Hi. I intended this for the weekend, but the lead subject on today’s Democracy Now
is on
the substance of these report/analyses and don’t be off-put by the word ‘Marxist.”
Oh, do listen to the excellent interview on DN – 9am on kpfk-90.7 fm, and many other
Radio and tv sources.
Ed
From: Cort Greene
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 8:22 AM
http://www.marxist.com/syria-protests-spreading-across-whole-country-involving-new-layers.htm
Written by a Syrian Socialist Monday, 18 April 2011
We have received two letters that give a very interesting insight into what
is happening in
and concessions, the movement that initially began with the youth continues
to build up and spread to other layers of society.
[image: Solidarity protest,
2011]<http://www.marxist.com/images/stories/syria/syrian_protest-Milano_26_marzo_2011.jpg>Solidarity
protest,
Dear Comrades,
Two weeks have passed since the Friday of Martyrs and much has happened in
witnessed a number of interesting developments in the last two weeks. I will
be reporting the events of the last two weeks here and send an update
tomorrow to share with you what I think of the situation overall in terms of
where different classes are standing as it is becoming clearer as events
unfold.
The week before last, leading to the Friday of Resilience, witnessed a major
movement in the towns and suburbs surrounding
Kiswa, Mou'adamieyah, Harasta, Daraya, Arbeen and Kafar Batna. The security
forces in Douma, as in Darr'a, although they had fled the city, remained
besieging it and coming in and out to arrest people. Darr'a saw a general
strike on April 5th and 6th. Two policemen were shot dead in
the government came out immediately to blame "agents provocateurs" and
"conspirators". Asad tried to contain the situation by sacking the cabinet
and throwing some reforms to the religious sections of society by allowing
veiled women back into education and closing a casino! He also invited to
his palace the heads of both the Arab and Kurdish tribes of north-east
(
country, or, in other words, to ask them to use their tribal influence to
hold back their youth from joining the protest movement. In a last minute
desperate measure, he enacted a decree on Thursday giving the Kurds Syrian
citizenship (after being deprived of this for about 50 years) and trying to
drive a wedge in between the Arabs and Kurds.
All this was in in vain, as on the Friday of Resilience protesters came out
in most cities, including a very strong participation in the Kurdish cities
and towns. The protesters were thousands or hundreds, depending on the city,
town or village. Demonstrations were seen in Darr'a, Jasem, Enkhel and other
towns and villages in the Horan plains (southern Syrian), in many of the
previously mentioned towns and suburbs surrounding
dispersed attempt to demonstrate in front of the Rifa'ie mosque inside
Banyas and Tartous (western coastal
cities) and Raqa, Bou Kamal and Der Alzor (North East Syria) and in Al Bab
City and other small towns in the provinces of
western
This widespread action was met by the regime's security forces with live
bullets and many were killed. The same night, around a 100 Syrian youths and
activists (including members of one of the communist factions) staged a sit
down in a square in the Al-Slebeh neighborhood in Latakia, but were
violently dispersed when the security forces opened fire (either directly on
them or in the air, which has to be confirmed) and chased them down the
streets while shooting in the air and throwing grenades to terrorize the
city. By the end of the Friday of Resilience the estimated number of people
killed since the beginning of the movement (a 3 week period) had risen to
around 170, with hundreds injured and arrested.
Last week, leading to the Friday of Persistence, witnessed a number of very
interesting developments. The coastal city of
mass protests for two weeks with no intervention on the part of security
forces. This changed on Sunday [April 10] when the security forces and
regime thugs decided to storm the city after ten army soldiers had been shot
dead. The Syrian revolution Facebook page reported that these soldiers had
been executed after refusing to fire on the protesters. There have been a
number of similar stories of executions in the army but nothing can be
confirmed yet. The Syrian government claimed that the soldiers had been
killed by the same so called "armed gangs" that have been attacking and
killing both protesters and security men! The media of the regime has been
using this incident to spread its propaganda attacking the revolutionary
movement and relating it to Muslim Jihadists or to a foreign
Saudi/Lebanese/Israeli/American conspiracy to deal a blow to the stability
of the country in the interest of
Syrian TV surprised the nation again with a new mockery showing three
alleged conspirators, who according to them had Islamist tendencies, and
they confessed to having received money from someone in
troubles in
all this killing was carried out by three people! The security forces
launched a campaign of terror in Banyas and its surrounding villages,
shooting at protesters, smashing property and mass arresting people. In the
Bayda village, every single male in the village was arrested and were not
released till the next day when the women and children of the village
protested on the highway completely blocking traffic. Later one leaked video
showed dozens of men in Banyas and Bayda thrown on the ground with their
hands tied behind their backs and the security forces beating them with
batons, kicking and stepping on them and humiliating them. This again
sparked a wave of protests in a number of towns.
The most significant development of this past week, however, were the
protests at the
numbered a few hundred students and were brutally attacked by the regime's
security thugs and many were arrested. One student was beaten to death at
the
many youths and could trigger a student movement and students strikes.
On Thursday, a few hundreds demonstrated in the city of
mountain) which is a neighboring city of
the regime's fairytale about "Islamists", since Sweda is mostly inhabited by
the the Druze minority and a sizeable Christian community. Asad tried to
contain the situation in preparation for the Friday of Persistence by
releasing a few hundred that had been arrested in demonstrations but again
in vain. The newly formed government (in itself a major provocation as it is
the same old mix) also issued orders to public sector employees to come to
work on Friday for a few hours in an attempt to reduce the numbers going on
the protests!
However, the Friday of Persistence surpassed expectations with protests
breaking out in most of the cities that had protested on the previous Friday
and also reaching the heart of the biggest two cities,
as well as new cities such as Jisr Al-Shoughor in northern central
the mostly working class city of
the
security forces and there were reports of injuries. The protesters of the
suburbs, Douma, Harasta, Arbeen, Zamalka, etc., tried to march to
and a couple of thousand of them managed to almost reach
where they wanted to stage a sit-in. They were confronted by a large number
of security forces who were successful in using batons and teargas to break
up the march. The security forces overall did not resort to using brutal
force except in the city of
snipers.
It seems as if the regime wants to try to absorb the movement by dealing
less violently with it and meeting with respected figures from different
cities/communities to deliver some promises and hopefully diffuse the
movement. However, this is more likely to be taken by the revolutionaries as
a sign of weakness than a sign of cooperation as many youths have rejected
these mediation efforts of the so-called “society figures”. The
revolutionary movement does not seem to be fading away, on the contrary it
is growing stronger, learning, and attracting more people day after day.
Letter 2)
Dear Comrades,
This is to follow up on my last letter. Tomorrow [Saturday] is expected to
be another big day for
and activists have called it the Sunday of Al-Jalaa (the Sunday of
Departure).
The mood among the youth is definitely one of militancy and discontent. This
is obvious on Facebook where the membership of the Syrian Revolution page is
increasing massively and all sorts of other small groups and pages for
action in different cities have sprung up and much discussion is going on.
This has concretely expressed itself in the student protests and the
increasing participation and leadership of the youth in the protest
movement. Also, the events on the Friday of Persistence are only going to
have an electrifying effect on the youths. For example, the inhabitants of a
small town called Al-Rastan, close to
international highway and bring down the biggest statues of Hafez Al-Asad in
the country. Pictures and videos of this have been widely circulating and it
is easy to imagine the radicalizing effect of this on the youth and other
sections of society as well.
Although the youth have been the driving force of the movement, things have
gone far beyond a protest movement of only the unemployed youth. As the
names of the detained individuals are coming out, it is surprising to see
how many of them are engineers, doctors, activists and lawyers. A couple of
days ago around 100 doctors protested in the
refusing to cooperate with them. Last week, the engineers in Darr'a
protested in front of their union building and the lawyers in Sweda have
been occupying their syndicate office. This shows that the movement has
definitely penetrated the petite bourgeoisie and the semi-petite
bourgeoisie/semi-working class elements.
The working class intervention in an organized fashion is yet to be seen.
The Syrian working class has lived under the yoke of a brutal Stalinist
police state that has penetrated all spheres of life for the last 40 years.
The unions are strictly under the control of the state and, unlike
there has been no strike movement in
that it is going to take time for the Syrian working class to move as an
organized force. However, signs of deep dissatisfaction among its ranks are
obvious. Syrian TV just recently discovered the virtue of going on the
streets and listening to people's opinions and demands! They went to the
Al-Slebeh neighborhood in Latakia and talked to people. One very upset
public sector employee complained about corruption and the inaccessibility
to government jobs for the youth unless they had a "connection" and the
existence of dozens of names that get paid but never show up to work. An
upset fisherman heavily criticized his union's leadership that does not
listen to the membership and asked for health benefits and retirement
financial security.
Many of the areas where the protests are taking place are quite
industrialized. For example, the coastal region has a number of industries.
Just outside Latakia there is a tobacco factory, a cement factory and a
textile factory. In Banyas, there is the Banyas oil refinery. Latakia,
Banyas and Tartous are all ports with many port workers. These workers are
coming under the pressure of their class seeing their relatives and friends
protesting and dying on the streets and are due to eventually move. In
addition, the regime is attacking ambulances and killing drivers as well as
forcing firefighters to cooperate with its oppressive machine and this is
only going to serve to radicalise the working class further.
Hafez Al-Asad came to power to purge the Ba'ath party, reduce it to a
mafia-like clique of his family and relatives, and establish a proletarian
Bonapartist regime in the image of Stalinist Moscow. The regime based its
policies on a very delicate balance of forces of the working class, the
peasantry, the petite bourgeoisie including the rich merchant class in
industrialists that were not expropriated. Capitalism was eradicated and
banks, heavy industries, transportation and all vital sectors of the economy
were nationalized and they remain so today.
After the collapse of the
transform itself into a new capitalist class. The transformation process
effectively started with the death of Hafez and the arrival of Bashar to
power. The ruling caste knew very well that they had to attack the toiling
masses in favour of the nascent bourgeoisie and were perfectly aware of what
the ramifications of that was going to be. Therefore, they proceeded very
slowly, attacking certain layers of society while leaving others alone, or
only partially attacking the masses. For example, after lifting government
subsidies on fuels, they came back with coupons to give back part of those
subsidies to families and businesses. This attack led to increasing the load
onto the backs of the masses and small private businesses.
The results of eleven years of this process has been the upsetting of the
previous delicate balance of forces which has been reflected in the
demonstrations of the last four weeks. The peasantry, the public sector
working class, and the small and medium petite bourgeoisie in the towns and
cities have been harshly hit by the so-called liberalization of the economy
and are the ones on the streets. The nascent bourgeoisie and the upper
layers of the petite bourgeoisie (especially the merchants) have been
accumulating immense wealth in the recent years at the expense of the masses
and thus are coming out fiercely against the movement. A new, relatively
privileged layer of the working class, employed in the private sector with
wages about double those of the public sector has also emerged in the recent
years and also seems to be against the movement. Due to their organic mix
with the remaining working class and petite bourgeois they seem to be
bringing a significant layer of society under their ideological influence
derived from their own interests. Unlike other Arab countries where the
liberalization processes started much earlier, the situation in
not reach the point of a sharp social stratification of different strata of
the toiling masses which seems so far to be in favour of the regime.
I just listened to the second President's speech and it was totally
different from the first. He came out with a series of promises and
admissions of the need to reform. He talked about investing in the
agricultural sector, giving tax breaks to small business, creating projects
to tackle unemployment (which he considers the biggest evil), fight
corruption, and a better distribution of the wealth among different classes
and areas of the country. There was very little of the intimidatory language
and talk of conspiracies and the overall speech came across as a major
concession to the masses and an attempt to keep his supporters on his side.
There was talk of lifting the Emergency Law and enacting the Law of Multiple
Parties but there was no mention of political prisoners. From the reaction
of people on Facebook it seems this is not going to work. Many people just
want him to go. The movements has been growing slowly but steadily and if it
continues in this manner things are looking like we are moving towards the
overthrow of the regime at some point.
*[Note: The attempt of the regime to absorb the movement seems to have been
very short lived. After the speech people came out immediately to protest
and there was another massacre last night in
forces opened fire on protesters.]*
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