DAMASCUS: The challenge to the Syrian regime is currently being contained by fear of the security services and a descent into Iraq-like chaos, as well as the president’s reformist image, analysts believe.

Since the unrest began on March 15, neither the capital Damascus, second city Aleppo nor Hama, where a 1982 Muslim Brotherhood revolt was violently put down by President Bashar Assad’s father Hafez, have seen major protests, activists say.

Instead, anti-regime demonstrations have been confined to the south’s mainly agricultural province of Daraa, the industrial city of Homs, the conservative northern Damascus suburb of Douma and Kurdish-majority regions of the north.

“Because of the harshness of the security forces, many people believe it’s better to wait and see what happens with the promised reforms, before going onto the streets and risking arrest,” said Rime Allaf, a Syrian researcher at the Chatham House think tank in London.

In a bid to quell the unprecedented protests in Syria, the regime announced it would examine ending emergency laws, allow other political parties in a state ruled by the Baath party since 1963, fight corruption and allow more freedom of information.
“The other dissuasive element is the regime’s insistence on focusing on the ‘fitna’ factor,” Allaf added of the specter of confessional dissent.

Officials have blamed the violence on “armed groups” and foreigners seeking to divide the ethnically and religiously diverse country.
“Syrians fear seeing their country plunge into chaos, having seen the massive influx of dozens of thousands of Iraqis and Lebanese fleeing civil strife in their own countries,” she added.

“During the huge pro-Assad demonstrations on March 29, of course there were many people there who love him and there were also Baath party members,” said Wadah Abed Rabbo, owner of Syria’s only privately owned daily Al-Watan, which is close to the ruling regime.
“But there were also a lot of people who see him as a guarantor of security.”

Some also believe the 45-year-old Assad cannot be likened to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, 82 and ousted after 30 years in power, or Tunisia’s 74-year-old Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali who fell after ruling for 23 years.

“Even if he did succeed his father Hafez Assad, Bashar has succeeded in nurturing the image of a reformer,” said a businessman. The man, in his 60s and asking not to be identified, has no great love for the Baath party which confiscated his land in the 1960s.

“He [Assad] still has a capital of sympathy, even if he very quickly brought an end to the momentum that accompanied his accession to power” in 2000 after the death of his father, the businessman said. “Today, without rapid moves to liberalize politics, that capital will disappear.”
“At best he will look faint-hearted, at worst he will appear as someone who wants to keep the political and security status quo,” he added.

A human rights activist, who asked not to be identified, said: “It is for economic reasons that there is not a lot happening in Damascus and Aleppo.”

For Thomas Pierret, a researcher at Berlin’s Zentrum Moderner Orient, it is all a question of numbers. “In order to make the regime bend, the Syrian opposition must mobilize the population in far greater numbers than they have done so far,” Pierret wrote in an opinion piece in Le Monde Wednesday.

“The bourgeois families of Damascus and Aleppo, many of whose sons joined the Islamist insurrection 30 years ago, have not yet joined the protest movement,” he wrote.
“The merchant class has greatly enriched itself with recent economic liberalization, and will undoubtedly think twice when it comes to choosing between liberty and stability.”