Necropolitics: The Taxonomies of Death in Syria (2)
Bare life and political opponents
Quickly after seizing power, the Baath party produced internal and external enemies to mobilize the population and maintain supremacy over state institutions. In the early days, most of these enemies were within the Baath and hence the purges quickly took place within the party. Once Baath leaders who constituted a threat to Assad’s rule were thrown in jail, the focus shifted to the Muslim Brotherhood and Iraqi Baath members. Since the 2011 revolt, the contours of internal and external enemies became blurred and overnight a large segment of the Syrian population became the enemy and was reduced to bare life.
Since it seized power on March 8, 1963, the Baath party has instrumentalized the state of emergency to crush its political enemies. The main enemy during the initial period was within the military and the party, as well as among the allies that supported its coup. The historic partner of the Baath party, Akram Hourani, was isolated because he disapproved of the union with Egypt and the Baath’s close relationship with the Nasserists. Even the Nasserists, who helped the Baathists overthrow the Separatist Officers, were purged. Gradually, non-Alawi officers were removed from strategic positions within the army and replaced by Alawi officers. Michel Aflaq and his followers were marginalized at the Baath Sixth National Congress.45 Salim Hatoum, a Druze Major, led a failed coup in September 1966, and was quickly pushed away along with other Druze officers. Between 1963 and 1970, there were several rebellions in Damascus, Hama, and Aleppo in addition to intra-party conflicts, which led to purges of military officers who opposed Assad and Jadid.
In 1966, Jadid and the leftist branch of the Baath took control, but were deposed in 1970. The fact that Assad and Jadid relied on Alawis and other minorities to seize power in 1963, and the subsequent appointment of Alawis and family members in strategic positions within the military, led to the marginalization of Sunnis from the military and other positions of power within the regime. Early on, Assad developed a tactical prowess in sectarian maneuvering that slowly made sectarian politics one of the pillars of the Syrian regime, and one of the strategies for political control.46 With each purge, Assad depleted his social base and alienated new segments of the population who supported Nasserism, Aflaq, or Hourani.
After Assad’s 1970 coup and the Muslim Brotherhood’s revolt in the mid-1970s, Islamists became the regime’s new target. The legal system was redesigned and weaponized primarily against them. The Syrian regime built a matrix of power to control state and society. Article 8 in the Constitution of 1973 explains, “[t]he leading party in the society and the state is the Socialist Arab Baath Party.”47 To maintain control over society and state, Assad built a triangle of power, namely, the military and security apparatuses, the Baath party with more than a million members, and an extensive bureaucracy of the state.48 The initial confrontation with the Muslim Brotherhood erupted when the requirement for the president to be Muslim was briefly removed from the new constitution. This led to intense opposition, which forced the regime to back down and reinstitute the religion of the head of state as Muslim. As the confrontation between the regime and the Muslim Brothers intensified, Assad tried to split their party by building a close relationship with the Damascus branch, which was led by Essam Attar. The other two branches, namely, the ones based in Hama and Aleppo, were more radical and did not believe the regime would make concessions or could be reformed. They chose a military confrontation with it, which would be violent and last until 1982.
In 1980, the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau) headed by Riyad el-Turk, the Democratic Arab Socialist Union (led by Jamal al-Atassi), and several smaller parties created the National Democratic Rally (NDR), a secular and progressive front. The Rally called for the overthrow of Assad’s regime and the transition toward a democratic society. State violence against the Muslim Brotherhood intensified, and residents who lived in the wrong neighborhoods were indiscriminately killed for their supposed support of the Islamists. Aleppo was the target of Syrian forces in 1980, when several quarters (see Figure 2.3) were put under siege for extended periods before being attacked for their alleged support of the “gangs.” French scholar Raphaël Lefèvre notes,
[b]y mid-March 1980, units of the Third Army Division entered the city, their commander, General Shafiq Fayadh, warning the townspeople that he was “prepared to kill a thousand men a day to rid the city of the vermin of the Muslim Brothers.”49
The NDR formed an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood to oppose state violence, but its leaders and many members were put in jail, while others fled.50 The regime understood the NDR represented a real threat to the regime’s legitimacy because it proposed a democratic, progressive, and secular program that many Syrians would have supported.
After the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000, public intellectuals and opposition leaders issued a statement that requested more openness and true democratic reforms. The Damascus Spring, which was confined to intellectuals and political circles, organized public discussions about some of the most pressing issues facing society, such as democracy in Syria, economic justice, and the role of youth in society.51 The NDR, which was banned in 1980, was revived in 2000 and called for the end of the state of emergency, as well as the release of political prisoners.52 It also began opening cultural clubs and forums in most large cities. Those involved in the movement “may not have shared ideological affinities, but were nevertheless committed to some form of political reform within the country.”53
Many leaders involved in the Damascus Spring had been previously in prison for many years for their opposition to the Assad regime. The regime recognized the potential threat that such a democratic movement could trigger, and thus repressed it swiftly. “In an interview of 9 February in the Saudi daily Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, the president called the activists of the Damascus Spring witting or unwitting enemy agents.”54 The forums were closed, and leading figures of the movement were put in jail or threatened by the Mukhabrat.55 After crushing the Islamist rebellion in 1982, the regime perceived secular groups as the main threat. Citing an Egyptian journalist who was present in Damascus in 2010, Raphaël Lefèvre notes,
a closed seminar on secularism at Damascus University attended by no more than 100 people from the ranks of progressives and democrats was banned by the authorities, while two weeks [earlier] a conservative cleric was allowed to preach in Aleppo, in the north of the country, in a sermon attended by 6,000 people.56
With the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Syrian regime borrowed from the Western dominant discourse about terrorism and counter-terrorism. Many post-colonial countries, including Syria, were more than eager to embrace the new discourse about the global War on Terror. To reinforce their power, these regimes were perfectly willing to attune their legal and repressive apparatuses to the United States new discourse about the war on terror and terrorism. In Syria, many were thrown in jail for “membership in an association created to change the economic or social structure of the state or the fundamental fabric of society” through “terrorist means.”57 The Syrian legal code was now in phase with its Western counterpart.
Shortly after the attack, the USA outsourced torture and arbitrary detention to Arab countries, including Syria. The Syrian prison system became an important node and an integral part in the global war against terrorism.58 In every instance, the Syrian regime banned political activities and closed political spaces, and stripped individuals of their political rights, reducing them to bare life. The security approach of the Mukhabrat did not abide by any legal code. Detention without trial, torture, and summary killings were commonplace throughout the reign of the Assad family.
Finally, with the Arab revolts in 2011, the focus of the regime shifted to criminalizing popular protests. When the state of emergency was lifted in 2011 due to popular pressure, the regime quickly replaced it with counterterrorism laws in 2012 and instrumentalized the legal system against protesters and political opponents. In the same vein, counterterrorism courts were weaponized against prominent human rights activists.59
The Syrian regime resorted to repression and violence every time it faced a political crisis. Instead of proposing a peaceful resolution, it eliminated its political opponents and opted for more repression. The central demand of Syrians, who opposed it, regardless of their political affiliation, was always to put an end to the state of emergency. In every instance, the regime criminalized its political opponents and stripped them of their basic rights. Regardless of their political affinities, they were treated as terrorists with no civic rights. Agamben explains that bare life (zoe) is a necessary outside that constitutes political life (bios). The sovereign is the one that defines the inside and outside of polity. While Agamben’s conceptualization is useful for understanding the state of emergency beyond a legalistic framework, it does not sufficiently address the specificities of regions located in the peripheries of the West. Political life (bios) in the Western sense (political parties, freedom of the press, independent judiciary system, free elections, etc.) is non-existent in a despotic country such as Syria.60 Since 1963, the Syrian state has systematically suppressed political spaces whenever they emerged. As such, there is a need to rethink the Agambenian perspective outside a European context.
Necropolitics and the Syrian revolt
Achille Mbembe, a post-colonial intellectual from Cameroon, argues that the state of exception first emerged in the colony, not the metropole. Unlike Agamben, he is interested in exploring the topography of violence in colonized spaces instead of Europe. While Agamben examines the origins of the state of exception within the European continent, Mbembe shows that it is imperative to study its deployment in the colonies. His work can help us explore the implications of the state of emergency in a context such as the Syrian one.
Mbembe explains that Nazi genocidal politics, for example, would not have been possible without the history of European violence in the colonies. In other words, Nazism originated, on the one hand, in European colonialism, and on the other, in the development of bureaucracy in Europe. The convergence of these two moments produced new technologies to serialize and bureaucratize death. Mbembe writes, following the intellectual Enzo Traverso,
…the gas chambers and ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanization and industrializing death, one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army).61
In a post-colonial context, the guiding question for Mbembe is, “Under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?”62 He explores this question through a critique of Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. The French intellectual developed the concept of biopolitics to understand the new mechanism of power in Europe. “Biopolitics” refers to the rationalities required for the administration of a population through mechanisms that foster life. The main problem is that Foucault does not pay enough attention to “politics as the work of death.” To analyze the politics of death, Mbembe suggests that “necropolitics” rather than “biopolitics” is a more adequate conceptual framework to study the power of the sovereign in the Global South. Simply put, necropolitics refers to the creation of death zones where human lives are destroyed without tangible consequences for the sovereign.
Mbembe revisits Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to show that necropolitics rather than biopolitics is the “lived experience” of the subaltern in the Global South. Necropolitics is the dark side of biopower in the same way that the colony is the dark side of the metropole. The state of exception for Mbembe is the space where necropower operates by deploying its lethal power and making decisions about who can live and who must die.
Mbembe explains that slavery is one of the most important modern manifestations of terror. As such, the slave experiences triple loss: “loss of a ‘home,’ loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether).”63 He explores the ways in which necropolitics circulates in space and how it takes place. The spatialization of necropolitics is an important element to understanding how this type of power operates. In other words, necropolitics creates “death worlds” where the enemy is targeted and where necropower operates. The destructive power of necropolitics is deployed in these death worlds to subjugate populations “to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”64
Mbembe’s theoretical framework allows for a better understanding of how the politics of death operates in a post-colonial context such as the Syrian one. The colonial project of Europe could be understood as the externalization of violence from the European continent and its dissemination in the colonies. Mbembe notes,
To properly assess the efficacy of the colony as a formation of terror, we need to take a detour into the European imaginary itself as it relates to the critical issue of the domestication of war and the creation of a European juridical order (Jus publicum Europaeum).65
The process of democratization in Europe produced better living conditions for European workers. There are evidently many exceptions to this general trend including the violence which workers and subaltern groups are regularly subjected to when they threaten the interests of the state and elite classes allied to it. As a result, white workers in Europe had access to socio-economic benefits unavailable to their counterparts in the Global South. The social contract between European workers and elites led to higher labor costs within the continent. Consequently, cheap labor and the conditions to sustain it had to be created outside Europe. The transatlantic slave trade and colonization were the solution for cheaper labor. Europe gradually exported its violence to the peripheries and created an uneven map of terror and exploitation. As such, the study of violence in the periphery is vital to better understanding the state of exception.
Agamben’s study of the state of exception in Nazi Germany is therefore the second phase of what had already taken place in the peripheries.
Aimé Césaire, the anti-colonial intellectual from Martinique, writes about French colonial violence in Discourse on Colonialism (1972),
First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.66
Césaire emphasizes the weight of colonial violence in the production of savagery in Europe. By focusing on the state of exception in Europe without highlighting its origins in the colony, Agamben downplays the organic relationship between center and periphery.
While Mbembe’s “necropolitics” addresses Agamben’s Eurocentric framework, it brings a different tension when deployed in the Syrian context. The main issue with Mbembe’s theoretical framework is that his topography of death revolves around the lived experience of the slave. The slave provides free labor, and as such must be kept alive. He “is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury.”67 Syrians, who are the objects of necropower, are not perceived as essential for the society or the economy. The primary object of the Syrian economy, as we will see in Chapter 4, is to help maintain power. Unlike the productive slave, whose life should be preserved since it is vital for the plantation economy, a Syrian citizen is not essential to the regime, and as such can be disposed of. In the Syrian context, necropolitical spaces are populated with people with no tangible economic value and are not worth keeping alive, especially when they threaten the despotic order.
The following section examines six aspects of necropolitical processes in Syria since 2011. These processes are not new for the most part, but they have been deployed more extensively since 2011. The prison system and dentition centers, which are central in necropolitics are discussed below. The codification of necropolitics in the Syrian context will require additional research, but the technologies of violence described below can help navigate the geography of violence in the current complex conflict.
Yasser Munif, The Syrian Revolution, Pluto Press, 2020)
Notes
45. Hinnebusch, Syria, 44–60.
46. See Nikolaos Van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria: Politics and Society Under Asad and the Ba’th Party (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).
47. Carnegie Middle East Center, “Syrian Constitution 1973–2012.”
48. Ziadeh, The Years of Fear, 12–14.
49. Raphaël Lefèvre, Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 76.
50. James A. Paul, Syria Unmasked (New York: Human Rights Watch. 1991).
51. “The Damascus Spring,” Carnegie Middle East Center. Last Modified April 1, 2012. Accessed May 20, 2019. https://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/48516?lang=en.
52. Human Rights Watch, “A wasted decade: human rights in Syria during Bashar al-Asad’s first ten years in power.” Last Modified July 16, 2010. Accessed May 20, 2019. www.hrw.org/report/2010/07/16/wasted-decade/human-rights-syria-during-bashar-al-asads-first-ten-years-power.
53. Samer Abboud, Syria, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 56.
54. Atassi, The Strength of an Idea, 358–9.
55. Mukhabrat refers to intelligence branches or individuals. There are three security branches in Syria: General Intelligence, Military Intelligence, and Air Force Intelligence.
56. Lefèvre, Ashes of Hama, 158.
57. “Far from justice Syria’s Supreme State Security Court,” Human Rights Watch. Last modified February 24, 2009, Accessed May 19, 2019. www. hrw.org/report/2009/02/24/far-justice/syrias-supreme-state-security-court.
58. Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing torture,” New Yorker. Last modified February 6, 2005. Accessed May 19, 2019. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/02/14/outsourcing-torture.
59. “Syria: Counterterrorism Court used to stifle dissent,” Human Rights Watch. Last modified June 25, 2013. Accessed May 19, 2019. www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/25/syria-counterterrorism-court-used-stifle-dissent.
60. In Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), Asef Bayat proposes a complex framework to examine politics in the Middle East without reproducing Orientalist tropes. He examines the various ways people organize and resist without necessarily using the language or the tools of political parties or social movements in Western countries.
61. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 18.
62. Ibid., 12.
63. Ibid., 21.
64. Ibid., 40.
65. Ibid., 23.
66. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 35–6.
67. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 21.
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