Thursday, March 24, 2011

The popular unrest and violence that has gripped the region has flared up this week in Syria, whose officials might have believed they were immune to such developments.

Before the recent bloodshed, which has claimed at least 15 lives in the last 24 hours, broke out in the southern town of Daraa, Syrian officials were betting that their regime, and its president, could somehow escape the wave of popular anger sweeping the Arab world.

Ironically, the Syrian regime had a golden opportunity to move proactively – parliamentary elections scheduled for later this year, and the government of President Bashar Assad could have announced a real step at reform, to signal it was listening to its people, instead of relying on rhetoric and slogans, or silence.

During several days of protests in Daraa, angry Syrians burned the offices of the company that operates the mobile phone network, which is owned by a relative of Assad. The president must know that high-level corruption is a widespread public grievance, but not even this wake-up call was enough to prevent the regime from responding in the depressingly familiar manner of Egypt and Tunisia: foreign plotters are at work, aimed at destabilization.

If anything has been destabilizing, it has been the government’s inability to address the devastating drought that has hit eastern Syria, which caused the migration of thousands of people to cities like Daraa. And in a nod to the Yemeni president’s early handling of his country’s crisis, Assad fired the local governor in Daraa, expecting that this would cool things down.

But the repeated references to “local problems” in Daraa can’t hide the fact that people are angry, and have legitimate grievances. They resent a decades-old state of emergency. They object to the Baath Party’s monopoly of power, no matter how much this is disguised by a multi-party “front.” They also reject high-level corruption, and the general climate of fear and intimidation generated by a system in which the secret police hold sway. There is simply no way to ignore the aspirations and grievances of young people, and pushing a few buttons to cut off electronic media will not solve the problem.

In short, Assad will have to undertake a true reform process, one that he promised upon taking office in 2000. He is aware of the identities of the most offensive symbols of this corruption, and a simple trip through the internet would be sufficient to gauge the depth of the resentment.

The fact that many Syrians bear no personal animosity toward their president has now become irrelevant. The regime’s response to Daraa has made this another chapter in the Arab saga of 2011, whose abiding lesson is: Reform before it is too late.