A perpetual state of emergency

After 48 years, an emergency has ended in Syria. At least, that’s what President Bashar al-Assad announced Saturday.

The president was referring to the country’s official “state of emergency.”

But there are several senses in which emergency has — and has not — concluded in Syria.

In place since 1963, Syria’s martial law was quite transparently in place because it conveniently gave the government extraordinary powers to repress dissent. It allowed the Syrian government and law enforcement to detain people arbitrarily.

In another sense, the announcement of the end of emergency rule marks an end to a real emergency.

The declared state of emergency ironically produced an emergency even as it claimed to be quelling imminent danger. Its use enabled consistent threats to human rights.

To some extent, we can expect this second form of emergency to be ended if the Syrian government actually begins to abide by the rule of law rather than the arbitrary rule of its top officials.

That, of course, is not guaranteed.

If recent examples from other protests in the Middle East are any indication, the lifting of the emergency law may not end the protests against Assad’s rule.

Ex-President of Egypt Hosni Mubarak made a series of concessions that failed to appease protestors. He promised greater accountability and even agreed to step down in September, but protesters were not satisfied with anything less than his immediate departure from the presidency he had since 1981.

To be sure, the current President Assad has not been in office as long as Mubarak. But when he assumed the Syrian presidency upon his father’s death in 2000, he was continuing the uninterrupted rule of his family that started in the early 1970s.

Ending emergency law may — or may not — be a significant enough concession to end the emergency the Assad family’s hold on power is facing.

The president seemed to recognize this in his Saturday address. According to the New York Times, Assad reasoned that “no further protests would be necessary — and impl(ied) that none would be tolerated” now that one of their objections has been met.

This bizarre comment, apparently a contradiction of the promise to completely end emergency rule, shows the extent to which Assad remains aware that the challenge to his authority has not passed.

And where such a challenge exists, Assad’s remark warns of the possibility that the Syrian people’s basic rights will remain in a state of emergency.

­— wallacen@indiana.edu