HOW ASSAD HAS TAKEN A LEAF OUT OF FRENCH OCCUPIERS’ BOOK
▶ Law 10 is a cunning attempt to gerrymander hotbeds of dissent. But Syria has seen it all before, a century ago
Foundations are being laid for a shining new suburb in southwest Damascus.
Enabled by the forerunner of a law passed this year to bring about the reconstruction of Syria, lorries and diggers are razing and redeveloping Basateen Al Razi.
It is the kind of suburb where anti-government demonstrations in 2011 later gave way to fighting, destructive sieges and finally, mass displacement.
Investors and government supporters hope that Syria’s Law 10 will streamline reconstruction of these areas, with modern apartment blocks rapidly replacing rubble.
The law establishes a blueprint by dividing areas into administrative zones with private-sector backing. Residents, current and displaced, will be given a deadline to prove ownership of their homes before being forced to vacate them in return for compensation and shares in the redevelopment.
But analysts and human rights groups say that millions of refugees and displaced Syrians could be dispossessed because of difficulties with proving ownership.
Law 10 is Syria’s masterplan for reconfiguring cities after seven years of war. But it is by no means the first. Successive governments in Damascus have used urban planning to control populations.
Recent history may indicate how the government intends to protect itself from future unrest and dispossess millions of civilians deemed disloyal during the war.
Rebels have threatened Damascus before. In 1925, the Great Syrian Revolt looked like it might succeed in overthrowing the country’s French occupiers.
The autonomous Druze region broke out in revolt, followed by Hama, Damascus and other parts of Syria. But the French crushed the local rebel bands with air strikes, atrocities and sieges.
If that sounds familiar, it is because the French Mandate and Syria today shared a common logic concerned with “remaking space and making that space unavailable to insurgents”,
said Dr Daniel Neep, author of Occupying Syria under the French Mandate: Insurgency, Space and State Formation.
“The French realised that they were incapable of winning this insurgency in traditional or conventional terms,” Dr Neep said.
“So what they had to do was change the rules of the game by putting spaces out of the reach of the rebels, creating new spaces and using urban planning to create new settlements in a way that, they thought, would reshape the Syrian people to be more docile, more easily governed.”
Barricades locked the rebels out of Damascus, cutting through centres of rebellion in Al Maidan and the villages of Eastern Ghouta. Roads were built for military convoys. And like today, French plans began with bombing strikes before the urban planners moved in.
After rebels tried to infiltrate the Azm Palace in the Old City, one neighbourhood was so badly bombed that it was dubbed Hariqah, meaning fire, and rebuilt with a French-designed grid street plan.
Like Basateen Al Razi today, Hariqah was an experiment to be applied elsewhere.
Qamishli and a new town in Palmyra would be developed by French military planners, and in the 1930s Parisian planner Rene Danger was hired to create for Damascus a plan to replace what he called “indulgent, seductive, mystical and violent” Levantine urban architecture.
The French had perfected cleansing cities when Georges-Eugene Haussmann redesigned 19th-century Paris with wide boulevards and public works to protect urban space from revolt as well as improve sanitation and transport.
By the 1960s, Syrian cities were changing again. Rural migrants were moving to the cities, often to informal settlements on the outskirts.
Place names that once showed the entrance of a city, or its orchards and gardens, were absorbed into suburbs.
“You can almost trace some of these rough neighbourhoods by their old names,” said University of Oxford researcher Nate Rosenblatt, who has studied Syria’s urban-rural dynamics.
Half a century ago. Baba Amr in Homs or Bustan Al Basha in Aleppo were the gates and gardens at the city outskirts.
By the mid-2000s, about 40 per cent of Syria’s population lived in informal settlements. President Bashar Al Assad’s government never committed to a plan for the slums, oscillating between legalising and upgrading them and outlawing and demolishing them.
In 2007, a new masterplan for Damascus was under way.
But by 2011, it was already too late. Simmering with socio-economic and political grievances after years of accelerating rural-urban migration and economic liberalisation, neighbourhoods such as Baba Amr in Homs, the south Damascus suburbs and Basateen Al Razi, now site of the first reconstruction project, would become centres of anti-government protests, then armed rebellion.
“The Syrian regime did not take care of this issue of informal settlements,” said Fabrice Balanche, Syria analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“It tried to secure the Old Cities [in Aleppo and Damascus].
It’s the method of counter-insurgency under the French Mandate applied to urban planning FABRICE BALANCHE Syria analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy
But the uprising didn’t come from the Old City. It came from the suburbs.”
Throughout the conflict, urban planning has been used as a weapon.
Human Rights Watch and the UN International Commission of Inquiry documented deliberate demolitions in neighbourhoods of Damascus and Hama between 2012 and 2013.
Some reports claim that land registry offices were used to guide demolition campaigns, or have been destroyed altogether to erase former residents’ proof of ownership.
In Decree 66 and Law 10, the government is redressing history and rebuilding the future.
The Assad government is not turning to French Mandate plans to guide it, but has shown a similar interest in counter-insurgency by punishing, dispossessing and reconfiguring neighbourhoods.
Human Rights Watch recently said that Law 10 was “poised to confiscate and redevelop residents’ property without due process or compensation”.
That was because “procedural requirements in the law, coupled with the political context in which it operates, create significant potential for abuse and discriminatory treatment of displaced residents and residents from areas previously held by anti-government groups”.
Millions have been displaced and 70 per cent of refugees lack basic ID, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimates, making it hard to prove ownership.
Neighbourhoods that turned out overwhelmingly for the uprising could be razed and redeveloped, with their original populations displaced and replaced by ones already part of economic, social and sectarian patronage networks. New roads will be built, cities reconfigured. Space remade.
“It’s the same method of counter-insurgency” used under the French Mandate and applied to urban planning, Mr Balanche said.
The rationale is to “break the uprising and to prevent uprisings in the future”.