Anti-US Demonstration Turns Anti-Regime

This report of a demonstration in down town Damascus was sent to me by a friend, who didn't want his name used. He included good photos, but I cannot upload them, alas.

A Glimpse Beneath the Surface:
An Anti-US Gathering Displays an Anti-Regime Flavor

A peaceful anti-American protest organized by the Syrian Communist Party turned messy on Saturday, February 18, as the crowd turned against government forces and shouted against the Bath Party. Some 200 day laborers and farmers from the city as well as the country’s interior, school-aged children, and even Muslim women gathered at 3:00 PM in front of the Communist headquarters near the upscale Shahbandar Square neighborhood in central Damascus, repeating slogans aimed at the US occupation of Iraq and displaying signs in support of the “glorious” Iraqi insurgency. A heavy uniformed police and plainclothes secret police presence watched quietly and approvingly along the sidelines for some two hours of protesting.

At 5:00, the situation changed abruptly with the lightning quick arrest of a small group of participants, who were shoved into the back of the Syrian intelligence forces' trademark white Peugeots. Immediately, some older women (perhaps relatives of the arrested) began weeping and confronted the uniformed policemen, shouting at them. Minutes later, more Peugeots rushed onto the scene as plainclothes men with machine guns rushed out to try and disperse the angry crowd. Some time between the two waves of car arrivals, police fired a round into the air and some of the assembled screamed in shock.

The situation quickly escalated as two separate groups of young- and middle-aged men and women began fist-fighting with policemen. Perhaps most shockingly for those accustomed to the carefully-choreographed nature of political protest in Damascus, the crowd then began jumping and shouting in unison for 10 minutes until they were physically stopped: “It’s our party [the Communists]! It’s our party! We want jobs! We dare you to stop us!” Within moments, neighborhood onlookers and protest participants were text messaging others on their cellular phones; nervous plainclothes agents confiscated some phones and took this narrator's digital camera memory card.

By 5:20 the city block was sealed off by dozens of red transit police cars and even more police and intelligence officers who would not let anybody in or out of the neighborhood. By coincidence or design, electricity for the block went off for a half an hour henceforth. Until approximately 10:00 that evening there remained scores of heavily armed plainclothes forces crawling around the residential neighborhood – behind bushes, in apartment complex stairwells, and in the middle of the street. By 10:30 things were back to normal and the only sign that a struggle had occurred was a solitary damaged storefront.

The incident sheds light on the regime’s ability to rapidly capture key “troublemakers,” calm the scene (although perhaps with mixed success on this occasion), and, most importantly, contain the situation from spreading. People as close as a block away would not have been able to know what occurred – all they would have been able to see was a cordon of police vehicles, not an uncommon sight in the city. The incident will never be reported in the media outlets from which ordinary Syrians receive their news. The stealth of the government's response to a small-scale expression of outrage at arbitrary arrests will likely have a severe chilling effect on the word-of-mouth that might normally help spread news of such an occurrence.

Gatherings with an anti-regime flavor are not unheard of in the interior regions of the country, especially the restive, Kurdish-dominated northeast, and the Iraqi-leaning eastern border, where most of the Syrian contribution to the Iraqi insurgency are reputed to have hailed from. Such overt acts of resistance in the face of regime forces are far rarer in the ritzy heart of the capital. The only political activity the neighborhood had witnessed in the past six months was a carefully-managed anti-US/UN rally in October and the recent burning of the Danish embassy not far away. The Communist Party, originally founded by a Kurd, is one of a handful of parties that are allowed to exist in a system that is constitutionally-dominated by the Ba’th Party. Because it draws most of its support from the workers and farmers, the presence of dozens of covered Muslim women active in the crowd was surprising.