Ana Maria Luca,
February 10, 2011   
 
“I typed www.facebook.com and it worked! For the first time in three years! Never thought this day would come!” said one Syrian Twitter user. The news that the government in Damascus decided to lift the ban on social media websites created a wave of enthusiasm among the Twitterati in Syria.  The state-owned internet service provider in Damascus announced yesterday that it unblocked websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot and Youtube, although Wikipedia remains restricted.

The Syrian government decided to lift the years-old ban on certain websites in the wake of the recent revolts against authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and protests in Jordan and Yemen. The move came after Syrian opposition members living abroad created a Facebook group called “The Syrian Revolution 2011” calling for mass protests in Syrian cities on February 4 and 5 in order to topple the government in Damascus.

Yet contrary to the hopes of opposition members, the calls for protests did not materialize into a large-scale uprising like that in Egypt, but only an increased presence of the state security apparatus on the streets. Some activists were even arrested at small rallies held at the end of last week, according to Human Rights Watch.

On February 2 a group of around 20 people dressed in civilian clothes beat up and dispersed 15 demonstrators who had assembled in Bab Touma in old Damascus to hold a candlelight vigil for Egyptian demonstrators, according to organizers. A Human Rights Watch press release said that the police were present at the scene and did not intervene. Suheir Atassi, an activist who attended the small vigil, was reportedly arrested on Monday after she complained that the police officers slapped her at a police station and called her “germ” and “agent of foreign powers.” 

According to HRW, Ghassan al Najjar, the leader of the Islamic Democratic Current, a small opposition group in Syria, was also arrested after he publicly called for protests in Aleppo, while Syria’s security services summoned more than 10 activists before the demonstrations called for on Facebook took place. 

The security apparatus in Damascus keeps activists under tight surveillance and intimidates them. According to Nadim Houri, the head of the Human Rights Watch’s bureau in Lebanon, it was very difficult to get in touch with the activists in Syria and get information from the ground. “Many of them just don’t talk; they haven’t responded to us. They are afraid,” he told NOW Lebanon.

But analysts also explain that the reason Syria did not have uprisings similar to those in Egypt and Tunisia in spite of it also being an autocracy is because it is not a majority system, the opposition is banned and has little resources to mobilize, while the head of state is young and enjoys the support of part of the Syrian youth.

Andrew Tabler, Next Generation Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, explains that unlike the kingdoms in the Gulf where succession is not questionable, Egypt, Tunisia and Syria are all republics with authoritarian regimes. This similarity provokes people to think the revolution would spread to Syria. “But Syria is ruled by a minority [Allawites]. Egypt is not; it is a majority system.  The discipline of the [Syrian] regime itself is stricter as they are less susceptible to pressure from the masses.  The military is controlled by the minorities in Syria, and it has less of an independent role as it did in Tunis and in Egypt,” he told NOW Lebanon.

He also added that another difference is that the members of the Syrian opposition with real appeal, those who were behind the Damascus Declaration for National Democratic Change in 2005, are in prison, are under house arrest or are very scared.

Another reason Syria is different from Tunisia and Egypt, according to Joshua Landis, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma and publisher of daily newsletter Syria Comment is that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad enjoys a certain level of support among his people. “I think you can make a strong case that young people like [Bashar] al-Assad, identify with him. They criticize corruption, they criticize the people around him, but not him,” he told NOW Lebanon. He also said that the lack of political parties and the lack of civil society in Syria had a big role to play in the failure of the “day of rage” called for by opposition members.

“The Syrians are also notoriously fragmented and divided, and that has been their big weakness, because they can’t work together. The Kurds are the biggest and most powerful opposition group. They’ve been more courageous, more daring, more organized in the past.  But they have 14 opposition groups, and it is quite easy for the government to play them off each other,” Landis explained.

Syrian activist Ammar Abdulhamid agreed that the opposition needs more time to organize. “Syria’s internal and geopolitical situation requires the infusion of a heavy dose of cold, rational calculations in addition to raw emotions as we prepare for our showdown, the timing of which will have to be determined by the activists on the ground,” he told NOW Lebanon. “Syria’s internal heterogeneity – that is, its religious and ethnic diversity and the reliance of the regime on its ability to stoke fears and hatreds – imposes on activists the responsibility to ensure that a popular protest movement needs to involve representation from all communities in order to avoid a sectarian or national showdown. The regime was able to contain the Kurdish uprising of 2004, exactly because it was Kurdish, and Arabs were not involved,” he explained.

The “Syrian Revolution 2011” and its “day of rage” was confined to the Syrian diaspora and on Facebook, where the group dedicated to a revolution in the country gathered over 10,000 members who are still calling for mass protests next Friday.

Abdulhamid, however, does not think anything will happen in Syria in the near future. “The gist of my argument is that a revolution in Syria requires a greater amount of planning and forethought than what we have witnessed in Tunisia and Egypt. That planning will have to take place outside the traditional circles of known opposition groups,” he said.