Ghassan Al Mufleh
Part (2)
The third article of the Syrian constitution adopted after the referendum of 1973 states that:
- the religion of the president is Islam.
- Islamic jurisprudence is a main source for legislation.
At the time, it was known that more than 11% of Syrians were of Christian faith, and a small percentage was Jewish, in addition to small percentages of other minorities like Yazidis and Armenians. It is true that their percentages are low, however they are all citizens and citizenship is not earned by percentages but by right and equality of individual citizens.
Before going into a discussion about the marginalization of these citizens we must first point out to an important issue we think still causes controversy:
Some say that the late Hafez al-Assad tried to prevent any mentioning of the president’s faith in his sought constitution, and had to re-write this article under the pressure of the Sunni street. However, we think reality is the following:
This is a justification and a falsification of Syrian history. Assad tailor made the constitution in order to fit him perfectly. This article represents a contradiction to all others about Syria being a popular, democratic, and socialist state as it figures in the first clause of the first article.
The issue of the president’s faith represented no problem for the Sunnis since it hadn’t even been a subject of debate and was handled by the manipulation of regional regimes starting from Hafez al-Assad and passing by Anouar Sadat – the faithful president – until president Moubarak.
It would have been better for the Sunnis at the time when they were at their full strength to refuse a President of the Alawite sect. However, what happened was the exact opposite: the man who came as a result of a coup d’état was met with great enthusiasm by the majority of the Syrian people. Therefore, following the allegations of the initial story, the strength of these people supposedly feared by Assad entailed that the president should be Sunnite and Islam should be the only source of legislation.
Some protests might have happened, but these were peaceful protests by a minority in Damascus’s streets protesting against the new president and not for the adoption of such a close in the constitution.
This constitution is a strange mixture – from a party that pretends to be secular – that we will attempt to discuss in later times. The discrimination in rights between Syrian citizens started with the beginning of Hafez al-Assad’s mandate. If we assume that there is truth in this story, then why didn’t the late president change this close after he gained control over the entire nation (economy, politics, security, and culture)?
The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
The Syrian constitution thus contradicts this article. The military officers in the Baath party along with their theoreticians have permitted themselves to marginalize the non-Muslim minorities in their constitution and constructed it in a manner that permits one individual coming from a minority sect to rule Syria - with steal and fire as his friend Lucien Bitterlin who is still a friend of the regime said when writing the biography of the late president.
This close which contradicts the rights of the Syrian citizens was not the outcome of the dominant popular culture at the time but a result of the conscious political culture of the military elites who took over power in order to construct a new social balance in which all human rights and dignities of Syrians has to pass through their constitution.
We conclude this part by proclaiming: may someone give me one Syrian party since the thirties of the twentieth century that did not have members from all sects, religions and ethnicities apart from the Muslim Brotherhood party which never formed a majority among the Syrian Sunnis? What is even stranger is that the Syrian Army which was vulnerable to party conflicts was never infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood neither during the fifties nor after that.
Therefore, this discrimination is a result of the culture of Baathist military elites and not of popular culture. Why? This answer is now left to politics…
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