Ismail, Salwa (2018) The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria

Ismail, Salwa (2018) The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria

• Focuses on how spectacular, i.e. massacre, and routine violence came to embody the Syrian experience under the Hafez al Assad government and that of his son, Bashar.
• During fieldwork in 2005, the author found that the memories and experience of violence shaped the way in which people interacted, thought, and spoke in public (vii-viii).
• The violence employed by the Assad government through the military and the security services has not been merely repressive, but has been used in a performative way to shape the relationship between citizen and state (1).

Introduction:

• The book focuses on the role of violence as a purposeful tool of the security state in Syria to shape relationship between citizen and state and differentiate ‘us’ from ‘them’. This narrative focuses on the template of the prison and, especially, the massacre as performative sites of violence.
• In particular, the 1982 Hama massacre is considered a template of regime violence and used in multiple different circumstances to describe the possibilities of state interaction, and thus to create fear about such future interactions and the repeat of the ‘Hama events’.
• During the 2011 revolution, older family members shared horror stories of death in Hama to try to dissuade youth from challenging the Syrian government.
• Sahwa reject’s Foucault’s conception of thanatopolitics as an end of politics or an extreme rationality of racist biopolitics, but instead as a constructive aspects of political life. In this view, extreme violence, including death, is an act of government meant to discipline the population and foment certain modes of behavior.
• The ubiquity of violence, and knowledge of the threat of violence, within Syria is great enough that political prisons and the threat of military violence disciplines not only prisoners, but also the population at large.
• Similar to how horror movies generate fear in their audiences, so tales of torture and disfigurement by the Syrian government generates revulsion and horror in the Syrian population through the spread of stories of performative violence within prisons.
• In both actual and imagined torture, the ego and self identity of the individual is broken down and destroyed. This creates the opportunity for that person to be rebuilt by the regime.
• Fear of the uncanny, particular at the arbitrary power of the government over life and death, best embodied by the return of Zaynab al Hosni alive after she was announced dead and ‘her corpse’ was delivered to her house in 2011, is another tool used to inspire a psychological fear within the subject population.
• In Syria, the rise of the developmental and modernizing state in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with massacres and mass imprisonment. This, the educational and agricultural initiatives of the government are just as constitutive of state power and control over society as the political prison.
• Unlike the idea of a ‘Stalinist subject’ constructed by the Soviet Union, based on nationalist self sacrifice, the Syrian authoritarian subject is based on the threat of violence and fear to comply with public performance without believing in those rituals. The daily experience of the Syrian subject is thus debasement and abjection due to public performance of nationalist patriotism that the subject does not believe in.
• Experience of abjection and debasement are particularly directed towards political enemies, who are forced to violate social taboos.
• Not only present violence, but also past violence shapes politics and social behavior through memory of past violence.
• The way in which this past violence impacts current society is mediated through the imposition of censorship, that restricts what can be remembered and how it can be remembered, and how memories are constructed through the lens of class, gender, and other identities.
• Book consists of 150 interviews in Syria between 2002 and 2011, primarily between November 2004 and May 2005, and between December 2010 and May 2011. Other interviews were done with Syrian exiles in Paris, Beirut, Montreal, Amman, and London between 2011 and 2015 (25).
• Questions asked during these interviews focused on the nature of societal transformation under the Hafez al Assad government, during the first round, and the nature of everyday life under his government, in the second round (25).
• Only the interviews with activists and civil society figures were generally open, as most interviews with ordinary Syrians were subject to assumed self censorship, especially over controversial topics, like the 1982 Hama massacre (26).
• The book is supplemented with secondary sources like Syrian Baath Party publications, official state newspapers, and the reports of human rights NGOs for statistics on prisons. Interviews are supplemented with diaries and written accounts of previous Syrian political prisoners. Some fictional accounts of Syrian regime violence, like novels, are also used to explore the social effects of violence (26-28).

 

Chapter 1:

• Contrary to narratives that understand regime violence as a reaction to the terrorism and threat posed by al Talia al Muqatila, the Syrian government was already using violence on a mass scale, especially through imprisonment, against opposition figures, especially Communists. The start of the Islamist insurgency only entrenched and justified this violence.
• Violence did not start at that point, but increased, as mass incarceration or movement into internment camps occurred. Paramilitaries also carried out massacres in villages and city neighborhoods thought to be opposition strongholds.
• The prevalence of detention camps and massacres during this period served a ‘educational’ or ‘pedagogical’ purpose, as they instructed the citizenry about the terms, conditions, and expectations of Syrian society.
• Beginning in the late 1970s, tens of thousands of political opponents were arrested and detained for long periods of time. This included Communists, Islamists, pro Iraq Baathists, and the Kurdish Democratic Party. These arrested continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
• At one point in 1984, a former political prisoner, Majed Hebo, estimated that Syria must have around 14,000 political prisoners, or 1 in every 1,000 Syrian citizens (38).
• During the entirety of Hafez al Assad’s administration, around 100,000 people were imprisoned at various point. Around 20,000 of those people passed through Tadmur military prison (41).
• There were an estimated 300 Islamist militants in Hama, although some have claimed as many as 1,000, in 1980. The Syrian government’s response was not in response to their numbers, but their tactics of bombing Baath party offices and military outposts, and especially the massacre of 79 Alawi cadets in 1979.
• The law of emergency rule, passed 1962 and evoked 1963, and the law of protecting the revolution, passed 1965, stripped Syrians of any basic civil rights and empowered the security services to act against political opposition without reference to law.
• The high rates of imprisonment, combined with the extralegal nature of arrests and the frequency if disappearances of those only incidentally associated with the opposition, led to a state of fear throughout the entire Syrian society.
• Although Rifat al Assad proposed reeducation camps in 1980, the Hafez al Assad government instead went down the road of massacre and killing massive numbers of those who disagreed with the government, and membership was made punishable by death in 1980.
• Rhetoric and statements placed Hafez al Assad, and later Bashar, in the position of a secular deity, with claims being made that he alone was capable of governing the country and that, without him, Syria and the entire nationalist project would fail.
• Good citizenship was constructed on believing this and following certain attribute, namely secular, modernizing, scientific, and nationalist. Divergence from these attributes was seen as a political / mental defect, to be ‘cured’ through exclusion, either in prison or through execution.
• Medical and biological language was used to discuss the opposition and military actions against them. The opposition, especially Islamists, were discussed as being inhuman, alien, and insane. Killing them was both necessary and beneficial, like combating a disease.
• Contrary to Foucault’s claims that torture and humiliation were largely a feature of premodern prisons, and absent to modern reformative and disciplinary ones, the author asserts that torture and humiliation remain essential features of the process of disciplining and remaking the imprisoned subject by destroying their physical sense of self and mental sense of being through disfigurement and pain.
• The presence of manuals of torture that detail the desired effects proves that the disciplining structures of knowledge that define modernity for Foucault are present in the contemporary use of torture (41).
• The author chooses to focus upon Tadmur prison, one of the largest sites for political prisoners. The prison, inherited from the French mandate, is isolated in the Tadmur desert. Conditions were deplorable, torture common, and disease rapidly spread during the winter due to freezing and damp conditions.
• Guards are posted on the prison roof and can observe prisoners through open hatches on the ceilings.
• Tadmur prison was meant to utterly isolate the prisoners from the outside world. 23 hours a day are spent in cells, with one hour of outside time spent doing exercises and subject to abuse from guards. No outside information comes in, and the compound is spaced out to isolate prisoners from each other as well as the outside world.
• Upon entering the prison, and at various points thereafter, specific inmates, particularly those who disobey but also others, are selected for exemplary punishment and violence. Upon entrance, this sometimes including beating prisoners to death. These beatings were exemplary performances of violence meant to structure inmate behavior and expectation about life in the prison.
• Torture and beatings within the prison are meant to humiliate and dehumanize the prisoner, by making ordinary bodily functions into symbols of shame.
• Many forms of torture specifically target the sexual organs or the prisoner’s sexuality. This affects a special psychological form of humiliation, and is often done to remind male prisoners of castration or the removal of their sexual agency.
• Specific forms of humiliation and debasement, especially being forced to eat, drink, or otherwise interact with spoil or defiled substances, are meant to force the prisoners to think of themselves as unclear (48-50).
• Forcing prisoners to perform humiliating acts or to humiliate others, especially through contamination with unclear substances -- e.g., spit, shoes, dead mice, urine -- destroy any sense of heroism and created memories of cowardice and debasement in the face of power (50).
• Prisoners sought to actively reclaim their agency and humanity by engaging in acts of sacrifice for other prisoners, especially the sick and elderly, and memorizing the names and experiences of executed prisoners.
• The political goals of the prison, as a way of disciplining and reconstituting an obedient and subservient subject, were demonstrated by the process of forcing political prisoners to renounce previous political ties and declare loyalty to Hafez al Assad. Failure to do was accompanied by beatings and transfer to more harsh facilities, like the Tadmur prison (53-54).
• The disciplining effect of the prison, as well as its psychological damage and humiliation, extended into broader society through the effects of imprisonment of friends and family. This including the stress, anxiety, and powerlessness of having a loved one imprisoned, but also included restrictions on the movement and employment of these groups and sometimes the use of loved ones inside prisons to force political prisoners to renounce political allegiances (54).
• Massacres were employed by the Hafez al Assad government against political opponents, especially Islamists, as a way to separate out the controlled ‘us’ from the expendable ‘them’. It is thus a manifestation of the larger power of government to categorize the population and divide it into binaries.
• Rifat al Assad and others compared the massacre of Islamists in Hama and elsewhere to Stalin’s idea of historical necessity. This made the idea of massacre both an option, since opponents were expendable, and preferable, since they posed an obstacle to a nationalist Baathist project.
• The status of Muslim Brothers as expendable was confirmed in law in 1980 when membership in the organization was made a capital crime (57).
• Enemies of the al Assad governments, grouped together under the name ‘Muslim Brothers’, were accused of being in league with Anwar Sadat and seeking to betray Arab nationalism by accepting the Camp David Accords. They were thus constructed as an internal enemy, traitors, and a threat to the nation and the nationalist project.
• A specific claim was made by Rifat al Assad in response to demands by dissidents that emergency rule be ended. He claimed that Syria remained in a state of war against Israel, with the internal conflict against Islamists being a part of that war (60).
• The analogy of military violence and war was furthered by the conscription of locals into militias, which made the suppression campaigns against Islamists look like civil wars (62).
• Over the course of 4 weeks, after surrounding the city, the Syrian army carried out a series of massacres of the population of Hama, moving to different neighborhoods over time. The object was not only to kill Islamists, but to kill and punish the Hamawi population for their perceived support and toleration of those Islamists.
• The power of division and categorization is best expressed through the use of civilian auxiliaries in the perpetration of massacres in Hama. This forced loyalty, and member of the in group, to be proven by direct participation in the killing of the out group (60-62).

 

Chapter 2:

• The Baath Party was up along Leninist lines from the 1960s onward, although it has become a hollow organization after its abandonment of the goals of socialism and democracy.
• Despite this, the Party and its popular organizations, like professional associations, student unions, and the Shabiba youth group, is still an important tool of power and governance, as demonstrated by its large membership, regular meetings, ritualistic performance of patriotism and loyalty, and the fact that its meetings bring together top government officials with Party representatives. This means that membership in the Baath Party or associated organizations gives someone connections to real power, making them able to access important resources for employment, repairs, or construction, and transforming them into a client of the security forces.
• These groups can also serve the regime by being called upon to mobilize and silence opposition voices. This is especially important among youth groups.
• Participation in special programs with popular associations, such as Shabiba members electing to train as parachutists, gives benefits in careers and educational opportunities. This encourages members to do as they are told in order to access these privileges.
• Participation in these popular organizations, from early childhood onward, does not indoctrinate the Syrian people and many later reject these messages. However, membership in these organizations still compels them to participate.
• Syria political and social life, including interactions between citizens as well as between civilians and security personnel, is characterized by fear. This fear is enforced through the ubiquity of surveillance and informants, as well as the dominance of military infrastructure and locations. Licenses, and resultant extensive intrusion of the state into personal life, are required for a number of routine activities. Many licensed professions, such as taxi drivers and kiosk salesmen, are assigned handlers from the security services, subject to special surveillance, and required to become informants.
• Syrians have adjusted to this by changing their speech and behavior in relation to their conversational partner’s perceived connection to the regime and/or the security forces.
• Identifying those linked to the security forces becomes very important in this social context, as they have tremendous power over others.
• These identifications are not always correct, however, as indicated by a Alawi woman’s complaint that others treat her like a client of the security forces because she is Alawi (78).
• Assumptions about the involvement of colleagues or superiors with the security forces in rampants because it is assumed that most promotions occur only after candidates have been vetted by the security forces or their lackeys, and that high ranking positions require cooperation with the political and military aims of the security forces.
• Bosses are seen an independent centres of power by virtue of either being security officers or having close ties to security services. Personal loyalty to the boss, rather than general compliance with rules, is often seen as the best chance of promotion and avoiding punishment (81).
• Becoming a client of the regime or its supporters was seen as a protection from the criminality of state actors and a way to access the fruits of this corruption. It made one a member of the in group, which was much preferable to being an exposed member of the out group, subject to the constant threat of violence or predation by a member of the in group (95-96).
• Some aspects of the Syrian system are designed to force citizens into criminal and proscribed activities, like underpayment of teachers to force them into corruption, because their involvement in such activities makes them more vulnerable and dependent on political favoritism and perceived loyalty, making them less willing to challenge the state and more willing to demonstrate their obedience (80-81).
• Beginning with the imposition of strict import and export regulations in 1958 under the UAR, smuggling became a major part of Syrian society. This was massively expanded during Syrian intervention in Lebanon, when ten of thousands of military personnel and civil servants were involved in smuggling operations. High ranking officials still control massive smuggling operations for personal profit.
• Smuggling punctuated ordinary life both because it was wide reaching, but also because it was often the preferred or the only way to obtain certain kinds of goods in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
• Smuggling of drugs also became prominent during the occupation of Lebanon in the 1970s and was usually controlled by military officials (84).
• The conflation of state activity and criminal activity through smuggling and other criminal acts by state, military, and security officials has also seen the involvement of criminals in state networks. This is especially true of the inclusion of gangsters into the patronage system of power political and military figures (85).
• The mechanisms of managing the rural to urban migration that occurred during development under the Hafez al Assad government maintained the regional and sectarian segregation of groups to ensure continued dependence on the government. This was especially done through recruit of large numbers of poor rural migrants into the armed forces, whose settlement patterns and location could then be controlled.
• This is shown through the spatial distribution of different populations in Damascus. To start off with, many neighborhoods were originally military bases and now house the children of former soldiers. These military neighborhoods were segregated along sectarian and regional lines so that certain populations, like the Alawis, would remain permanently separate and vulnerable, and their places of living identifiable for potential future violence. In this way, spatial divisions distinguished those supporting and protected by the regime from outsiders and possible targets of violence.
• These divisions also allowed for the dispensing of patronage to loyal groups and exclusion of other groups. This is expressed through preferred access to public employment, especially in the military, and access to appropriate land for some neighborhoods and exclusion from these benefits for others.
• Jobs in the security forces are especially valuable for friends and family networks, as they give that social group privileged access to all sorts of government services and opportunities (92).
• The spatial segregation of rural migrants to urban areas also resulted in a lack of integration, the formation of prejudices against the rural migrants by urbanites, and the exclusion of rural migrants from traditional societal and economic spheres of urban areas. This enforced the isolation and dependence of the rural migrants upon the Syrian government.
• The forced participation of citizens in the nationalist Baathist project, such as through the restriction of certain consumption practices for import substitution schemes, creates a fatigue among the citizenry. It inculcates a feeling of constant service and the sense that the people serve the government, not the other way around (94-95).

 

Chapter 3:

• The political project begun by the Baathist state in the 1970s featured a social and economic transformation of the country, which in turn required a new type of political subject. While the economic and social aims of Baathism were later abandoned, the project of constructing a new model of citizenship continued. The construction of new modes of citizenship was most intense through popular associations, especially the Revolutionary Youth Union and the Pioneers Organization (97).
• A common motif of schoolhood and education among the Baath Generation, those growing up in the 1970s to 1990s, was the dominance of military orders and styles within schools, especially focusing on the khaki uniforms.
• Among many members of the Baath Generation, this elicited disgust at the thought of having been enrolled in quasi military activities and shouted patriotic slogans at school, as well as for the color khaki in general.
• One man also complained that the military focus meant children were not taught other important subjects, like foreign languages. He cited the militarist dominance of education as a result for national stagnation and decline (102).
• Schools were constant sites of political activity, and students were compelled to participate in performances of political loyalty and fervor, such as publicly mourning the death of Basil al Assad in 1994.
• Schools all had a ‘guide’, associated with the Baath party and always described as having connections with security forces, and military instructors. These figures wielded immense power and fear, and connections with them, through participation in the Shabiba or other organizations, allowed students to access this power even as they were coopted into structures of surveillance and discipline through denouncing their classmates.
• Students were traditionally targets of recruitment into leftist, nationalist, and revolutionary groups dating back as far as the 1920s and including both poor rural and middle class urban youths (106).
• Participation in popular associations, like the Shabiba or parachutist courses at high school, gave participants not only additional education or professional opportunities, but also was associated with high social status and embodiment of the nationalist project, as these cadres were praised by state institutions.
• Raising the social status and public position of members of the Shabiba and other groups also served the regime’s purposes by giving it the stories of genuinely heroic and nationalist people whose sacrifices towards the nationalist cause could be used to covered up narratives of corruption, greed, and brutality.
• Students who opposed the Syrian government tried to avoid participation in these popular associations, despite their career benefits, and sought other social groups, originally the Muslim Brotherhood or Communist groups (109).
• The Shabiba, National Union of Students, and other popular associations formed a backbone of support for Bashar al Assad in the 2011 civil war. Despite the supposed weakness and careerism of its membership, they formed important groups for organizing recruitment and support for the government (109-110).
• Family life often acted as a constraining factor within Syria, with parents teaching children how to behave and to avoid oppositional politics in general. Fear of revenge against a family member was often used as rationale for avoiding political activity.
• Unlike in North Korea or Stalinist Russia, where families were turned against themselves as informants, in Syria the integrity of the family is used to curtail dissent. Political opposition will result in the punishment and destruction of one’s family, beginning with the interrogation of family members and resulting in the exclusion of family from professional or educational opportunities (111).
• Many felt that families, especially their fathers, enforced and replicated the repression of the Hafez al Assad government within their own lives, performing repressive actions, like the burning of forbidden books or beating sons who risked arrest, themselves and thus becoming a tool of the regime.
• Syrians often describe their experiences of living under the Hafez al Assad government in terms of debasement, degradation, and being forced into behaviors that made them feel unworthy or unclean.
• The economic crisis and severe shortages of food and other basic goods during the 1980s and early 1990s contributed greatly to these perceptions, as citizens described feeling humiliated and exhausted by having to wait in huge lines for goods or needing to purchase food, sometimes tainted, illegally on the black market to survive.
• The feeling of exhaustion as a result of everyday life in particular related to politics, as it was often used as a reason for avoiding political activity.
• The presence of violence in everyday life debased the people, who described witnessing ordinary citizens being beaten by security officials for minor infractions or for no reason at all. The commonality of security personnel on the street created an impression that anyone could meet a similar fate, thus creating a feeling of powerlessness, weakness, and fear.
• The presence of shabiha, criminals linked to regime bosses, especially along the coast, created another layer of insecurity and fear. They often harassed civilians, trespassed, and intimidated or raped young women (119-120).
• The ease with which violence could be deployed against someone created feeling of precarity, as did the the routine inability to obtain economic security. Both created conditions were Syrians felt like their lives were dominated by unaccountable forces beyond their control (120).
• Those close to the Syrian government received special privileges, like access to better public services, free electricity, or the ability to shop for goods in Lebanon. Their experience of life was thus very different and contrasted with the general abdication of Syrians as a result of the economic crisis of the 1980s and inspired loyalty (117).
• Supporters of the al Assad governments subscribe to the government line that Hafez al Assad prevented government splintering and fracture. Hafez al Assad is viewed as keeping a fragile society together and defending that project from enemies like the Muslim Brotherhood (120-121).
• They assume that this fracturing of the country, similar to what happened in Lebanon, is the worst case scenario and its prevention justifies regime violence. In this sense, any action to maintain this unity and fight the opposition, like the Brotherhood, is justified and supported (120-121).
• National identity, and the individual identities constructed in reference to it, changed throughout time. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were constructed in reference to Arab nationalism, particularly the liberation of Palestine, and socialism, with the goal of building an egalitarian society (122-123).
• Some Syrian artists and writers talked about the difficulty of reconciling their Arab nationalism with their opposition to the al Assad government. As they supported the aim of liberating Palestine and the Golan Heights, but did not want to buy into the idea that this goal necessitated accepting dictatorship. Some felt trapped by their support of elements of the regime position.
• A Syrian leftist, imprisoned from 1991 to 2000, writes that her group was hopelessly esoteric and politically pointless, but still viewed participation in this Communist circle as preferable to supporting the regime or remaining politically neutral, as it gave her political agency.

 

Chapter 4:

• Syrians constantly anticipate regime violence and expected that massive retaliatory violence will be the response to any concerted challenge to the government.
• This belief was created by the experience and rumours of government violence in Hama in the late 1970s, and especially in 1982. Syrians described violence in relation to the Hama massacre and fear that the government will ‘do Hama again’.
• Open discussion of the Hama events or the Islamist insurgency of the 1970s and 1980s is taboo and the subject is not mentioned in any history courses or textbooks. An official narrative exists, but the larger regime approach to barring any discussion of the incident.
• Censorship during the 1980s meant that no reliable journalistic accounts of the events in Hama exist in the public record. As no certified narrative exists, the event is subject to multiple conflicting interpretations.
• Those who supported the al Assad government echoed a specific interpretation of events and justified regime violence in reference to the violence of the Islamist insurgency and the danger it posed (137-138).
• Many Syrians, especially those who suffered in Hama or lost family members during the massacre, feel that their silence about the massacre, or their collection of widow’s pensions, is a form of complicity in the violence and crime.
• The estimated number of dead from the Hama massacre is between 10,000 and 25,000, according to Amnesty International. The more conservative estimate is more believable (135).
• The role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Islamist insurgency is unclear, as prominent Brothers deny any involvement, or claim that they only became aware of the insurgents when the regime began attacking Brothers in 1980. However, insurgents claims that the Brotherhood encouraged them to engage in violence and supported their group.
• Many of the narratives and recollections of the Hama violence and the insurgency are framed in ways that exonerate the storyteller and place blame for the violence on others. They recalling feeling exposed to violence if they did not support the government, thus justifying the fact that they did nothing to challenge it.
• Residents or former residents of Hama cited the widespread belief that regime was weak as reason for the uprising to occur (142).
• Islamism, including Brotherhood membership, and public displays of piety became popular during the 1970s. This was partially a form of private resistance against the massive expansion of Baath power into everyday life.
• This group’s recollections of the violence in Hama took the form of testimonies of violence against friends and family members. Many incidents are very similar to those reported by international human rights organizations, especially the massacre of neighbors and soldiers entering housing to loot and threatening to rape women.
• A number of Hamawis frame the conflict between the Baathists and the Islamists along class and rural-urban divides. In these tellings, the poor Sunnis and rural peasants supported the Baath to steal from the wealthy urbanites. These narratives focus on the domination of the city by the countryside (145).
• The violence of the Hama massacre cannot be totally forgotten or erased because the city is still partially destroyed and physical ruins of the city are daily reminders for the residents and visitors of the destruction in 1982.
• The actions of the government in rebuilding parts of the city, often not to completion, are viewed as especially insulting because their willful refusal to recognize the violence means that resting places (read: mass graves) of Hamawis are disrespected during the rebuilding process.
• The exclusion of Hamawis from urban planning means that the act of rebuilding is opposed to the local project of remembering and commemorating the destruction and massacre of Hama in 1982 (149-150).
• The experience and memory of violence in Hama in 1982 continues to shape the contemporary behavior of survivors and their children. In some cases, this is the avoidance of certain mundane activities, in others it causes severe mental issues and generates humiliation and debasement in the rest of life.
• These feelings are also greatly increased by the requirement that survivors participate in silence about the events and often public performances celebrating Hafez al Assad. This creates feelings of deep alienation from society, depression, and humiliation
• Humiliation and abjection were further produced by the impunity for those perpetrating crimes in Hama. The utter lack of justice created feelings of debasement and made the torture and beatings suffered in 1982 more raw and emotionally triggering (154).
• Victims of this violence reported the experience of violence deepened historical feelings of persecution and discrimination, as well as separation from those Syrian social groups they hold responsible for the violence. It also made them feel as if their grievances were entirely unaddressed (157).
• Hama was neither unique nor alone, and the Syrian government responded to political opposition in similar ways with massacres. Smaller version of the ‘Hama events’ were repeated in small towns and villages across the country, most recently in al Suwayda in 2000. This meant that the same psychological and emotional legacies of the Hama massacre are more widely spread among the population (154-155).

 

Chapter 5:

• The 2011 Syrian uprising started in Daraa in response to the detention and torture of schoolchildren and spread to other cities in solidarity. The government’s first response was gunfire and violence, but it took around 6 months for peaceful opposition protests to transform into opposition violence (159).
• The first reactions of the Syrian government were violent and the used of military tactics against protests, such as establishing cordons, laying siege, and cutting off the water and electricity of opposition areas. This instantly made the uprising look like a war (169-170).
• Defections of military officers and soldiers to the opposition resulted in the outbreak of actual civil war, as these groups concentrated in areas of minimal conflict and then launched attacks on the government (170).
• The Syrian state governs using certain techniques and methods meant to evoke the emotions of horror, confusion, uncertainty, and ghoulishness; often by blurring the ability of citizens to distinguish between reality and fiction (161).
• This uncertainty and uncanny relation to truth and life was demonstrated by the case of Zaynab al Hosni, whose family was informed she was killed and dismembered by security forces, only for her to appear alive on TV and denounce her death as a fabrication. This created general uncertainty and horror resulting from that uncertainty.
• All those who witnessed the appearance of Zaynab al Hosni on TV expressed bewilderment and her mother said that she terrified about being unable to know if her daughter was alive, raising questions about whether the woman on TV was an imposter or whose body had she been showed at the morgue.
• The Syrian government deliberately withholds information, including about life and death, to create a sense of bewilderment and helplessness among the population. Doing so prevents firm narratives of events from establishing among the population in opposition to official records, even if those official versions are challenged and disbelieved.
• Being able to tell that the government is lying does not necessarily make finding the truth easier nor does it significantly diminish the effect of horror evoked by the government’s distortion of facts and obfuscation of the truth.
• Syrians generally expect another massacre to take place, and assume that this violence with take a similar form as the 1982 massacre in Hama.
• Both sides of the Syrian civil war reduced the other to stereotypes: to regime supporters, the opposition were all Islamists and jihadis, and to the opposition, all Assad soldiers were shabiha thugs (170-171).
• Rhetoric implicating all oppositionists as terrorists and all loyalists as complicit in violence, as well as the actual involvement of the civilian population in violence through their recruitment into loyalist or rebel paramilitaries, has polarized Syria into two enemy population, where the other civilian group is viewed as an extension of the enemy and thus an acceptable target of violence.
• Images of the civil war are carefully managed by the regime, especially regarding its own soldiers. They are painted as nationalist patriotic martyrs, with national symbols and pictures of Bashar al Assad center stage and other connections, such as grieving families, being excluded or marginalized. This serve to present a narrative of unity, even though the Assadist side is deeply divided against itself (171-172).
• The author chooses to focus on the intimate and personal aspect of massacres, rather than all forms of mass killing. This means that chemical attacks are deliberately excluded (173).
• Although Syrian government forces are necessary for creating the military conditions required for massacres to be carried out, they are usually not directly involved in the violence, which is instead carried about by Baath brigades, Shabiha, or other paramilitaries, often those recruited from the same town or area.
• The Syrian government uses indiscriminate violence in carrying out massacres, often injuring or killing its allies as well as opposition supporters. This actually goes to serve regime narratives, as the death of obviously pro Assad figures or attacks on loyalist villages lends credence to claims that opposition figures are responsible for the massacre or other murders (178-181).
• The lack of clear information able to determine who is responsible for which massacre further the sense of the uncanny and horrific aspect of violence.
• The lack of clear access to the truth about violence in Syria is not only a consequence of an opaque media system, but also a deliberate tactic of violence, wherein targets for massacre are selected so that the identity of perpetrators and victims is unclear and can be contested for political gain.

Conclusion:

• Under the Assad governments, from 1970 onward, Syria existed under a ‘civil war regime’ that perpetuated a continuous state of potential and actual violence between the rulers and ruled.
• This system divided the population alongside the lines of loyalist or opposition using spatial arrangements, dispensation of patronage, exposure to or protection from violence, and rhetoric.
• The oppositional populations was targeted for extreme violence and regarded as a drain on that country that could be sacrificed and exterminated if necessary. Citizens were heavily implicated in this violence, as the government forced civilians to divide along lines of either being victims or perpetrators of violence.
• The state specifically and intentionally reinforced sectarian divisions in society, especially the privileged position of Alawites, to split society. In this way, Alawis were differentiated from the general population, who resented them, and made dependent on the state and particularly on the military.
• The exposure of the general population to violence, particularly those members who have committed proscribed acts, creates a fear and anxiety. They seek to protect themselves by becoming involved in clientist networks that provide protection in return for participation in the policing and punishment of other citizens, as well as involvement in further criminal activity.
• Prisons served to reform and correct ‘aberrant’ political behaviors by forcing prisoners to degrade themselves. In this way, extreme violence and damage to the body was used as a method of reforming the soul and the prisoner’s behavior through pain, humiliation, and the resultant emotional and psychological effects.
• The techniques of governance used in prisons, namely arbitrary violence and constant degradation with the threat of brutal force, were also applied in lesser forms to the rest of Syrian life. The omnipresent nature of security forces and the idea that one was always under surveillance and at risk structured citizenship in a similar way that it did to prisoners, forcing them out of politics and away from any confrontation with authority.
• Memories of massacres, especially the 1982 Hama massacre, and the threat of future massacres also structures Syrian political and social life, as it is assumed that this will be the response to any major challenge to the state.
• The inability of Hamawis to commemorate, discussion, or properly bury those killed during the massacre creates an additional sense of humiliation and powerlessness. This inability to challenge the state also creates feelings of guilt at one’s own coerced participation in patriotic events and silence (199).
• The immense violence of the government, its willingness to lie, and its corruption combine to create a surreal system by which the actual perpetrators or victims of violence are unknown. There are multiple believable options, and the confusion and bewilderment of being unable to discern is to the political advantage of the regime.

 

Postscript:

• A Syrian woman described the 2011 revolution as a redemption by individuals who refused to live in shame, a word often used to describe life in Syria. Opposition to the regime was seen as a way of reclaiming humanity and agency.
• The continuous wave of arrests of opposition figures and activists throughout the 1990s and 2000s indicates that the Syrian government never succeeded in making the population totally abject, rebellion and defiance continued (203).

 

The commonality of practices in prisons and outside can be expanded further, especially in the performance of deadly violence in prisoners=massacres, and guilt of massacre victims=coerced complicity in violence and torture.

 

Why no focus on chemical weapons and air force? It is not intimate or personal, but that just means it is another type of violence. A deeply inhuman violence that can be brought to bear by the regime.

 

Analysis does not make sufficient use of gendered forms of violence, esp. the commonality of sexualized violence. This is a special form of degradation; the author notes that sexual violence is used to debase prisoners because it leaves deep psychological scars, but does not look at the social context of this violence. The sexual violence towards men, including rape, and threatened or actual sexual violence towards female relatives remove and reverse male sexual agency and sexual expectations and roles within Syrian society. This is thus another area were state practices of violence humiliate and shame by robbing prisoners/citizens of an aspect of their identity: their sexual identity.

 

Connect the points raised in the book to broader discussions of governance through crime/fear/anxiety in other settings. Say that the general conclusions of these studies support the contentions of the author, who fills a valuable role by discussing how the Syrian government created these general societal feelings of anxiety, exposure, and debasement.