap forward for the Alawi community. But because of their status as a minority group, standing against a large Sunni majority, this position of power has been unstable. In order for the Alawi presidents, first Hafiz al-Asad, later followed by his son Bashar al-Asad, to stay in office they had to keep the critics as quiet as possible and prevent any disturbances against their rule from breaking out. This was often done forcefully with the help of Syria’s many security services, the mukhabarat.
As early as 1974 Amnesty International published reports on the appalling human rights conditions in Syria.21 In one of these reports, dated 1979, the agency warns against:
…the use of emergency legislation to suppress political opposition and other basic human rights, the prolonged imprisonment without trial of known or suspected political opponents, the abduction of alleged political opponents from Lebanon by Syrian forces and their subsequent detention without trial in Syria, the use of torture to intimidate and to extract "confessions" during interrogation; routine ill-treatment during investigation and as a means of punishment and prolonged solitary confinement of untried political detainees, the lack of basic legal safeguards and the holding of trials of political prisoners in camera by special security courts created under emergency legislation, the use of the death penalty for both political and criminal offences.22
20 Barry Rubin, The Truth About Syria (New York 2008) Preface.
Online Edition: http://www.gloria-center.org/pt_free_books/the-truth-about-syria/
21 Amnesty International: Human Rights in the Syrian Arab Republic, News and Publications. http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/syria
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From this point on the reports only appeared more frequent and became more pressing, as the situation seemed to change for the worse.
This chapter will look into the Syrian politics of the Ba’th party and will give a detailed account of the human rights conditions under the last two presidents, father and son al-Asad. By doing so, this chapter will try to establish how much has changed, or in fact has not changed, since the change of guard in 2000. This is important as it is necessary to understand the political history of Syria to understand the anger that boiled up amongst the Syrians in early 2011, and the way the government in return handled the crisis. The Asad history of handling opposition and crises can help us understand their way of dealing with the civil war now, and could possibly shed some light on how far the government is willing to go to quell this opposition. In other words, would Asad really be capable of committing genocide? First, Hafiz al-Asad, his background and his rise to the Syrian political top will be dealt with, in order to understand the repressive political style he has pursued. Secondly, Bashar al-Asad’s policies will be studied in depth and explained by the forces that drove him to make these decisions. This political history should give us at least some insight into Bashar al-Asad’s mindset and his outlook on this war.
The Politics of Hafiz al-Asad
Up until the first World War, Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire, when the Allies supported by Syrian nationalists conquered the country and the French became a mandatory power. In Turkish times, the Sunni Muslims had been the privileged community, yet France perceived itself as a protector of minorities. The Alawi community had always been a backward community, consisting of hardly educated laborers living a retreated rural life in the coastal mountains of the west. Now, the French had opened up doors for the Alawis to climb the social ladder.23
A profound account of the social and political position of the Alawi community in which Hafiz al-Asad was born: “An obscure backwater – separatist, Western sponsored, and by definition sectarian, which held itself aloof from the Arab world in general, and from the rest of Syria in particular.”24 Coming from this, a community seen as backward and insignificant,
is what formed Hafiz’s beliefs, and via a career in the military, and in an environment of political coups and countercoups, he steadily rose to power throughout the sixties. A
23 Philip Shukry Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920-1945 (New Jersey 1989).
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combination of hard work and smart career choices brought him into the Syrian Air Force. Through the army it was only a small step into politics. Hafiz joined the Ba’th party, a socialist party mixing Arab nationalism, pan-Arabism, Arab socialism and anti-imperialism that was founded as early as 1947 when Syria had only just reached independence.25 With the Ba’th party coming to power in 1963, internal division among the Ba’thists gave Hafiz the opportunity to become the Syrian president in 1970. The story of Hafiz himself is equally one of struggle. With many men aspiring power, becoming Syria’s most powerful man was not easy as the danger of deceit was lurking around almost every corner. According to David Gilmour: “A Roman emperor of the third century had more chance of honorable retirement than a Syrian Ba’thist leader in the Sixties.”26
Since the Ba’th party came to power in 1963, members of the Arabic speaking religious minority communities, like the Alawis, the Druzes and the Isma’ilis, have played a prominent political role.27 In the armed forces too, the minority groups received preferential treatment, occupying the higher positions with only some exceptions.28 Being an unstable time politically, when the Ba’th party had only just risen to power in a very unstable political climate, trust amongst the Ba’thists was far from secured. A struggle for power started between the leaders of the Ba’thist Military Committee. In order to strengthen their positions, these leaders had gathered around them military men to whom they were related through sectarian, tribal, or regional ties, creating their own private armies. Furthermore, it seemed that the Sunnis were discriminated against when it came to applying for the military academy and other training facilities. The same discriminating behavior to the disadvantage of the Sunni Muslims was apparent in the transfer of officers within the Armed forces.29 Officers who were ‘trusted’ because of their sectarian ties with the military leaders would be stationed in strategically important areas, while those deemed ‘untrustworthy’ simply because they were Sunni would be sent off to places far away from the capital.30 Sectarian ties also played a role in the lower echelons of the military. This way the Ba’thist created battalions consisting mainly of men from a certain sectarian group.31 By placing the Sunni battalions far from the capital and away from the power centers, the Ba’thist prevented any unexpected Sunni attack on their still fragile
25 Seale, Asad, 14.
26 David Gilmour, ‘Blood Ba’th’, book review, London Review of Books, 2 February 1989. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v11/n03/david-gilmour/blood-bath
27 Nikolaos van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria. Sectarianism, Regionalism and Tribalism in Politics,
1961-1978 (London 1979) 21.
28 Ibidem, 51. 29 Ibidem, 51-53. 30 Seale, Asad, 72-154.
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position of power. This paranoid way of thinking and acting is what dominated in Syrian politics in those early years of Ba’thist power, and not without reason.
The period between 1963 en 1970 was a period marked by coups and countercoups. The distrust that came from this only reinforced the sectarianism within the Ba’th party and the military. Hafiz played along with this game very well, while keeping a low profile to prevent too much attention being drawn to him. By doing this he steadily rose to the top of the leadership. Finally in 1970 he saw his chance to take over the party by ordering the military to occupy the civilian party section and to arrest prominent civilian leaders. With his biggest rivals either behind bars or fled across the border to Lebanon, Hafiz al-Asad officially became Syria’s first Alawi president in February 1971, relying mostly on his own faction of officers to maintain his still shaky position of power.32 By then, the most prominent Sunni, Druze and Isma’ili factions had already been neutralized or purged from the army, reducing the chances of any independent non-Alawi power blocs to form that could endanger the new regime.33 Any risks to the presidency then existed mainly within the Alawi community itself. The fact that even within the Alawi community conspiracies were made against Hafiz’s position made him trust fewer and fewer people, until eventually he relied only on the people he had a close relationship with, such as members of his own family, tribe or village.34 Nikolaos van Dam suggests there to be a clear relationship “between political stability and the degree of sectarian, regional and tribal factionalism among the political power elite: If these factions showed great diversity, the result was political instability.”35 This could explain why after 1970 Syria experienced such a
long time of political stability. After all the purges in the party and the military, only those trusted by the president could reach any position of power, which greatly diminished the threat to his presidency. In its internal governance and foreign diplomacy the Syrian regime built up a very sophisticated system with numerous back-up and fail-safe mechanisms. These included having a large community, the Alawites, tied to the government for survival, managing the armed forces, mobilizing people through a revolutionary ideology, buying off whole sectors of society, tightly controlling the economy, establishing a strong party apparatus, igniting hate toward foreign advisories like the United States and Israel to mobilize domestic support for the government36, and continuously manipulating privileges and punishments to keep people in
32 Seale, Asad, 72-154.
33 Van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria, 92 34 Seale, Asad, 72-154.
35 Van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria, 92.
36 This is basically Barry Rubin’s argument throughout The Truth About Syria: The Arab leaders, and Syria in particular, create and use conflict with imagined enemies like America and Israel to justify their oppressive politics at home. These regimes need authoritarianism to survive and use foreign threats as an excuse for this.
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support of the regime.37 “It is almost as if so much energy and talent went into creating this
structure that not much was left over for doing anything productive.”38 This rather paranoid
style of politics Hafiz al-Asad governed his country with, is what may have kept him in charge for so long.
But opposition did not only exist within the party and the military, of course. As the Syrian population did not necessarily agree with their president and his politics either. Hafiz’s rule began with a considerable advantage: “The regime he displaced was so detested that any alternative came as a relief.”39 A more liberal climate swept the nation:
Ordinary people soon had reasons to be thankful for Asad’s accession. The price of basic foods was cut by 15 per cent. The hated security services were purged and curbed, while responsibility for dealing with a number of crimes was transferred from the army to the police. Detention orders and many confiscations of property were revoked. Restrictions on travel and trade with Lebanon were lifted, restoring to Syrians their natural space. When the Ba’th first seized power Asad had been in the forefront of the drive to break the city’s hold over the countryside. But by 1970, and with the ambitious economic and military plans in mind, he knew he needed allies in the urban middle class, so, breaking with his political past, he tried to win over shopkeepers, businessmen and artisans of the towns as well as the many citizens who had fled Syria since 1963, mainly Sunnis from the former leading families.40
While retaining the essentials of power in his own hands, he did make the necessary changes to give his state formal institutions, though they may have been more ceremonial than anything else.41 The most important of these was of course the party, over which he now had unchallenged power. Within the party, a twenty-one men strong Provisional Regional Command was appointed to debate the country’s domestic and foreign policies. One of its first acts was to nominate the 173 members of the People’s Assembly. This Syrian parliament would from then on be elected by universal suffrage. Party congresses were also to play an important role, meeting every four years or so to debate and discuss the major issues of its policy. Another
Rubin argues this to be the reason there is still so much animosity between Israel and its Arab neighbors and between many Middle Eastern countries and The West; These countries do not want to solve the issues as these are needed to stay in power and keep their populations quiet.
37 Rubin, The Truth About Syria, Chapter 1: Why Syria Matters, 23. 38 Ibidem.
39 Seale, Asad, 169. 40 Ibidem, 171. 41 Ibidem.
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significant development was the formation of a National Progressive Front, where other parties than the Ba’th could make a showing and speak their minds, though their influence was very minimal. In practice, though, the president dominates the Ba’th which in turn dominates the Front which dominates the parliament, a body that in reality does not hold any real power as it cannot initiate laws nor challenge the executive’s policies but merely exists to endorse them.42
But most important for the Syrian population itself was probably the system of local governments, elected to assist the governors with their daily business, who stood closest to the people and their daily lives.43
But Syria was far from the democracy it tried to make itself appear like. “The fist of dictatorship was thinly concealed by the glove of representative government. As mandated by the 1973 constitution, there is a veneer of parliamentary democracy parallel to the real lines of power following the dictator’s chain of command.”44 Hafiz was in charge, and dissent was not really an option. He never annulled the Emergency Law that came into being when the Ba’th party came to power in 1963. This law gave the government nearly unlimited authority to restrict individual freedoms and to investigate and detain suspects when national security and public safety were assumed to be at risk. Another dubious law allowed for suspected enemies of the state to be tried and sentenced in special state security courts outside of the criminal justice system. The government maintained that these measures were absolutely necessary to defend Syria against plots by rival countries in the region, most notably Israel, and to combat extremist Islamic groups. In practice, however, emergency powers were used to protect the single-party rule of the Ba’th party by empowering the security forces to persecute, incarcerate, and sometimes even to murder critics and opponents.45 Amnesty International has reported that under the State of Emergency, thousands of suspected political opponents have been detained and held incommunicado without being charged or trialed, some for over two decades; others have been subjected to grossly unfair trials before military or state security courts.46 In some cases political prisoners were kept in detention long after the expiry of their sentence. In 1994 Amnesty International submitted a memorandum on its concerns about this to the Syrian authorities, including cases of political prisoners held for nearly ten years beyond expiry of their sentences.47 Amnesty International has also repeatedly raised cases of alleged torture and deaths
42 Rubin, The Truth About Syria, Chapter 3: Asad’s System, 2. 43 Seale, Asad, 173-177.
44 Rubin, The Truth About Syria, Chapter 3: Asad’s System, 2.
45 Brittanica, ‘Syria’s Emergency Law Lifted after 48 Years’, (19 April 2011).
46 Amnesty International, ‘Syrian Arab Republic: Briefing to the Human Rights Committee, 71st session, March 2001.
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in custody as a result of torture or suspicious circumstances.48 Yet, this did not change anything,
and the legislation that made this possible remained intact.
By 1976 the economic boom that Syria was experiencing came to a stop, creating a great deal of discontent amongst the population. On top of this came a groundswell of complaints about corruption and unfairness. At the same time, a wave of terrorist attacks and assassinations swept the country. As the violence became a daily worry, the authorities in Damascus started to identify these terrorists as ‘the Muslim Brothers’, a term used to describe all Muslim or Muslim-spearheaded opposition which consisted of a variety of guerilla groups with different leaders and histories and operating in different parts of the country. The repression was brutal, with the epitome of this being the infamous Law 49, which stated that membership in the Muslim Brotherhood or association with its members is a crime punishable by death.49 The regime would send the security services to the areas where support for the Brotherhood was strongest, round up people suspected of relations with the opposition and execute them or bring them to one of the detention centers.50 Especially the Tadmur prison is said to have been filled with political opponents and suspected affiliates of the Brotherhood.51 The retaliations of Hafiz’s regime against the Muslim Brothers were on a number of occasions even directed at mosques and other objects of sanctity to Muslims.52 In June of 1980, sixty mosques in Damascus were attacked during a single night and copies of the Qur’an were torn up and defiled.53
The zenith of the brutal repression of the opposition to Hafiz al-Asad and his repressive regime was the crackdown of the uprising in the city of Hama. Hama could be described as the “citadel of traditional landed power and Sunni puritanism”, a conservative city that for long had been a stronghold of the opposition to the authorities in Damascus.54 At 2 a.m. on the night of
2-3 February 1982, an army unit patrolling the city fell to an ambush of heavily armed rebels. Hafiz quickly sent the army and security services to the city to deal with the insurgents. The battle for Hama raged for three long weeks where the regime’s troops hunted down the rebels, killing many civilians in the process. These civilians not only died because of indiscriminate shelling of the city, they were also murdered in round ups where entire families were taken
48 Amnesty International, ‘Syrian Arab Republic: Briefing to the Human Rights Committee, 71st session, March 2001.
49 Umar F. Abd-Allah, The Islamic Struggle in Syria (Berkeley 1983) 80-84. 50 Abd-Allah, The Islamic Struggle in Syria, 84.
51 Ibidem, 84-85. 52 Ibidem, 86. 53 Ibidem.
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from their homes and executed on the spot. The loyalty of the government soldiers was pushed to the limit causing many to defect as they saw the blood of many innocent men, women and children being spilled. The uprising is said to have cost the lives of anywhere between 3000 and 20.000 people, and left the city in ruins.55 The crackdown of the uprising in Hama shows many similarities with the violence in Syria that has been going on since 2011. Though the conflict now has escalated to a far grander scale, the motives of the violence now and during this uprising in Hama are similar. In both cases the Syrian government answered the opposition with a far too brutal crackdown that resulted in the loss of many innocent lives. This shows how poorly the Syrian regime deals with critique and opposition, as they realize that many Syrians might actually agree with these critics. Violently silencing the opposition might be the only way to prevent any ideas from spreading under the repressed population.
Hafiz Al-Asad wanted to give his regime the appearance of a legitimate state with functioning institutions and a lively civil society. Yet from the 1970s on Amnesty International has been reporting about serious human rights abuses, most of these committed by the security services acting under direct orders from the regime. The reports speak of arbitrary arrests, detention without trial, incommunicado detention, torture, cruel and inhumane or degrading treatments and punishments, disappearances, and extrajudicial executions.56 Hafiz’s political strength did not rest upon popular support, but on his firm control on the army and the secret services. Syria could even be characterized as a mukhabarat state: A country in which the intelligence or security services are the dominant factor in controlling the population and defending the regime. Often, this is done by working closely with certain trusted elements of the army, which in this case would be the air force where Hafiz started his career. Hafiz feared that any discontent could be the end of his regime and therefore opposition would not be tolerated, meaning that the prisons slowly filled themselves with (many innocent) opponents of the government. The crackdown in Hama is the prime example of how far this regime was willing to go.
55 Seale, Asad, 332-334.
56 For these reports see the Syria page on amnesty.org.
An example of a report addressing the human rights violations is: ‘Report from Amnesty International to the government of the Syrian Arab Republic’, Amnesty International Report, 1 November 1983.
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Bashar al-Asad
The new president, and Hafiz’s second son, Bashar al-Asad took the constitutional oath of office on 17 July 2000 after his father’s death. His inaugural speech has been said to have been remarkably enlightened by Syrian standards, and even went so far as to criticize certain policies of the past that were implemented by his own father.57 “We must rid ourselves of those old ideas that have become obstacles. In order to succeed we need modern thinking.”58 The speech
confirmed the high hopes of many inside and outside of Syria that Bashar would indeed lead the country in a new and more modern direction.59
Indeed, father and son came from completely different backgrounds. Hafiz was a peasant’s son raised in the Alawi mountains, where the politics of Damascus were no high priority in people’s daily lives. He was not born to be the leader of his country, but worked and plotted his way to the top of the leadership, with many of his peers and rivals ending up as victims of assassinations or imprisonment in one of Syria’s dreaded prisons, often even ordered so by Hafiz himself. Bashar, on the other hand, was born into Syria’s most powerful family. He was sent to the best schools of the country and had even spent some time getting a postdoctoral education in ophthalmology in England. He never had to struggle to make something of his life as his father had. Even though Bashar was not meant to follow in his father’s footsteps as president, until his older brother basil and heir of his father’s throne died in a car accident, power and wealth were just handed to the heir of Syria.60
This difference between father and son, is a reason people both within as well as outside of Syria had hoped things might change under this new president. Hafiz had spent his entire career worrying that he might lose his powerful position the way his predecessors did. From 1964 until his accession in 1970, Syrian politics were dominated by political instability, violence, coups and countercoups. Hafiz, being the final and most successful of these aspiring presidents, therefore realized he needed to keep a tight leash on anyone who might be a threat to his position. This meant he not only had to watch out for a stab in the back from any of the other powerful men with higher aspirations, but he also had to put a strict control on popular opposition to his rule.61 But Bashar al-Asad became president a lot less troubled than his father. Of course he too knew about the intrigues going on behind the scenes of Syrian political life,
57 David W. Lesch, Syria: The Fall of the House of Asad (London 2012) 4. 58 President Bashar al-Asad’s inauguration speech.
Found on the website of Global Research, The Centre for Research on Globalization:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/president-bashar-al-assad-transcript-of-inauguration-speech/5391709 59 Lesch, Syria, 4.
60 Ibidem, 9. 61 Ibidem.
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and he too moved his most trusted allies into the Ba’th party, the government ministries, the military and the secret services like his father had done before him. This way he created an airtight array of sectarian, tribal, family based patriarch system creating loyalty and stability, an “Alawite fortress”.62 But unlike his father, Bashar had no first-hand experience with the
plotting and the scheming of the old guard.63 This is what fueled the hope of many that Bashar could leave the paranoid and restricted politics of the old regime behind; That Bashar would “open up the big prison that Syria had become under his father.”64
It seemed Bashar would indeed live up to the high hopes and expectations. In his inaugural speech, Bashar made some big promises. First on the importance of intuitions in protecting public interest:
Our aspirations will not be properly fulfilled unless we emphasize the role of institutions in our lives. A constitution is neither a building nor a system that governs, nor the persons who work in it; rather, it is first and foremost, the institutional thinking that considers every institution, however small it might be and whatever its domain may be, a representative of the entire country, its reputation and its civilized outlook. Institutional thinking acknowledges that institutional work is a joint and not a personal work, a work that is based on honesty, sincerity and on using time to the maximum extent, on putting public interest above personal interest, and on putting the mentality of a state above the mentality of the tribe. It is the logic of cooperation and openness to others, and it is inseparable from the democratic thinking which has many things in common with it in various places.65
Putting the mentality of the state above the mentality of the tribe could mean an end to Alawi dominance and beneficial policy in Syrian politics. This hope was further raised when Bashar touched upon the issue of democracy:
To what extent are we democratic? And what are the indications that refer to the existence or non-existence of democracy? Is it in elections or in the free press or in the free speech or in other freedoms and rights? Democracy is not any of these because all
62 David W. Lesch, ‘The Syrian Uprising and Bashar al-Asad’, Lecture at the Trinity University, 14 March 2013. (Can be viewed on YouTube).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlN9av_HDRA 63 Lesch, Syria, 50.
64 Fouad Ajami, The Syrian Rebellion (Stanford 2012) 6. 65 President Bashar al-Asad’s inauguration speech.
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these rights and others are not democracy, rather they are democratic practices and results of these practices which all depend on democratic thinking. This thinking is based on the principle of accepting the opinion of the other and this is certainly a two-way street. It means that what is a right for me is a right for others, but when the road becomes a one-way road it will become selfish.66
A selfish one-way road is exactly what Syria had been under the government of Hafiz. Politics was the business of a small group, while most people had very little political influence. For many it seemed that Bashar acknowledged this fact and that finally someone would turn Syria into a less restricted and authoritarian state. It appeared that Bashar also seemed to realize that it would be impossible to keep the Syrian population suppressed forever. With a large Sunni majority that felt discontented with the suppressive policies en the relentless operations of the security agencies it seemed likely that one day citizens would stand up against their own government. Bashar realized Syria needed to reform: “Democratic thinking is the building and the structure. We all know that when the foundation of a building is weak the building will be threatened to fall for the slightest reason.”67
The Damascus Spring that followed would indeed enlighten Syria with some liberalization and a slight deepening of democracy. Several hundred political prisoners were released, giving the impression that at least some of the oppression of before would be lifted. Amnesty International reported that “the number of political prisoners, including prisoners of conscience, has now been reduced to hundreds from the several thousand who were in detention by 1991 when the first amnesty was issued.”68 But it was not just this major event that made it
seem that the scale would tilt to a more liberal Syria. Life became less restricted in other senses too: Western cigarettes, long banned under Hafiz’s rule, were now freely available, tourism was flourishing as luxurious hotels and art galleries sprung up rapidly, and investments from the rich Gulf states were flowing into the country as trade prospered after a long period of tensed relations.69 Furthermore, the first independent newspapers was allowed to start publishing after more than three decades of state controlled and censored newspapers.70 Groups of intellectuals pressing for democratic reforms were even permitted to hold public political meetings and
66 President Bashar al-Asad’s inauguration speech.. 67 Ibidem.
68 Amnesty International, ‘Syrian Arab Republic: Briefing to the Human Rights Committee, 71st session, March 2001.
69 Ajami, The Syrian Rebellion, 7.
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publish statements, something that was unthinkable before.71 Moreover, Bashar also brought
into the government members of the Syrian Computer Society, “people who could legitimately be called reformists.”72 These people were not there to enact political reforms though,
nevertheless they were hired to modernize Syria by implementing administrative reforms and examine the country’s economic weaknesses.73
But after a short period of time, the Damascus Spring came to a hold. Like his father, Bashar too could not and would not tolerate dissent. What he inherited from his father was an authoritarian state, characterized by a stagnant economy, pervasive corruption, and political repression. This was the situation the new president had to deal with. The presidency may have been given to a younger generation, many others of the old guard were still holding positions of power. This raised serious questions about who really is in charge in Syria. Did Bashar come to the conclusion that his short flirt with a more liberal stance towards political debate could cause him too much trouble? Or was he pressured to end this lift on oppression and go back to the old way of handling political dissent in Syria by powerful people who feared this could be the end of their privileged position of power and wealth? “Was he, like his father before him, master of the realm, or a puppet, his strings pulled by mightier powers?”74 The Syrian president
is definitely not all-powerful, as he has to fight against systemic corruption and an institutional, bureaucratic and cultural laziness in the country. He has to negotiate, bargain and manipulate other powerful pawns in the game of politics to actually get things done.75 Whenever a decision is made, Bashar has to do it in accordance with the wishes and demands of the five pillars of his political power; the army, the security services, the Ba’ath party, the Alawi community, and powerful Sunni merchants. When Bashar took over, his move was welcomed by the merchants and traditionalist Sunnis of Homs, Hama and Aleppo who failed to realize that in return for an apparently more open policy towards the Arab world and a broadening of the party at home, they would be subject to the much more rigid discipline imposed by the Alawi military, Bashar’s real power base.76
But his worries were not just about these mighty pillars, Bashar needed to give the Syrian population some of what it demanded as well. For long the regime prospered by keeping Syrians believing that the battle against America and Israel, not freedom and prosperity, should
71 BBC, ‘Profile: Syria's Bashar al-Assad’. 72 Lesch, Syria, 5.
73 President Bashar al-Asad’s inauguration speech. 74 Ajami, The Syrian Rebellion, 7.
75 Lesch, Syria, 35. 76 Ibidem.
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be their top priority. These (imagined) external threats were used to justify internal repression.77
But this did no longer suffice. In his inaugural speech Bashar made big promises of economic reforms and this fueled hopes that the country could finally escape its lower middle income status.78 Damascus began liberalizing economic policies, including “cutting lending interest rates, opening private banks, consolidating multiple exchange rates, raising prices on some subsidized items, and establishing the Damascus Stock Exchange.”79 Nevertheless, the
economy remained highly regulated by the government, with long-run economic constraints including foreign trade barriers, declining oil production, high unemployment, rising budget deficits, and increasing pressure on water supplies caused by heavy use in agriculture, rapid population growth, industrial expansion, and water pollution.80 Furthermore, the combination of big spending on defense and the drop in oil prices, one of Syria’s prime export products, became a burden and a threat to the spending on basic services, complicated further by the high birthrate the country was experiencing. The regime also had to deal with increasing migration from rural to urban areas. Especially people belonging to minority groups moved to the big cities, causing the minority groups to become more dispersed across the country. This dissipation made it harder for the security services to observe and control potential dissidents.81 Bashar realized he could not solve the economic problems by cutting on the defense budget. As mentioned, the army was organized in such a way as to remove any untrusted groups as far away from the centers of power as possible, to pose checks and balances on units from particular regions. By doing this, largely homogenous factions were created within the army, including factions consisting of mostly men belonging to minority groups. If their status as untrusted was in any way grounded, large scale demobilization would possibly lead to the injection of these ill-affected soldiers into the system, men trained in arms that are not happy with their government.82
It seems Bashar was caught between two powerful forces. On the one hand he had to satisfy the powerful men of the old guard, who did not like any big changes in the system as this might tamper with their position of power. On the other hand the Syrian population demanded change and was fed up with the oppression and the authoritarian nature of the regime.
77 Rubin, The Truth About Syria, Chapter 1: Why Syria Matters, 2.
78 World Bank website, country page of the Syrian Arab Republic, 20 May 2013. http://data.worldbank.org/country/syrian-arab-republic
79 CIA, World Factbook: Syria.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sy.html 80 Ibidem.
81 John Bulloc, ‘Asad’s Past, Syria’s Future?’, RUSI journal (1988) 31-35. 82 Ibidem.
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The president found himself in the same position his father did a few decades before, and, like his father, Bashar chose oppression as the solution. While at first glance it seemed as though Syria had experienced a wave of liberalization under the new president, very little had changed in reality, given that most of the reforms were cosmetic and superficial. Instead of Asad changing the system, the system may have changed him.83 Amnesty International continued to publish reports about the many human rights abuses in the country. In 2004 the repressive strategy of Bashar became very obvious when clashes erupted between Kurdish protesters and the security forces. Amnesty International reported about hundreds of Syrian Kurds who had been detained after mass arrests across the country in March.84 “The incommunicado detention at unknown locations of many hundreds of Syrian Kurds is of serious concern, not least as it puts detainees at greater risk of torture or ill-treatment."85 Amnesty International had received many descriptions of torture of named individuals, including children. A seventeen year-old boy was reportedly tortured with electric shocks while held for nine days.86 The human rights organization came in the possession of the names of more than 20 Kurdish children between the ages of 14 and 17 who were reportedly subjected to various forms of torture and ill-treatment while detained for over three months.87
The security services in Syria are expansive and omnipresent. There are no less that fifteen security branches that make up the mukhabarat. Not only is this system oppressive, but the tyrannical activities of the mukhabarat are often arbitrary. They use a combination of pre-emptive fear and intimidation as useful tools to deter potential unrest, which has created a certain level of nation-wide paranoia. The mukhabarat have been given a tremendous amount of freedom and leeway by both Hafiz and Bashar to ensure domestic stability and to protect the Asad regime at any cost from turmoil in the country. Political prisons had become “the distinct mark of Syrian political life”.88 Political detainees are routinely tortured or ill-treated in Syria,
particularly during periods of unrest. Throughout the years, many people have reportedly
83 Lesch, ‘The Syrian Uprising and Bashar al-Asad’.
84 Amnesty International, ‘Syria: Amnesty International Calls on Syria to End Repressive Measures Against Kurds and to Set Up an Independent Judicial Enquiry Into the Recent Clashes’, Amnesty International Report, 6 April 2004.
85 Ibidem. 86 Ibidem.
87 Amnesty International, ‘Memorandum From Amnesty International to the Human Rights Committee Concerning the Implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in Syria, Amnesty
International Report, February 2005.
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“disappeared” after being arrested by Syrian security forces.89 In April 2010, a report was
released by Amnesty International detailing the organization’s concerns
…about a persistent pattern of torture and other ill-treatment of political detainees while held in often prolonged incommunicado detention for interrogation by Syria’s security and intelligence agencies (notably, Military Intelligence, Political Security and State Security); unfair trials, including the acceptance by courts of “confessions” allegedly obtained under torture or other ill-treatment; beatings and other ill-treatment of inmates by prison guards; and the failure of the authorities to ensure that all allegations of torture and other serious violations of human right are independently investigated and that those responsible for abuses are brought to justice.90
These much feared intelligence agencies have accumulated more and more powers over the years, and can pretty much do their work with impunity.91 Two Syrian jokes illustrate how the
system works more effectively than any human rights report ever could: At the secret police Olympics, the world’s best agents compete in the top event. Two agents of each country must enter the forest and catch a rabbit using nothing but their hands. All teams go in and eventually capture the rabbit. But the Syrians don’t come back at all. After a long time, the referee goes to find them. Finally, he spots the Syrian team in a clearing, beating a donkey and shouting, “Confess you’re a rabbit! Confess you’re a rabbit.”92 This joke shows how many untruthful
confessions have been beaten out of people and how the mukhabarat can make people confess to whatever they want them to confess. In the second story, a Syrian man dies and goes to heaven. An angel asks him to recount his life story but instead the man just goes on endlessly praising Asad and the Ba’th party. In desperation, not knowing what to do anymore, the angel calls for God, who appears in great majesty. But even God cannot get the Syrian to deviate from repeating the regime’s propaganda. Finally, God persuades the man that he is indeed god himself and the man at last tells them the truth about himself. “But why,” God asks, “didn’t you do this before when we asked you?” The man replies: “I thought you were the mukhabarat!”93
89 Amnesty International, ‘Fear for Safety / Torture / Possible “Disappearance”’, Amnesty International Report, 29 April 2001.
90 Amnesty International, Syria: Briefing to the Committee against Torture, Amnesty International Report, April 2010, 4.
91 Lesch, Syria, 65-66.
92 Rubin, The Truth About Syria, Chapter 3: Asad’s System, 11. 93 Ibidem.
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this shows the absolute power the regime’s agents enjoy and the paranoia they instill in people’s minds.
In 2006 another large wave of arrests swept the country. Amnesty International reported that the victims came from across the social and political spectrum and included Kurds, Islamists, human rights activists, writers, students and leftists, many of whom were harshly sentenced after unfair trials. Most were sentenced by the Supreme State Security Court (SSSC) or Military Court, both of which suffer from “a gross lack of independence and impartiality.”94
Only no one seemed to care about the country’s appalling human rights record as the international community remained silent for so long. But come 2011, the frustrations of many Syrians had risen to the point oppression could no longer be done ‘unnoticed’. As the streets were filling up with protesters and the news bulletins across the globe showed footage of the protests, so to became public the brutal crackdown by the Asad regime.
Conclusion
Harsh oppression of any opposition to the regime seems to be a recurrent factor in Syrian politics and the outbreak of the violence in 2011 may have not been all that unexpected. Violence is the only way Bashar al-Asad knows to deal with opposition to his regime. He has been doing so for years, just not on as grand a scale as he is now. In fact, Asad handled the uprising the worst way he could. By not at all dealing with the underlying issues that caused the protests to erupt in the first place, he threw his country in an downward spiral of violence and anarchy, up to the point where there is no real solution left. “Instead of reacting to the protests, he branded terrorists, conspirators, and armed gangs as the primary reason for the unrest, and that has been the mantra ever since then.”95 Bashar claims the unrest to be externally
engineered by foreign powers that want to see Syria fail. Many Syrians believe this lie, possibly even Asad himself too, creating a great deal of ungrounded Syrian paranoia.96 Hersch claims this to be the consequence of living in the “dangerous neighborhood” that the Middle East is. Their perception of the nature of the threat is vastly different from what we see outside of Syria as they look at it from a different conceptual paradigm. They have to deal with surviving international politics in the unstable Middle East far more than western countries. Furthermore
94 Amnesty International, ‘Syria: New Crackdown on Government Opponents’, Amnesty International Report, 3 April 2006.
95 Lesch, ‘The Syrian Uprising and Bashar al-Asad’. 96 Ibidem.
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they have to deal with what they see as interventionist and imperialistic policies of the USA and its allies, among whom their despised nemesis Israel. As Bashar sees it, the United States and The West have it out for him. No matter how many reforms and concession, it is never enough. This is the consequence of a conceptual gap between what we in The West see and what Bashar thinks he is doing. He has reformed the country indeed, but not enough compared to western standards.97 He sees it at as a big step towards the people that demanded reformation, yet these people see it as a superficial transformation that changed very little. This conceptual gap is what makes Asad feel that no matter what he does, it is never good enough and people will never be satisfied anyway.
But Bashar does not feel defeated by the outbreak of the uprising and the violence that ensued. The Asads do not grant concessions from a point of weakness, they will only grant concessions from a point of strength. “That is why the violent crackdown of the demonstrations and the small concessions granted are two sides of the same coin.” This is the Asad way of handling politics, you give the people as little reforms as you can but you change just enough to keep them somewhat satisfied. Asad is convinced his regime will survive again, as he is righteous in what he is doing. This war, in his mind, is not just about surviving, he sees it as actually saving the country.98 This cocky attitude is what kept Asad from granting the protesters real reforms and is what is keeping him from stepping down now.
97 Lesch, ‘The Syrian Uprising and Bashar al-Asad’. 98 Ibidem.
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3.
Massacres
Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these human groups, and is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations.99
State-organized massacres are one of the most important indicators of a conflict turning genocidal. Semelin distinguishes 3 cases in which state-organized massacres appear:100 1) A power under construction imposes itself on everyone else by resorting to the practice of massacre to assure its ascendency over the population and to gain the upper hand as quickly as possible.101
2) An already functioning state whose legitimacy is contested, with people refusing to longer accept allegiance to this power.102
3) A state caught up in a war, which finds itself uncertain, sometimes even vulnerable, over the conflict’s outcome. the more the fight against the external enemy becomes a difficult, hopeless battle, the more this state will invest its energy in fighting the supposed enemy within, believed to be complicit with the enemy on the outside.103
Syria could be categorized in the second of these three, and can thus be classified as a contested state. In Syria state-organized massacres have been committed on numerous occasions. This chapter will answer the question: What are the specifics of the massacres that have been committed in Syria by government forces and the pro-government militias during this civil war? The second section of the chapter will look into these mass killings, but before that, the first section will look into the theories on contested states and state-organized massacres, based on the work of Jacques Semelin.104 It is necessary to first look at these more abstract and general theories to really understand the dynamics of what is going on in Syria.
99 The U.N.General Assembly Resolution 96 (I) (“Resolution 96 (I)”) G.A. Res. 96 (I), at 188–89, U.N. Doc. A/64/Add.1 (Jan. 31, 1947).
100 Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, (New York 2007) 118-147.
101 The Khmer Rouge establishing their Democratic Kampuchea through massacre and forced labor would be a prime example of this.
102 The civil wars in Yugoslavia are a good example of a “contested state”.
103 Rwanda fighting both the internal enemy (the Tutsis), as a reaction against the external threats (Burundi and the RPF).
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A Contested State: The Theory
Semelin distinguishes between three fundamental political dynamics of mass killings: insurrection, subjugation, and eradication. Depending on which of these is the motivator behind the massacres, we can conclude whether the will is to destroy a group partly or even totally. The first of these political dynamics, insurrection, is perpetrated mainly by non-state actors and is aimed at striking the target group a single blow to provoke a traumatic shock that is so intense it will influence the policies of its leaders. The main example of this would be terrorism and guerilla warfare, both aimed at opposing or resisting state policy.105 The other two dynamics, subjugation and eradication, are of more importance to this case, as much of the violence in Syria under research here is state-organized. Destroying to subjugate is about annihilating a group partly in order to force the rest of the group into total submission. The destruction is in this case partial, but with an intended total effect. The terrorizing effect of the massacre will spread among the whole of the population, pillaging and rape increasing the impact of the terror, in order to impose political domination on the survivors. A powerful tactic to be incorporated in a military campaign in order to hasten the opponent’s surrender. This is especially the case in modern civil warfare, where the distinction between combatants and non-combatants often is no longer made, and civilians are dragged into the conflict.106 Destruction to eradicate has an even more destructive nature than subjugation, as its aim is total annihilation of a group, to eliminate a community from a territory controlled or desired by a state. This process is about cleansing or purifying the area of a presence deemed dangerous or undesirable. A distinction can be made here between the prime objective being the cleaning of the territory, which would involve deportations and the possibility to flee, or the primary aim being the destruction of a group, in which case fleeing is made (almost) impossible and people are being slaughtered on an even grander scale.107
This does not mean that these last two destruction dynamics would simply be considered genocidal. A distinction needs to be made based on the intensity and extremity of the process, and between what should be called ethnic cleansing and what would indeed constitute to genocide.108 Yet genocide should not be defined as the total physical extermination of a group, like Michael Mann does in his analysis of destruction process, as this is too narrow a definition. Genocide is about the extermination of a group, but not necessarily a total destruction. Clearly, there is not simply a quantitative difference between the “spatially and temporally limited single massacre, and the extended nature, both spatially
105 Semelin, Purify and Destroy, 347-361. 106 Ibidem, 327-334.
107 Ibidem, 334- 343.
108 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge 2005) 12. As quoted in: Semelin, Purify and Destroy, 345.
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and temporally, of genocide.”109 However, there surely is a qualitative distinction in what states
hope to achieve politically by deploying massacres over time and space that reveals the genocidal nature of a series of massacres.110 This is what makes the distinction between
cleansing operations or genocide even more difficult. Genocide necessarily involves one or several massacres, but not all massacres constitute genocide.111 In Syria, massacres have been committed, but this does not necessarily mean a genocide is also being committed.
Examining whether Syria is caught in a process of subjugation or eradication would help to understand the violence of the past three years, and would help us understand to what extent the massacres are genocidal. Semelin concludes that there is one thing massacres of genocides have in common:112 The massacring often began in the same way, under the pretext of eliminating elites of the enemy group, with the aim to “reduce the adversary’s defense capacities to nothing by going for its head.”113 Thus by going after the leaders of the opposition. In Syria this would be the situation as it was in the spring of 2011 when the protests had just started and the regime was shooting at the people protesting on the streets, while the authorities continued to use their state of emergency powers to punish and silence their critics (including political activists, human rights defenders, bloggers and Kurdish minority rights activists), which had been going on long before the violence erupted that spring.114 These critics were arbitrarily arrested and detained for long periods of time without a trial, or imprisoned after unfair trials before the Supreme State Security Court (SSSC) or military or criminal courts.115 This first step of the violence is according to Semelin justified by the instigators as an act of war: “Even if the enemy was unarmed, it represented no less of a threat to be destroyed. It thus constituted a ‘military target’ as such”.116
This first step would be followed by an escalation of the violence and an expanding pool of potential victims. No longer is it just the visible opposition that is a possible target, anyone affiliating with the opposition, or even only suspected of affiliating with them becomes a threat to national security. This escalation of violence into a frenzy of killings and massacres is a sign the ruling party feels it is, or actually is, losing control over the situation. Its power is no longer
109 Mark Levene, ‘The Changing Face of Mass Murder: Massacre, Genocide and Post-Genocide’, International
Social Science Journal 54 (2002) 443-452, 448.
110 Ibidem.
111 Semelin, Purify and Destroy, 323.
112 The cases Semelin used for his research were Yugoslavia, Germany and Rwanda. 113 Semelin, Purify and Destroy, 230.
114 Amnesty International, Syria: Annual Report 2011. http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/syria/report-2011 115 Ibidem.
