After one month of atrocities and bloody suppression of protests under his orders, killing over 200 people, President Bashar al-Assad took a more conciliatory tone in a televised speech to the nation on Saturday, according to CNN.
Bashar al-Assad in televised address to nation of Syria
Al-Assad said the following:
“We (will) lift the state of emergency contrary to the opinion of many others who think this might lead to imbalance in the state of security. I disagree with this, and I think this will consolidate the security of the country. …We have to distinguish between reform and chaos. The Syrian people are civilized people. They don’t like chaos, they don’t like instability. …
This period we pass through, the blood that has been shed in Syria, has been painful for all Syrians. We are saddened by the death of any person who has been sacrificed.”
However, according to Day Press (Damascus), he warned that new laws in the works would not be lenient towards what he called “sabotage”. Presumably this leaves the door open to further violence against protesters.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, Syria is in a generational Awakening era, since its last generational crisis war was the Lebanese civil war. In Syria, the climax was the 1982 massacre of tens of thousands of civilians by Syria’s army, under the orders of the current president’s father.
Although there’s talk in the press that Syria’s violence might spiral into a civil war, that’s impossible during a generational Awakening era, since there are too many survivors of the last crisis war still alive, and they’ve dedicated their lives to making sure that nothing so horrible happens again.
America’s last generational Awakening era occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, and climaxed in the resignation of President Richard Nixon. This provides a clue to what’s going to happen in Syria. Saturday’s announcement of reforms will not satisfy the protesters, who will continue to demand that Assad step down, and the opposition will grow until it does, even if it takes several years.
It’s a basic principle of Generational Dynamics that even in a dictatorship, major policies are determined by masses of people, entire generations of people, and not by politicians. In Syria, we’re seeing that in action, as dictator Assad is forced by young protesters to back down.
It’s worth pointing out that Iran is in the same situation, in a generational Awakening era, with young protesters who are generally pro-Western. The hardline government has been using violence to try to permanently end the protests, but the protests will go in different forms for some time, probably until the hardline regime of crisis war survivors is replaced.
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