The Assad Regime's Propaganda
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THE ASSAD REGIME’S PROPAGANDA: MANIPULATION THROUGH MESSAGING AT THE BEGINNING OF THE ARAB SPRING UPRISING IN SYRIA A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of The School of Continuing Studies And of The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Liberal Studies By Chams Eddin, B.A. Georgetown University Washington, DC October 30, 2013 THE ASSAD REGIME’S PROPAGANDA: MANIPULATION THROUGH MESSAGING AT THE BEGINNING OF THE ARAB SPRING UPRISING IN SYRIA Chams Eddin, B.A. MALS Mentor: John Brown, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Propaganda is used by authoritarian regimes to maintain political order and influence internal and foreign opinion. With this general observation as a starting point, this thesis will analyze the presentation of events and dissemination of information by the Syrian government during the first sixteen months of the Syrian uprising, from March 2011 to July 2012. This was a critical opportunity period during which pro-democracy activists might have developed international support resulting in the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime early in the uprising. To the extent it can be assessed, how effective was the official Syrian propaganda in dictating a narrative description of events on the ground in Syria which inhibited effective international support for democratic change? This is the key question this thesis seeks to answer as it examines the regime's propaganda efforts and delineates the limits of traditional media and nontraditional media to question, invalidate, and counter propaganda, as exposed by the Syrian experience. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am indebted to all of the persons interviewed for this thesis who generously shared with me their experiences and insights. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my thesis mentor, Professor John Brown, for his enthusiasm for and support of my research and invaluable comments that assisted me in producing this work. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family for their encouragement and patience, my wife, Ashley and my son, Raif. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGMENT iii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I: THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL POWER IN SYRIA 5 Syria’s Mosaic Ethnic Composition and Political Power Pre-Independence 5 Post-Colonialism: the Ba’ath Party and Realization of Arab Nationalism 8 Hafez Assad, the Alawites, and the Ba’ath Party and the Use of Propaganda 10 External Use of Propaganda 15 Propaganda in Response to challenge 16 Succession of Power to Bashar 18 CHAPTER II: THE BEGINNING AND INTENSIFICATION OF THE 2011 SYRIANUPRISING AND THE REGIME’S PROPAGANDA 24 Information vs. Propaganda 25 Deraa and the Beginning of the Syrian Uprising 27 The Protest Movement Spreads from Deraa and Grows 33 Propaganda During the Early Months of Protest 36 Assad’s Failed Attempts to Appease Protestors 37 The Regime’s Propaganda Response to the Full-Fledged Protest Movement 43 Development of New Modes of Communicating Propaganda 44 Depicting Democratic Movement as a Precursor to Sectarian Conflict 50 Christians as a Target Audience for Regime Propaganda 55 CHAPTER III: OPPOSTION AND REGIME MESSAGING AND PROPAGANDA DIRECTED OUTSIDE SYRIA AND THE DECENT TOEXTREME VIOLENCE 61 The Composition of the Protestors and Their Use of Social Media for Organizing, Messaging and Propaganda 62 iv The Social Media Reporting of the Syrian Activists 65 Opposition Propaganda Aims to Weaken the Regime and Grow the Opposition 69 Assad’s Restrictions on Foreign Journalists and the Clash of Competing Narratives 73 Regime Monopolization and Control of Traditional Media Emerging from Syria 74 Assad Takes to the International Airwaves 78 The Culmination of the First Year of the Rebellion at the Siege of Homs 84 The Development of Homs as the Capital of the Revolution 84 The Siege of Homs and Assault on Baba Amr 87 Regime Propaganda and Baba Amr Assault 89 The Deaths of Foreign Journalists in Baba Amr 91 CHAPTER IV: THE TRAGEDY OF HOULA AND THE ASSAD REGIME VICTORY IN THE INFORMATION WAR AT THE END OF THE FIRST 16 MONTHS OF THE SYRIAN UPRISING 94 The Houla Massacre and Reporting of Regime Propaganda as News by Western Media 94 Assessment of the Success of the Assad Regime Propaganda Following the End of the First Year of the Syrian Uprising 101 CONCLUSION 106 BIBILIOGRAPHY 109 v INTRODUCTION One of the most famous slogans of the movement that swept the Arab world was first chanted in December 2010 in Tunisia and repeated in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya during the following months before reaching the streets of the Syrian cities later in the period known as the Arab Spring: Alsha’ab yuridu iskat alnizam , Arabic for The people want the fall of the regime . The regime of Bashar Assad was aware from the beginning of the Arab Spring that the movement threatened its existence. The four fateful Arabic words were chanted by thousands of people first in Tunisia, then in Cairo, and then in Sana’a in Yemen and Manama in Bahrain. The refrain became well known in Syria through nonstop coverage of the Arab revolts by government-sponsored and pan- Arab print and visual media outlets as well as online media outlets and social networks. Then the same four words appeared in the form of graffiti scrawled by young students on the wall of their school in the southern city of Deraa. The Assad regime had no tolerance for the utterance of this bold slogan and it committed itself to eradicating the democratic aspirations it embodied by deploying propaganda and leveraging its controlled and allied media outlets. Those clear and direct words iskat alnizam, Arabic for the fall of the regime, were not to be uttered in the Syria of the Ba’ath party and the Assad family. As of the writing of this thesis, the Syrian uprising has morphed into what some describe as a civil war. It is an ongoing conflict that is constantly changing and is still in many ways inscrutable to academic inquiry due to limited sources of authoritative, confirmable information and due to continually evolving events. This thesis places the conflict under the lens of media studies to investigate the regime’s use of official propaganda, its success in terms of influencing and dominating discourse, and the 1 effectiveness of traditional and social media as a counter to the official propaganda during the first sixteen months of the uprising from March 2011 through July 2012. This time period is at once sufficiently wide to delineate significant aspects of the role of media in the earliest stages of the conflict but also purposefully limited so as to meaningfully assess what transpired during a critical time in the development of the conflict. This analysis begins with an overview of the religious and ethnic composition of Syria and how power dynamics between sectarian groups, particularly the Sunni Muslim majority and the Alawite religious minority, have developed in modern Syrian history starting with a brief description of the social system under the Ottoman Empire and tracing the evolution of sectarian groups through the French occupation and the emergence of the Ba’ath party in post-independence Syria. I will develop a working definition of propaganda and explain how the Ba’ath party, and later the regime of Hafez Assad, relied on the usage of propaganda since the early years of Syria’s independence to consolidate and expand their power and political dominance. I will examine the development of the Syrian media under the control of the regime of Hafez Assad and the subsequent rule of his son, Bashar Assad, and describe the content and style of its propaganda known for its fossilized language and rhetoric and depictions of events in divergence from reality, qualities still evident in the regime’s propaganda. I will then turn to an examination of direct oral, written, audio and visual accounts of events in Syria during the first sixteen months of the uprising and recorded material made available by defectors and cyber activists. The available eyewitness accounts from activists and the narrative that emerges from those accounts is contrary to the narrative 2 description of events as depicted by the official propaganda broadcasted by the television stations controlled by the Assad regime and allied to it, such as the official Syrian TV, Al Ikhbariya, Addounia, Hezbollah Al Manar television, Russia Today, and other media outlets that took part in spreading the desired message of the regime. I will explain how both the regime and its allies attempted to misrepresent events on the ground in a country where foreign and pan-Arab media outlets have had no meaningful consistent presence because they were expelled since the beginning of the uprising, targeted militarily or through abductions, or have been otherwise forbidden from covering the uprising. I will also examine how opposition activists used social media to attempt to counter the regime’s propaganda messages and assess the effectiveness of those efforts. Propaganda dominated traditional media broadcasts and at the same time the regime and its allies endeavored to deploy their message using the vehicle of new media but with propaganda content and the stilted tone and rhetoric identical to what the regime has deployed through traditional media vehicles. On the other hand, the activists, young people limited by their lack of organization and inexperience but adept at leveraging new media, attempted to overcome the limitations of their online networks by accessing more traditional methods of mass communications. My analysis culminates in an examination of the effectiveness of the Syrian regime’s propaganda measured by the extent to which the regime’s narrative of events seeped into the conventional wisdom on and widespread view of events in Syria.