The Case for Regime Change in Syria (4)

A point was raised in the Comments Section below to the effect that for every corrupt Alawite in the regime there is at least five corrupt Sunnis. I don’t dispute the veracity of this statement. For indeed it comes as a natural reflection of two facts: 1) demographics, that is, there are simply much more Sunnis in the country than Alawites, and 2) the politics of appeasement and co-optation, that is, if we you want to keep the Sunnis elite on the quiet side and ignore the abnormal fact of Alawite dominance of the military and the decision-making process, you have to ensure that they are corrupt. Continue reading →

Defiant Messages!

Crackdown against western-oriented activists in Syria is proceeding apace and has been for quite a few weeks now, as we all know. The latest installments were the March 24 arrest of Samir Nashar, the founder of a liberal party based in Aleppo and one of the internal opposition figures who took part in breaking the barrier separating the “inside” and the “outside” when he attended the opposition conference organized by the Syrian National Council in Washington, DC at the end of February 2005. Samir was released a week later and put under a travel ban. Continue reading →

Ali Alive!

Under increasing pressures from rights activist, Syrian authorities finallyadmittedthat they do indeed have custody of ‘Ali ‘Abdallah and his sons, but, rather than release them, they simply chose to put their case in front of the State Security Court on unspecified charges. Meanwhile, and mere hours ago, Syrian communist activist and former political prisoner, Fateh Jamous, was arrested in Damascus Airport upon his return from a long trip to Europe where he took part in a number of meetings with exiled opposition figures. The arrest comes as part of the ongoing campaign of intimidation that the authorities have been conducting over the last few months, and which has intensified immensely in the last few days. Continue reading →

Secularists & Islamists – The Promise & the Dread

This is the paper that I have prepared during my second stint as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution (October 2005-March 2006). It, too, was too whimsical for publication as a Brookings policy paper. So, here it is. Continue reading “Secularists & Islamists – The Promise & the Dread” →