Month: August 2013
Mapping Syrian civil society
My two Middle East Institute interns, Ala’ Alrababa’h and Idon Natanzon, have spent time this summer talking to civil society organizations both inside Syria and in the diaspora, especially in the US but also in Canada and Europe. The objective was to map Syrian civil society by understanding as best we could the objectives, views, constituencies, activities, shortcomings and needs of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Together they collected data on 65 organizations, which is far from the total number out there but enough to sketch a preliminary snapshot of a civil society struggling to meet urgent needs with less than adequate means and insufficient collaboration.
We won’t be publishing the data collected, as that would make life easier for those who see many of these organizations as threatening. But here is what Ala’ (with the kind assistance of Somar Abdullah of the Center for Civil Society and Democracy in Syria) and Idon found in broad strokes:
Inside Syria
Civil society organizations and civilian opposition in Syria are largely disorganized, overlapping, and do little coordination or even networking with similar groups. In addition to the difficulties in communicating inside Syria today, this is due to inexperience. Because of the emergency law, little formal civil society activity existed in Syria until the late 1990s, when restrictions were relaxed.
Two prominent organizations that existed prior to the revolution were the regime-sponsored Syria Trust for Development and the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies. Asma al-Asad, President Asad’s wife, started the Syria Trust in 2001. The organization’s activities included Firdos, which focused on economic development in rural areas, but the project came to a halt in 2011. The Trust now organizes small-scale service work in regime-controlled areas. The Damascus Center started in 2005 and has since published extensively on human rights inside Syria.
Since the 2011 uprising, hundreds of organizations have sprung up around Syria. Many are limited in their activities to the Internet, but others are engaged actively with their communities. They conduct relief work, political opposition, and research simultaneously, sometimes to the detriment of efficiency and objectivity.
The NGOs fall into five, not always mutually exclusive, categories: Islamist organizations, minority organizations, regime-related organizations, youth organizations, and other, unaffiliated organizations.
Most of the many Islamist organizations are unnamed and use mosques to organize relief work. In addition, two main civilian Islamist groups exist in the rebel-controlled north. Neither is moderate. The Islamic Liberation Party focuses on missionary work (Da’wa) and support for militias. The Muslim Youth Committee works mainly on providing services.
Generally speaking, organizations that deal with minority affairs are political. They represent minority interests and organize protests. Some also conduct relief work for members of their group. Others, like the Assyrian Union Party, have affiliated militias.
The Popular Front for Change and Liberation is one of the most prominent groups with ties to the regime. While the Front claims to be part of the opposition, it took part in the 2012 elections, boycotted by most of the opposition, and has joined the Syrian government established after the elections.
Youth organizations inside Syria, while small, are very promising. The Alawite Bees of the Coast uses “freedom money” to encourage Alawites to join the opposition, and tries to change the misconception that all Alawites are behind the regime. The Colors Initiative and Qur’an for revolution are two other creative campaigns created by the Syrian Non-violence Movement.
Finally, unaffiliated organizations do not fit any of the previous categories. Some are mainly political, like Building the Syrian State, while others focus on humanitarian work. Bihar Relief Organization, which works on humanitarian relief and food distribution in the north, uses an efficient and transparent system system of distribution. Other relief organizations could benefit from Bihar’s experience.
The diaspora
Since the ongoing crisis in Syria erupted in 2011, dozens of diaspora advocacy and relief organizations have been organized to help meet the overwhelming humanitarian needs of Syrians living inside the country, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and the millions of refugees that this conflict has created. Prior to 2011, only a handful of Syria-focused international NGOs existed, most of whom focused solely on networking and connecting Syrian expatriates.
Three years into the crisis, the international landscape for Syrian civil society is both diverse and complicated. While the Syrian-American community is small, estimated at roughly 150,000 people, relief efforts have been organized throughout the US as well as in Canada and parts of Europe. Many of the more active groups maintain non-political and non-religious affiliations in order to provide egalitarian aid to the most at-risk communities. However, Syrian-Americans are increasingly unified in their desire to see this conflict come to an end.
Much of the work being done in support of the Syrian people is conducted without significant US government funding. The Syrian American community has shouldered the majority of financial support, while the broader American public remains distant from this cause. If these organizations intend to maintain their relief work, they must do a better job at expanding their donor bases and increasing the willingness to help among ordinary Americans.
The Syrian American organizations face common challenges, many of which they highlight themselves. These include a lack of access inside of Syria, not enough focus on long-term development, a general lack of resources, an inability to properly document human rights violations, and extreme donor fatigue. Because they operate in the same space, many groups compete for the same resources and draw from the same pool of activists. While they cooperate on humanitarian issues, many conduct identical programs and struggle to make use of best practices. Additionally, the focus on the extreme short-term need limits the organizations’ abilities to strategize about longer-term projects and planning.
The Syrian American community is becoming increasingly coordinated. Over the past year policy groups have formed the Coalition for a Democratic Syria, which coordinates government and public relations. Separately, the American Relief Coalition for Syria has brought together over a dozen of the leading humanitarian groups. Combined these new structures signal a turning point in the international landscape of Syrian civil society. There is great potential for coordination, collaboration, and expansion. But we may be reaching a point of such extreme donor fatigue that aid groups will fail to meet the ever-increasing humanitarian needs in Syria and the affected region.
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Washington’s fault
Even for someone who served abroad as an American diplomat, the Egyptian penchant for conspiracy theories about Washington’s supposed role is astonishing. So too is the crudeness of Egyptian anti-Americanism. While I was treated to a good deal of poor taste and baseless speculation about American machinations while serving as an American diplomat in Italy and Brazil, the admixture of hope for good relations with the United States was significantly greater there. Egyptians seem genuinely to dislike the US and attribute many of their ills to it.
It is difficult to understand how people as clever as the Egyptians have failed to break the code of American behavior: Washington understands that it has relatively little influence over what happens in Egypt and is prepared to accept whoever comes to power with a modicum of legitimacy and promises to steer the country towards something like a democratic outcome with as little violence as possible. That’s what happened when Mubarak fell, it is what happened when Morsi took over, and it is what happened when the demonstrations and General Sissi pushed him out.
Washington is following the Egyptian lead. If American behavior seems erratic and incomprehensible to Egyptians, that is largely because the revolutionary course the Egyptians have chosen is so unpredictable. The result is that all sides in Egypt are convinced the Americans are arrayed against them. Neither secularists nor Islamists in Egypt seem inclined to look in the mirror to see the origins of what ails their country. Both prefer to blame it all on Washington, which has been less than adroit in countering the vituperation.
This is not to say there is no basis whatsoever in the conspiracy theories. Ambassador Patterson likely did try to get General Sissi to negotiate some sort of deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. Deputy Secretary of State Burns did not spend several days in Cairo recently lounging around the embassy–he surely pushed for Sissi to clarify the future roadmap for preparing a constitution and holding new elections. The Americans will be concerned to see things in Egypt move towards relatively democratic stability, with the state’s monopoly on the legitimate means of violence restored (especially in Sinai). They may make mistakes of judgment about how that would best be accomplished, but to imagine that they want Morsi back in power, or Sissi to continue in power without elections, is just plain wrong.
I don’t begrudge Egypt its enthusiasm for its latest military rock star. General Sissi has clearly tapped some deep vein of political gold in the Egyptian body politic. But we should all recognize this cult of personality for what it is: a budding autocrat whose similarity to Gamal Abdel Nasser should raise eyebrows not only in Washington. My dean Vali Nasr predicts that the Americans will soon be back to a policy of supporting Middle Eastern autocrats against more and less radical Islamists.
I hope not. The Arab uprisings are a tremendous opportunity to encourage greater freedom in a part of the world that has seen little of it. Things are now going sour in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, and Egypt, not to mention poor Syria. Each circumstance is distinct, but in all of them the genie will be difficult to put back in the bottle. What is needed from the United States is consistent backing for democratic processes, which require relatively stable and orderly environments. The only thing we should want to be blamed for is support to those who seek human dignity and open societies.
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Syria has dropped off the screen
The White House justifications for backing out of a bilateral summit with President Putin lack one important one: Syria. The list is a long, citing (in addition to the asylum for Edward Snowden):
our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society.
Some might hope that this presages progress in convening the proposed Geneva 2 meeting on Syria, but there is no sign of that. The more than 100,000 people killed in Syria in the past 2.5 years, the 1.5-2 million who are refugees, the 4 million who are displaced inside Syria and the 7 million in humanitarian need have dropped off the radar of an administration that promised to anticipate and prevent mass atrocities.
A colleague deeply immersed in Syria asked the other day whether watching the Bosnian implosion was this bad. I answered that it was worse, because the crisis was on the front pages daily. And it went on for 3.5 years before President Clinton carried out the threat he had made during his first campaign for the presidency to bomb Serb forces. That is why it is not on the list of reasons for canceling the Obama/Putin meeting.
Why was it on the front pages every day? The proximate causes were two: the Bosnians had forceful and effective spokespeople, mainly their ambassador to the UN in New York and their wartime prime minister. Ambassador Mo Sacirbey was on CNN daily strumming the heartstrings of ordinary Americans. Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic would whip himself into a lather bemoaning the latest atrocity. Students organized against the war on college campuses, Congress held hearings, Foreign Service officers resigned and newspapers ran daily accounts of a war in which little of strategic significance was happening.
While Senator McCain and a few others have raised their voices about Syria, mobilization today against the atrocities in Syria extends little beyond the Syrian American community, which is doing its best to funnel in humanitarian assistance but has found no resonance in the broader US population. There is no recognizable and consistent Syrian voice speaking out daily on US television.
Part of the reason is political instability in the Syrian opposition, which has gone through three or four “presidents” in a couple of years, none of whom became a welcome figure in the American media. Divided international sponsorship–the Qataris backing the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudis backing less Islamist forces–underlies this instability.
The Bosnians faced similar divisions among their international sponsors: their money and weapons came from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others. But the government in Sarajevo had from the first a stable leadership: the laconic Alija Izetbegovic was the more or less uncontested first among equals, accepted even by his rivals as the legitimate president of the beleaguered Bosnian state. There was stolid consistency at the top, which helped to paper over the differences among the international donors and reduce the perceived significance in Washington of the jihadi fighters who joined the Bosnian cause.
In Syria, the Saudis, perhaps emboldened by the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are now trying to play a leadership role by offering to buy off the Russians. They have managed to install one of their favorites as president of the Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. What they have not managed to do is counter the growing significance of the extremist fighters, who have frightened Washington away from embracing the revolutionary cause.
The Syrians are not lacking in rhetorical power: sister and brother Rafif and Murhaf Jouejati here in DC do a great job trying to bring the latest atrocity to our attention. But they are doing it essentially as civil society activists rather than as official representatives of the Syrian opposition. And they are heard mostly in a narrow circle of Syria-watchers and expatriate Syrians, none of whom carry much weight in the broader American body politic. Syria really has dropped off Washington’s screen.
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The Al Qaeda conference call
This morning’s report of an intercepted conference call with participation of up to 20 Al Qaeda bosses and operatives goes some way to explaining the nonsensically broad travel warning and embassy closings of recent days. The odd configuration of closings apparently was derived from the conference call. This suggests what anyone who knows the American bureaucracy will have already guessed: we don’t pay anyone to be careless, so the system is exceedingly risk averse (without however necessarily decreasing the risk).
Also of interest is this: Washington responded to the intercept in part with drone strikes in Yemen. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula escalated the threat, causing the evacuation of Embassy Sanaa and disruption of American aid programs in a country desperately in need of them. Now both Al Qaeda and its opponents seem to be massing in Sanaa for a showdown. A movie script along these lines would hardly be credible.
Evacuation of civilian Americans from Yemen has serious implications. It is hard to picture how the flow of personnel from the Yemeni hinterland into Al Qaeda can be stemmed without solving some of Yemen’s problems with water, poverty and governance. There is every reason to believe that the drone war increases Al Qaeda recruitment, however vital it may appear to the joint chiefs in the short term.
This is a frustrating situation: a terrorist network conference call stymies the world’s last remaining super power. Ayman al Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s chief executive, has to be reasonably pleased with the effect he is having at so far minimal cost (those few “militants” killed by drones in Yemen). It might even be that the conference call was a setup, conducted entirely for the benefit of the National Security Agency’s Arabic speakers. The subsequent leaks will have indicated to Al Qaeda a good deal about American intercept capabilities, though they likely already knew most of that.
President Obama was right to underline last night on Jay Leno that Americans are far more likely to be killed in automobile accidents than in terrorist attacks. That was true even in 2001, when Al Qaeda killed close to 3000 Americans. The numbers in most years are well under 30, few of them in the United States and not all by Islamic extremists.
But that won’t satisfy the Administration’s critics, who will emphasize that the conference call suggests Al Qaeda central has been reconstituted and is directing its franchisees once again. Al Qaeda is certainly showing itself a resilient and resourceful opponent, one that manages to tie up gigantic American resources with minimum effort.
What should we be doing in this situation? Protecting our people is certainly priority one. But making sure they can conduct their diplomatic, consular, economic assistance, and other functions is also vital. I know no one who thought we were doing enough on the civilian side in Yemen before the recent threat emerged. Just restoring our people to their original effort will not be sufficient.
We need a much beefed up civilian effort in Yemen. That isn’t going to happen so long as the terrorist threat is out there. The terrorists know it. They also know they don’t actually have to carry out an attack to block governance and development efforts. They need only get us to evacuate our civilians. Yemeni employees will carry on, at great risk, but they will not be fully effective beyond the humanitarian realm without Americans or third country nationals.
A terrorist attack now might underline the point and prevent us from returning them any time soon, but the threat has already had a serious impact.
PS: On the ingredients of what is needed, see for example Daniel Green’s piece.
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Moderate tones, but Iran needs the pressure
Newly inaugurated Iranian President Rouhani held his first press conference today. The tone was moderate, even if the content was essentially unchanged: Rouhani wants a negotiated solution to the nuclear impasse, one that includes lifting of sanctions as well as an end to threats and the “secret” American agenda (read “regime change”).
Rouhani was well aware that strict new sanctions on Iran had passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives last week, which he attributed to Israeli pressure:
so the interests of a foreign country are served and imposed on representatives in Congress so that even U.S. interests are not being considered…
Most of those hoping for a negotiated solution to end Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons bemoaned this hostile signal in the run-up to this weekend’s inauguration of a relatively moderate president. The man hadn’t even finished naming his cabinet yet. The sanctions vote could have increased pressures in favor of more conservative “principalists” and undermined Rouhani in his declared intention of reaching a settlement that would relieve Iran of at least some of its economic burdens.
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You are not safer
There are many cock-eyed things about the travel alert the State Department has issued, along with the embassy and consulate closings it has ordered:
- They cover a very wide swath of the Middle East and Africa (19 countries, down a few from the original) and now a full week, making the travel warning essentially useless to anyone wanting to avoid an attack.
- The people the closings are supposedly intended to protect are those who serve abroad, most of whom live in well-known compounds often less well protected than the embassies and consulates they work in.
- It would presumably take little for the planners of an attack to postpone for a week or two.
- The warning itself is causing a good deal of the harm that an attack might cause–disrupting American diplomatic operations, convincing Americans on the home front that their government can’t protect them, casting doubt in the minds of our friends and allies about whether we are prepared the run the risks engagement on their behalf entails.
It makes me wonder: did this intercept pick up a communication Al Qaeda wanted to be heard, so as to cause damage without having to bother with all that messy bombing, maiming and killing?
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