Sex, shopping and the death of a regime
By Mark LeVine
When and if President Bashar Assad and his Ba'athist regime collapse, chances
are it won't be because of a US invasion, or even a small contingent of special
ops forces fomenting chaos at the center of Syrian power. Rather, sex, shopping
and expensive real estate will likely be the principal culprits.
In a recent edition of the semi-official Syria-Today, the following ad
was placed right next to the text of an address by Assad:
Emaar
Properties, a Dubai-based joint stock development company, unveiled plans for
two major Damascus real estate development projects on October 17. The two
developments, "Eighth Gate" and "Damascus Hills", will be the city's first
fully planned communities and are together valued at US$3.9 billion. They will
be constructed in the countryside near Damascus and will comprise residential,
commercial and real estate compounds ... The projects are a joint venture
between Emaar and the Syrian-based Invest Group Overseas, an offshore
investment and property development company owned by a group of Syrian
expatriate investors. Emaar chairman Mohamed Ali al-Abbar said that Syria was
an emerging market for Emaar. "Syria has great potential for future development
and is a remarkable location for Emaar to develop high quality real estate
projects," Mr al-Abbar said.
And so begins the inexorable march
towards another neo-liberal paradise in the Middle East. If Lebanese journalist
Rami Khoury argues that the joint goal of President George W Bush, French
President Jacques Chirac and through them the United Nations is to "whittle
away Syrian sovereignty", such an enterprise won't be accomplished by Security
Council resolutions and border intrusions alone.
Prying open the Syrian economy to the neo-liberal, globalized economy is both a
core strategy and one of the primary goals of this process. And it is shared by
the United States, France and a fair number of Arab and Syrian entrepreneurs as
well.
Indeed, against Emaar's drive to "build a global property-related brand", the
Ba'ath Party's "Unity, Freedom, Socialism" doesn't stand much of a chance. The
best Assad can offer his people, as he explained in a March 5 speech, is "the
protection of national and pan-Arab interests through adherence to our
identity, independence, loyalty to our principles and beliefs ... [while]
dealing realistically with emergent challenges and developments".
But while Assad offers to "protect our political and social stability", Emaar
offers luxury, service and profits. We don't need to guess who will win here,
especially when the price for Assad's stability is an authoritarian regime, an
economy that is in a shambles - near negative growth, key industries losing
more than a quarter of their income in the past year alone - and increasing
political and economic ostracization.
In fact, a year ago, the chief of the State Planning Commission announced that
Syria would adopt the principles of a market economy by 2010, although a
subsequent announcement at the Ba'ath regional conference qualified this (at
least rhetorically) by adding "social" before "market economy". And Syria has
been struggling over how to liberalize its economy since the early 1990s, if
not earlier.
The argument over language reflects, as Syria expert Bassem Haddad explains, a
larger debate around "the future of the national economy, the role of the
state, the importance of competition and the dangers of being engulfed by
global capitalism", all of which could seemingly be put off as long as Syria
could drink from the Lebanese well.
In this context, what is saddest about the intersection of Assad's speech and
Emaar's newest project is that they suggest that the ostensible reasons behind
the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri - to preserve Syria's
massive racketeering operation in Lebanon (without which an otherwise destitute
Syrian government would have a hard time functioning) - were seriously
misplaced.
More than one commentator has described the contest between Assad and Hariri as
one between an old-style mafia family and a savvier and increasingly globalized
former associate (and now competitor). Viewed this way, the belief that getting
rid of Hariri would help the Assad "family" preserve the status quo is betrayed
by the presence of Emaar, which reveals that the old order is already slipping
away, one Damascene hillside at a time.
As important, it's Syria's "brotherly" Arabs, not the Americans and French
imperialists, who are leading the way.
Of course, few Syrians will be able to afford the luxury living of Damascus
Hill in the foreseeable future, regardless of who's living in the presidential
palace. Nor does the political opposition seem able to offer an alternative to
the status quo. Yet if Syrian author Ammar Abdoulhamid argues that the largely
supine Syrian opposition "is in desperate need of a Cialis treatment if it is
to rise up to the challenges ahead", a generation of young Syrian men, with
bleak prospects for obtaining the kind of livelihood that would allow them to
marry and establish families, has a less metaphorical dysfunction for which
Cialis or even Viagra will do little good: the difficulty of having sex in the
present socio-economic circumstances.
According to Syrian journalist Abdjullah Ta'i, his interviews with young
Syrians who went to Iraq to join the insurgency reveals that one of the more
common reasons given for doing so was not religious or nationalistic. Rather,
as one returnee put it, "My friends and I went to fight in Iraq because we
thought we would find lots of sex there. People said that sex and prostitution
are available in streets because of the poverty and disorder. We wanted to
exploit that situation."
Sadly for the largely Sunni sex-jihadis, there wasn't much sex to be had in
Iraq, largely because prostitutes, like most women, have been driven from the
public space they used to occupy by the violence of the insurgency. (If they
were Shi'ite, they might have been able to avail themselves of the innumerable
Iranian-run "temporary marriage" hotels that have sprung up in Baghdad and the
cities of the south).
But while many went home disappointed, others stayed and were hired by Islamist
militias - and here the 72 virgins available to newly martyred jihadis is a
particularly useful hiring incentive; although a few have actually married
Iraqi women, thereby solving the problem that led them to Iraq in the first
place.
Most, it seems, have not been that lucky. And if the majority who left Syria
(at least partly) for sex come back with little else beyond increased religious
enthusiasm, to an economy that shows little signs of offering them prospects
for a better future - politically, economically, or sexually - the tenuous
balance between the Syrian regime and its people will be increasingly
threatened.
Along with sex and real estate, shopping - or the lack of it - constitutes the
third major problem facing the Assad regime. Until the oppressive economic
regime of the French Mandate and the statist economic policies of socialist and
Ba'athist governments, Syria had for centuries been famed for its merchants,
small-scale industries and trade-based economy. A new, private bourgeoisie
began emerging in the 1980s; together with the old Damascene merchant class it
threatened the cohesion of interests between the Alawi-dominated military and
the Sunni merchants, putting increasing pressure on the regime slowly to
liberalize the economy.
The problem that has evolved, however, is that while the largely Sunni economic
elite increasingly desires market reforms and political liberalization, the
Alawi military does not. What we are likely to see in Syria in the near future,
particularly with the growing impact of the Mehlis investigation into the
killing of Hariri on the country's political dynamics, is the exacerbation of
cleavages within Syria's "military-merchant complex" that were manageable as
long as Lebanon remained under Syrian control, but which will be increasingly
out in the open in the near future.
After decades of a now-failed authoritarian bargain, and with a government that
will have an increasingly hard time providing a basic level of "social justice"
that once gave Syria one of the lowest rates of income poverty and inequality
in the developing world, Syrians will increasingly look to the market for
solutions to their myriad problems.
What kind of market is there to meet their needs, and how well the world
community cushions the country's inexorable incorporation into a globalized
world economy, will likely determine if the regime's warning that Syria could
end up looking like Iraq turns out to be hyperbole, prophecy, or something in
between.
Mark LeVine, professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, Culture and
Islamic Studies, UC Irvine. Author of Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting
the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld Publications, 2005)
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