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Governments' role suspected

BY MOHAMAD BAZZI | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

February 12, 2006

DAMASCUS, SYRIA - Someone was trying to whip up Islamic fervor in the Syrian capital. Unsigned leaflets and cell phone text messages circulated across the city on Feb. 3, claiming that Danes would be gathering in Copenhagen to desecrate the Quran.

"The unbelievers plan to burn our holy text in their public squares, as a protest against the Muslim boycott of their products," the text message said. "Pass on this message and you shall be rewarded in heaven."

At Friday sermons throughout the city, preachers attacked satirical cartoons of the prophet Muhammad as blasphemy and urged Muslims to defend his honor. Entrances to the Al-Murabit mosque were strewn with Danish, Israeli and American flags so worshipers could trample them as they entered for prayers. Outside the mosque, banners called for a boycott of Danish, European and U.S. products "until Denmark is brought to its knees, regretting this farce called freedom of expression."

The next day, thousands of protesters gathered in a main square. Under the watchful eye of plainclothes security agents, they chanted rhythmically, "We will sacrifice our souls and our blood for you, dear prophet." They then marched to the Danish and Norwegian embassies and set them on fire.

When it began two weeks ago, the wave of worldwide Muslim protest against the cartoons was relatively peaceful. Yet, remarkably, the first acts of violence happened in Syria, an officially secular country where outward signs of political Islam are forbidden. The Syrian regime fought a bloody war against an Islamist uprising in 1980s. Normally, anyone chanting religious slogans in the middle of Damascus would have been arrested immediately.

In a country like Syria, where the government controls all political activities - especially expressions of religious fervor - many say these protests could not have happened without the approval or even active encouragement of President Bashar Assad's regime. Some see the hand of Syria's intelligence services, the mukhabarat, as instigating Islamic militants to attack the embassies.

"That type of violence in Syria just doesn't happen unless the mukhabarat is involved," said Eugene Sensenig-Dabbous, a political science professor at Notre Dame University in Beirut. "It was the government, and the mukhabarat, using the Islamic extremists to make a point."

Manipulated protests

Events in Syria illustrate how some Middle East governments even provoked violence. These autocratic regimes have fanned anger over the cartoons for their own political purposes: to burnish their Islamic credentials, to settle scores with European countries, to redirect popular anger toward external targets and to undermine internal reformers, whose quest for change is often identified with Western calls for democracy.

"This is an effort to keep people occupied and distracted from the country's internal problems," said Yassin Hajj Saleh, a secular opposition activist who was imprisoned for 16 years by the Syrian regime. "Protesting against these cartoons keeps people from protesting against the regime. It's an easy way to blow off steam."

The cartoons lampooning Muhammad did spark genuine anger among the world's 1 billion Muslims. Clerics and Muslim governments condemned the 12 caricatures, first published in September in a Danish newspaper. The drawings, one of which depicts the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse, reinforced a widespread notion among Muslim masses that the West is quick to denigrate their religion. To prevent idolatry, Islamic law forbids any visual depictions - even positive ones - of Muhammad and other major religious figures.

European and Muslim officials are worried that the widening anger could help fuel new attacks by militants against Western targets. The controversy also comes at a time when relations between the West and the Muslim world are strained by the victory of the militant group Hamas in Palestinian elections and a showdown with Iran over its nuclear research program.

Demonstrations in some Muslim countries have remained peaceful. Protesters in Egypt - including members of the Muslim Brotherhood - have gone out of their way to explain that they are not angry at the Danish people, but rather at Denmark's government and the newspaper that first published the drawings.

"They committed a crime when they violated our prophet's sanctity," Mohammed Abdel-Qaddous, a prominent Egyptian writer, told a forum last week in Cairo organized by the Muslim Brotherhood. "But if we set their embassies on fire, as happened in Syria and Lebanon, we will then be responding to their crime with another crime."

Ongoing scrutiny

Then why did the violence crystallize in Syria? "Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this for their own purposes," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week. "And the world ought to call them on it."

Iran has been under intense pressure for its defiance of United Nations restrictions on its nuclear research. Syria is under scrutiny for its meddling in neighboring Lebanon, where a UN investigation has implicated top Syrian officials in last year's assassination of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri.

After Hariri's killing, Syria was forced to withdraw thousands of troops that it had kept in Lebanon for 29 years. Both Iran and Syria had relied on European support to head off U.S. criticism, but they steadily lost European backing over the past year.

Usually, the Syrian government keeps a tight lid on all political activity. On Jan. 31, a group of Syrian opposition activists wanted to hold a news conference about human rights. They chose a public square not far from the one where the cartoon protesters would gather four days later. But as soon as the 20 activists showed up, they were surrounded by dozens of police officers and plainclothes mukhabarat agents. Within minutes, they were forced to disband.

"They shut us down before we could even say a single word," said Riad Seif, a former member of the Syrian parliament who was arrested in 2001 along with nine other activists in a crackdown on democracy forums. Seif and four others were released last month.