"Assessing Repression in Syria"

from Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations

In the News

May 6, 2008

Author: Robert Rotberg, Director, Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution

Belfer Center Programs or Projects: Intrastate Conflict Program

Even as evidence mounts pointing to a partnership between Syria and North Korea in the construction of a Syrian nuclear reactor, Syria and North Korea continue to deny the allegations, leading the U.S. to condemn both countries’ secrecy.

For further information about Syria’s repressive state, see Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations (Washington, D.C., 2007), 269-299. Below is an excerpt from the book.

As David Lesch notes in his chapter, under Hafiz al-Asad—the current president’s father and the architect of Syria’s special form of harsh authoritarian rule—a Faustian bargain was struck between the regime and the country’s people: in return for stability and security, and doses of economic progress, freedom was banished.⁴² Under Asad the son, there was at first some mild relaxation of restrictions. But in 2006, especially after the carnage of the latest war in Lebanon and Syria’s earlier compelled withdrawal from Lebanon subsequent to its complicity in the murder of a key Lebanese leader, the regime’s harsh internal control of dissent and political opportunity was largely restored.

Asad the father came to power in 1970 and forcibly eliminated and filled prisons with opponents, eradicated free expression, massacred 20,000 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama in 1982, and constructed a tough apparatus of repression comparable to those in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Belarus. In early 2006, with Syria in transition, there were fewer political prisoners, somewhat more space than before for nongovernmental organizations and civil society, and limited new openings for the media.

By early 2007, however, Syria, coming in from the cold, remained a repressive state. The security forces, under the ruler’s brother-in-law, were still powerful. A discussion of Asef al-Shawkat’s pervasive national influence as head of military intelligence, and his methods, was suggested by a Syrian television newscaster who subsequently fled the country: “The fascination of such people is that we all know that in one moment they could give you everything that you wish for, or they could kick you into an iron box.” He continued, “They have fists of steel and ropes of silk.”⁴³

The UN Human Rights Committee and Human Rights Watch in 2005 reminded the international community that Asad’s Syria continued to be governed under emergency legislation promulgated in 1963. The regime greatly limits rights to freedom of opinion and expression, curbs the right of peaceful assembly, and ignores the right to freedom of association (and trade unions). It routinely practices torture, provisions of the national constitution to the contrary. Seven political prisoners allegedly died of torture in 2004; despite more recent releases of hundreds of fellow political prisoners, thousands more still languished in Syrian prisons in 2005, and there were new arrests. Others simply “disappeared” during the 1990s and into this century.⁴⁴

Amnesty International in 2005 reported the continued harassment of human rights defenders. They are put under constant surveillance, banned from traveling, tortured, imprisoned after rigged trials in special military courts, and smeared in the official media as “traitors.” In Human Rights Watch’s words, “Syria has a long record of arbitrary arrests, systematic torture, prolonged detention of suspects, and grossly unfair trials.”⁴⁵ Preventive arrests are common.

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