Thanassis Cambanis

Old friend and colleague Eric Westervelt spoke with me on WBUR’s Here & Now about the diplomatic efforts to resolve the Syrian civil war, and the historical arc of the crisis in the Arab state system. You can listen here, or read the highlights as compiled by WBUR.

What are some takeaways from your time in Syria?

“There’s a bizarre sense of the clock having stopped somewhere in the 1960s or ‘70s when you step into regime-controlled Syria. The propaganda operation of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the way it’s still trying to hold onto an absolute monopoly of dishonest manipulation and a denial of the barrel bombs and torture state. All these really crusty mechanisms of trying to maintain an old-fashioned authoritarian dictatorship seem really out of tune for 2015. We start with really small things, from just outright denial up until recently that the regime was losing the war, up to really big issues like that the secular authoritarian dictatorship hasn’t figured out a way to talk about how it wants to control a country that contains minorities but also religious Islamists, and we get to sort of this big historic arc of what’s happening in the region. The Arab state system that came into being at the end of the colonial period in World War II has proven unable to serve its citizens and it has set up a sort of horrible binary choice between secular dictatorships on one hand, and Islamist extremist groups like the Islamic State on the other hand. And neither of these poles represent the vast majority of citizens, and yet in the case like Syria’s, the regime and the Islamic State have wiped out almost every force that is moderate or even just less extreme and located between these two poles, so we have a region that’s still struggling to find avatars of the aspirations of the majority of its people.”

On the extreme “poles” Syrians are forced to decide between

“The Arab states like Bashar al-Assad, or Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, or you could really pick your favorite offender, made a sort of dirty deal with the republics half a century ago. They said, we’re going to oppress you but we’re going to deliver modernity and progress, but ultimately they failed on their end of the deal. So people were oppressed and they also started getting poorer, less healthy, less educated and were missing out on what were supposed to be the benefits of this dictatorial trade-off. By design of these despots, the only viable opposition that was allowed to exist was extremist Islamist, and that self-fulfilling prophesy has led to a lot of the destruction in the region and yes, now we’re witnessing a tug of war between these extremes but the generational fight that we’re just at the beginning of is one where there’s going to be a third pole, which might not be liberal or democratic, but it certainly is not going to be something as extreme as the Islamic state. And that is, I wager, what is going to be dominating the region after this period of upheaval.”

On the views of ordinary people in Syria

“Well there’s two major groups that haven’t turned against the dictator. And one, are the real die-hard supporters of the old order, they’re not a small group. These are the ones who are, whether for ethnic reasons or because of their wealth and their well-being are tied to the regime support, aren’t going to abandon it. The other group, which is more interesting because they could shift, are folks like all the displaced Sunni Arabs and Palestinians I spoke to, who are turned off by the violence and extremism of the opposition groups, but they are in no way loyalists for the regime. What they like about regime-held Syria is that it’s a place that has room for many sects and many ethnicities and that welcomes people who are religious and people who are not religious. Beyond that, they are abused victims of the regime, like many people in the opposition areas and you can tell – some of them actually were able to speak openly about this to me – that they are yearning for some alternative, someone to be able to come and topple the regime but not replace it with a fascist religious order.”

How close is the war for people in Damascus?

“The suburbs of Damascus, many are still in rebel hands. The period I was there in early October was relatively quiet, which means I would hear dozens of barrel bombs every night and more outgoing artillery than incoming, but there were several hits a night on the city and usually a dozen or so casualties ending up in Damascus hospitals. You realize when you drive around Damascus, you have to go around rebel-held areas to join the highway going north, that this really is a city surrounded by oppositionists and that it’s very tenuously held by the regime.”

Is there anything that gives you a glimpse of hope in Syria?

“The most positive thing about Syria is the one thing that’s always been positive, which is the tremendous human capital and talent of its people. Sadly today, a lot of the most promising Syrians have taken the refugee trail to Europe or are laboring away in exile as activists who are just trying to survive here in Lebanon, in Turkey, in refugee camps elsewhere. But there is an unbelievable amount of promise among this population and it’s a population that’s become very politically awakened and mobilized over the course of this uprising. So we have a reservoir of politically savvy, educated, polyglot skilled young people – young and middle-aged people – a lot of them with real technocratic experience. So in the very slim eventuality that Syria had a political transition, you’d be able to draw on a tremendous diaspora and population of recent emigrants just from the last five years who would have a better chance, maybe than any other Arab country, of building a functional creative successful new political order. So if I were looking for a ray of hope for the next five years or the next generation in Syria it would be that.”