On the shores of the Red Sea, in the Saudi city of Jeddah, May 19, 2023 has undoubtedly made history. After twelve years of exclusion, decided in the face of the bloody repression carried out against the opposition in 2011, the Syrian president has made his return to the Arab League. In front of his peers, Bashar al-Assad delivered his vision for the Arab world. There would be "peace, development and prosperity instead of war and destruction".
The almost naïve tone contrasts with the violence of the crimes – war and against humanity – of which the UN accuses him: deliberate bombings against civilian populations, use of chemical weapons, deaths under torture, hanging of tens of thousands of political opponents. At the end of the race, several hundred thousand victims in Syria.
But in this unstable region, Bashar al-Assad, nicknamed the "butcher of Damascus", has managed to maintain a completely different image: that of protector of minorities. And they are numerous in Syria, a former crossroads of civilizations.
In 2011, his country had a confessional rainbow: Druze, Ismailis, Alawites and Christians together represented 35% of the population.
That year, some of them were nevertheless overcome by concern: in Homs, bastion of the uprising against the Syrian president, demonstrators chanted the slogan "Alawites in the coffin, and Christians in Beirut".
The opposition then incriminated fake pro-Assad protesters who allegedly tried to tarnish the image of the Syrian Spring.
Yet in areas outside government control, extremist groups do persecute minorities, witnesses said. In the middle of the war, in April 2014, a nun reported on Vatican Radio the crucifixion of Christians by jihadists in front of their relatives.
The Alawites were not left out. Among the deadliest attacks, those claimed in May 2016 by the Islamic State Organization (ISIS): 148 dead in Tartus and Jableh, two Alawite cities.
An "Alawite state"?
The Assad clan itself comes from this minority, which numbers two million souls. Emerging in the 11th century, this Shia dissent was marginalized by centuries of Sunni rule. In 1970, the community saw one of its own seize power by force: Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father.
Many Alawites then joined the administration, the army and the intelligence services (mukhabarates). Once generally poor and rural, they then experienced a relative social and political ascent.
Faced with the protests that erupted in 2011, part of Western opinion perceived Damascus as "an Alawite regime facing a Sunni revolt," said Issa Ibrahim, a Syrian lawyer based in Norway. An optical illusion: the Syrian power is not an "Alawite regime", says the lawyer, but "a regime monopolized by a handful of Alawites – and other courtiers – who despoil all its people".
About 80 per cent of the public service is believed to be in the hands of this minority, which constitutes only 10 per cent of the population. "But if they are over-represented in certain positions, it is not because they are Alawites, but because Assad supposes them to be more loyal to him," said Issa Ibrahim, himself born in this community.
"What concerns the regime," he continues, "is none other than loyalty to it, not confession." This explains the presence of a Sunni and Christian bourgeoisie in the most influential circles in Syria, notes the lawyer.
Christians, Bashar, and fanaticism
In front of the cameras, Bashar al-Assad displays a warm closeness to Christians. In April 2014, the Syrian army recaptured the Christian town of Maaloula from the rebels. If his public appearances were extremely rare in these times of war, the Syrian president had chosen Easter Day to appear in the city a few days later, escorted by prelates.
From the churches desecrated by the jihadist fighters of the al-Nusra Front, Bashar al-Assad, celebrating the resurrection of Christ, wished peace to his country.
Bashar al-Assad in a monastery in the ancient Christian city of Maaloula, retaken a few days earlier from rebel groups by the Syrian army. The photo was taken on April 20, 2014 by the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) © AFP.
The official discourse is full of praise for Christians. In Saydnaya, near Lebanon, in July 2019, Bashar al-Assad calls them "builders of humanity". Arabness "protects you from fanatics who would like to present you as strangers to the Arab world," the president continued.
In Syria, however, "no one believes Assad's lies about protecting minorities anymore," said Samira Mobaied, vice-president of Syrian Christians for Peace. This NGO denounces both the regime and the use of arms by its opponents.
Established in France, throughout the past decade Samira has worked hard to combat Assad's "manipulation" among minorities. This scientist is one of the Christians who stood up against the regime from the beginning of the revolution. Like surgeon Haissam Saad, who was arrested and tortured for treating a protester in 2012. He barely survived the abuse. His co-religionist, political activist Bassam Gayth, succumbed to it.
Christian minority opponents break silence about Syrian regime
Divide and conquer
This regime "weeps over the fate of Christians but imprisons and kills them when they oppose it," says former diplomat Ignace Leverrier in the blog of the newspaper Le Monde dedicated to Syria.
This hardly surprises Mazen Darwish, a Syrian lawyer. President of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, he was imprisoned from February 2012 to August 2015 and declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International.
"The logic that 'you are with me or you don't exist' spares Christians little more than the Alawite minority," he said, himself from the latter.
Many Alawites have chosen rebellion, boycotting the recruitment of young people into the army, or organizing a meeting of Alawite opponents in Cairo in 2013, calling the community to revolt. Alawite General Zubaida al-Meeki was even the first female officer to defect.
The presence of Alawites in the ranks of the opposition is anything but trivial. Their community is so associated with the intelligence services that it is enough to imitate the accent of the Alawite regions to terrorize someone on the phone, several Syrians note.
The Assad clan divides and rules, they summarize. This analysis is similar to that proposed by Ziad Majed, political scientist and professor at the American University of Paris: the regime knowingly fueled enmities between communities.
In the Sunni majority of the countryside, "the Assad system has instilled hatred against the Alawites", associated with the regime in the collective unconscious, regrets the Alawite lawyer, Issa Ibrahim.
Conversely, "the regime has led all minorities into an unjustified fear vis-à-vis the rest of their Syrian brothers" (Sunnis), sighs Syrian actress and Alawite Waha Al-Raheb.
Assad by default
The concerns of these minorities are not unfounded, however, objects Tigrane Yegavian, a member of the editorial board of the journal Conflicts.
In a post-Assad Syria, the Alawites would have absolutely no guarantee of being associated with power. Worse, no safeguard would protect them from the vengeance of the rest of society, continues the author of "Minorities of the East: The forgotten of History".
"For most Alawites and Christians, adherence to the regime is not so much a matter of conviction as of lucidity," the journalist continues: faced with the Islamists, Assad appears to be a default choice.
The Christian neighborhoods of Aleppo would probably have been erased, if the city had not been retaken by the Syrian army at the end of 2016, adds the Franco-Syrian.
The baptized already represented only 8% of the population in 2011. Less than half of them remain in Syria today.
The Christians and Alawites who agreed to confide in France 24, they have all definitively left their country. Hostages of a dictatorship claiming to act in their name, only two alternatives were presented to them: silence or exile.
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