Uprising Highlights Ethnic, Religious Divisions

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The Assad clan that has ruled Syria since 1970 is fighting for its life and seems willing to use whatever it takes to stay in power.

At least 1,400 protesters have been killed since the uprising began some 12 weeks ago, and many thousands more have fled across the border into Turkey.

Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, took over after his father, Hafez, died in 2000. The Assads have used the Ba'ath Party apparatus to run a tightly-controlled despotic one-party state.

The Assads are members of the Alawi offshoot of Shia Islam, while most Syrians are Sunni Muslims and consider the sect heretical.

The Alawis were once at the bottom of the ethnic and religious ladder, but began their ascent during the period of French rule in Syria, which lasted from 1920 to 1946.

Profiting from French efforts at divide-and-rule in Syria, they joined the military in disproportionately large numbers.

After independence, chaos reigned in the country, as one coup d'état followed another.

This provided the Alawis with the opportunity to rise to power, by dominating the armed forces and the Ba'ath Party. In 1963, the party took power away from the Sunni majority.

Sunni resentment has never disappeared. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad crushed an uprising in Hama led by Sunni Islamists, killing at least 25,000 people and razing much of the city.

Should the regime fall, there would probably be a bloody settling of accounts, so Bashar has little choice but to fight to the death.

However, Assad is popular among Christians, who make up more than one tenth of the population, and other minorities who fear a change in the country's delicate ethnic and religious balance should a Sunni-majority regime replace him.

Mordechai Kedar, author of Asad in "Search of Legitimacy - Messages and Rhetoric in the Syrian Press 1970-2000," thinks it possible that "six states will rise from the ruins of Syria, each more homogeneous than the former united Syria and more legitimate in the eyes of most of its inhabitants."

Minorities such as the Druze and Kurds might seek independence, and dissident groups in Aleppo and other cities might secede from the Damascus-based country.

Kurds make up about seven percent of the country's population, yet were only recently granted citizenship.

For more than 50 years they have been subjected to an aggressive Arabisation policy, denied the right to speak or be taught in the Kurdish language or to practice Kurdish traditions.

Official positions by governments and movements in the region have taken on a sharply sectarian character.

While the Shiite regime in Iran, the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, and the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah have all been silent on the uprising or supportive of Assad, other Middle Eastern states, including neighbouring Turkey, have become increasingly critical of Damascus.

Before the uprising, Turkey had become one of Syria's closest allies, but relations have badly deteriorated.

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has denounced the repression as savage.

Syria is geographically and historically a pivotal country in the Middle East, and the outcome of the current struggle will have ramifications across the region.