Franck Salameh: An Alawite State in Syria?

Many Middle East analysts view Syria through one lens: a troubled state in need of regime change. But recent events indicate that a new paradigm is needed—one that accepts that the Alawite drive for communal survival may preclude survival of the present Syrian state.

 

Quite a few commentators described the Houla massacres of May 2012 as "a turning point" in Syria’s sixteen-month-old uprisings. “This is Syria's Srebrenica” they clamored, evoking the memory of the 1995 slaughter in Bosnia. Some called for sterner international pressures, ranging from the imposition of more debilitating sanctions against the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad to further isolating his government to putting boots on the ground to support the armed opposition and create civilian "safe havens." Yet the brutal killings continued, an undaunted Assad went on flouting international denunciations and, save for a litany of jeremiads about the regime's cruelty, precious little has changed on the ground in Syria. If anything, Assad seems to have raised the stakes, in late June downing a Turkish military jet that had presumably breached Syrian airspace. This too, along with news of fresh new massacres in the Damascus neighborhood of Douma, met with international mutism—and, curiously enough, with Turkish resignation.

 

There was the recent ballyhooed Geneva conference and before it the histrionic expulsions of Syria's diplomatic corps from key Western nations—with the Obama administration, true to form, demurring. But those remained perfunctory, timorous and largely ineffective slaps on the wrist. For beyond the killings, the world's indignation and the Syrian regime's continued recalcitrance, there lurked a method to Assad's madness that very few observers have deigned address: what animates Assad are communal-survival concerns and Alawite group contingencies; that the international community and the Syrian opposition’s oratory about Syria’s unity and national integrity are the least of the regime’s preoccupations; that it might be too late at this point in the game for the Alawites to abdicate their reign and resign themselves to a subservient future in Syria; that many assumptions about the current shape of the Syrian state are broken beyond repair; and that the Alawites would rather dismantle their existing republic and retreat into fortifications in the mountains than share power with a Sunni-Arab majority ill-prepared to grant either democracy or clemency to its erstwhile wardens...