Opposition Groups - Early Developments
Ethnic, sectarian, class, and family divides often exacerbate personal or organizational jealousies and make it more difficult to make common cause in Syria. An institutional culture that emphasizes leadership and initiative only at the top of an organization, rather than network-building and delegation, also contributes to this weakness. In addition, there is often an astonishing lack of networking or even familiarity among civil society leaders.Leaders of these organizations tend to be one-man-bands, whose powerful egos dominate weak organizations, and they do not "play well with others."
Much of the driving force behind the modern development of civil society in Syria has come from the left, with many former communists and a range of other leftists -- nearly all of them very secular -- channeling their energies away from a direct focus on politics and towards building civil society. The most glaring weakness in civil society on the left side of the equation is the lack of any significant grass roots support. It is this recognition that drove many of the most perceptive leftists to guardedly embrace a re-tooled, moderate Muslim Brotherhood, over the past few years. Because the government has long feared any secular alternatives to Ba'athism, it has generally demonstrated tremendous hostility to such groups.
To counterbalance these secular groups (and to counter the influence of Islamic fundamentalists, both the traditional Muslim Brothers and the upstart Wahabi/Salafists), the Alawite-dominated regime has provided funding and encouragement for moderate Islamic institutions, many of them civil society organizations. These Sunni organizations include Salah Kuftaro's Abu Noor Institute (founded by his deceased father, the former Grand Mufti of Syria) and MP Mohammed Habash's Islamic Studies Center. There are also civil society activists, either former Islamists, or those sympathetic to Islamist perspectives.
The most important opposition groups during the early years of the Assad era were Sunni Muslim organizations, whose membership was drawn from urban Sunni youth. The largest and most militant of these groups was the Muslim Brotherhood. Other organizations included the Aleppo- based Islamic Liberation Movement, established in 1963; the Islamic Liberation Party, originally established in Jordan in the 1950s; Muhammad's Youth; Jundullah (Soldiers of God); and Marwan Hadid's group, established in Hamah in 1965, often referred to as At Tali'a al Muqatilia (Fighting Vanguard). All, it is rumored, received financial assistance from private sources in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf countries, and the revolutionary committees in Iran. It is also speculated that they received weapons smuggled from Iraq and Lebanon and training and assistance from Al Fatah of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
In addition to the militant Muslim opposition, there was opposition from intellectuals and professional associations, whose purpose was not to overthrow the regime but to reform it. The first time such groups challenged the government was on March 31, 1980, in Aleppo and Hamah. Additional opposition came from expatriate Syrian politicians, mostly Sunni Baath politicians of the pre-1966 era who opposed the military and sectarian nature of the government and its drift away from Arab nationalist policies. The leader of this group was Bitar, the cofounder of the Baath Party.
In the spring of 1980, these nonmilitant professional groups formed a loose alliance called the National Democratic Gathering and demanded freedom of the press, freedom of political action, promulgation of civil law with the ending of the state of emergency, and free parliamentary elections. The alliance had no contact with the Muslim Brotherhood and was considered a peaceful alternative to it.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s there were a number of religiously motivated violent attacks, many instigated by the Muslim Brotherhood and directed at Assad's regime, members of the ruling Baath Party, and members of the Alawi religious sect. At the outset, rather than blaming the Muslim Brotherhood, the government blamed Iraq and disaffected Palestinians for these acts, and it retaliated by holding public hangings in September 1976 and June 1977.
The Syrian Democratic Coalition was an amalgamation of liberal and market economy political and humanist organizations. In SDC, the Arabs and the Kurds sit side-by-side so did Muslims (Sunni and Shia'a), Christians, Alawites, Druze, and many other groups representing the mosaic of Syria. On June 9, 2005 and during the 10th Ba'ath Congress, the Ba'ath party declared the Syrian Democratic Coalition and the Reform Party of Syria (RPS) as non-entities, enemies of the State. From that date on, anyone associated with, deals with, or joins SDC or RPS were automatically questioned and jailed.
Between the secularists and the Islamic activists, there are powerful suspicions, resentments, and differences about approaches, priorities, and future political and social objectives. In the middle are a key group of moderates -- those who brokered the Damascus Declaration in October 2005 -- who seek common cause so as to strengthen their efforts and ability to resist SARG repression. While the Declaration is a powerful bridging device, whose influence will continue to play itself out, many of the differences between these two groups remain, and will complicate any effort to forge a civil society consensus in the future.
Opposition leaders were quick to condemn the US Government’s public statement on 17 February 2006 announcing the designation of $5 million under the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) for support of the Syrian opposition, calling it "naive" and "harmful." The statement hurt the opposition, and the Syrian government would use it in the to further discredit its opponents as agents of the Americans. No bona fide opposition member would be courageous enough to accept funding. NGO’s with ties (often covert) to the SARG or its security services could be encouraged to apply for the funds. The amount was paltry compared with what had been set aside for the Iranian opposition.
The Movement for Justice and Development (MJD), currently banned in Syria, was formed in London in 2006 and took the bulk of its initial membership, from exiled "liberal, moderate Islamists," some of whom were formerly members of the Muslim Brotherhood. MJD's approach toward democratic change in Syria is non-ideological - they don't believe in Shari'a law, for example. On its website the MJD states it is a member of the Damascus Declaration. The MJD is not an original signatory.
"Membership" in the Damascus Declaration is essentially open to anyone who supports the Declaration's goals. MJD has participated in symposiums with international branches of the Damascus Declaration in Europe and the United States, including co-sponsoring the April 25, 2008 "Syria in Transition" round-table that included former high-ranking State Department guests. MJD was coordinating with Damascus Declaration on satellite television, in a MEPI/MJD plan to broadcast television programming into Syria from abroad. They were saying the Ford Foundation is supposedly financing this. MJD did not enjoy a cooperative relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. As Damascus Declaration has grown abroad, MJD tried to take an increasingly active role and endeavored to prevent Muslim Brotherhood members from being elected to any Damascus Declaration committees.
The 17 March 2006 announcement in Brussels of the creation of the National Salvation Front (NSF), a fourteen-member committee of Syrian exile opposition figures led by former Vice President Khaddam and Muslim Brotherhood chief Sadreddin Bayanouni, initially received mixed reaction from civil society figures, opposition activists, and others. A number of contacts noted that the identities of the majority of the participating exile politicians initially remained unknown. Press reports have offered only a limited list of named participants: Khaddam, Bayanouni, U.S.-based Syrian National Congress chief Nagib al-Ghadban, U.S.-based Syrian Liberal National Democratic Party SYG Husam al-Deiri, and Obeid Nahad, the editor of London-based thisissyria.net. Press reports noted other signatories included unidentified representatives from pan-Arabist, liberal, Islamist, Kurdish, and communist groups.
In 2006 a group of dissidents inside Syria formed a new threat to the Assad regime. United behind the Damascus Declaration, a document exploring the future outlook of a new Syria, most of these dissidents faltered because of the pressure from the regime and because of the inability to be active. Most of the Damascus Declaration dissidents saw the United States as a big evil country. The National Salvation Front was formed between the Muslim Brotherhood and the ex-vice president of Syria Abdul Halim Khaddam, a Syrian-Saudi who defected after 35 years of service to the Ba'ath Party. This alliance between the Ba'athists and the Islamists rocked the opposition to its core for many reasons. Khaddam was part and parcel of the Ba'ath Party, and remained so. He played an important role in defining and protecting the dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad in such areas as stifling liberties of Syrians and taming Lebanon to the whims of the Assad family. His past corruption in a non-accountable environment made him an unpopular figure among Syrians.
The 34-member Damascus Declaration (DD) group agreed at a 16 June 2007 meeting to expand into a National Congress comprised of up to 180 members in two or three months. Prospective candidates for the Congress wwere to meet secretly in small groups to discuss important issues and forge stronger bonds between one and another. Candidates for the National Congress represented a broad cross-section of Syrian society, including moderate Islamists, but shared common liberal democratic beliefs. Expanding the DD group into the Congress would dilute the power of Arab nationalist DD members who tend to be critical of the West (and especially the US).
By early 2008 the Damascus Declaration National Council (DDNC) was establishing its abilities to meet inside Syria and reaching out to external opposition groups such as the moderate Islamists Movement for Justice and Development (MJD). But a government crackdown was taking place all over the country. The DDNC had been severely hit in cities along the coast and Hassakeh province, but it remained operational, though significantly weakened, in Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs. Of the 17 members elected to the DDNC secretariat, five were now in prison and two had quit or stopped actively participating, leaving ten active secretariat members. In addition to the secretariat, DDNC members also elected an executive committee of five. Two of them, DDNC executive committee head Riad Seif and civil society activist Ali Abdullah, were arrested in December 2007 as part of the government's crackdown.
The October 2008 arrest of 12 members of the Damascus Declaration National Council, drafters of a civil society reform document written in 2005 and signed by a confederation of opposition parties and individual activists who sought to work with the government to ensure greater civil liberties and democratic political reform, indicated the regime’s willingness to suppress advocates for human, legal, or minority rights even in normal times.
The post-crackdown DDNC had three main thrusts of action. First, its members wanted to repair and strengthen the regional branches of the DDNC that had been disrupted by the regime's crackdown. Specifically, their goal was to encourage them to resume regular meetings. Second, DDNC members not in prison were looking for new ways to communicate amongst themselves and with the outside world, with a view towards eventually unifying expat Syrian opposition movements under the DDNC banner. Third, the DDNC was working to improve relations with the Arab Socialist Union Party and the Communist Action Party, both of which had dropped out of the DDNC's forerunner the Damascus Declaration in December 2007 after the creation of the DDNC.
The Kurdish Movement is characterized by a mature opposition inside Syria and one that is more nascent outside Syria. Those on the inside are very much influenced by the Iraqi leadership in the Kurdistan area of Iraq. They rally around three or four strong political parties such as the Yekiti, the Kurdish Future Movement, and the Democratic Party. The government generally permitted national and ethnic minorities to conduct traditional, religious, and cultural activities but the government's actions toward the Kurdish minority remained a significant exception. Security services arrested hundreds of Kurdish citizens during 2010, and the government prosecuted them, in some cases on charges of seeking to annex part of Syria to another country. Many human rights observers believed that the government deliberately attempted to stop any public display of "Kurdishness."
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