we're here with dr michael provides associate professor of history at the university of california san diego we'll be talking about syria particularly and the region in general michael tell me a little bit about the background of syria after the father died in the sun came in who's now the current leader to give me a sense of where this revolt where the wellsprings of the revolt occurred  sort of getting groomed for a few years but people didn't really take him seriously until suddenly the father died in the summer of ninety nine and he was sort of immediately thrust into  the presidency there was an constitutional amendment that the prime the vice president stepped aside and suddenly he was president and it was a kind of a it was him i mean i was living in syria at the time and his death the death of the father was a big surprise the emergence of the son was not a surprise in and it was there was a kind of a perception among people that the future was really worrisome and and once the succession took place people kind of relaxed and you know there was some continuity i mean syrians i think like people in the region generally saw the lebanese civil this this relief on the part of the population to kind of ease things up to release prisoners he closed the prison this there was a period that was called the damascus spring that took place this was two thousand this was the this fall and and spring fall of two thousand the spring of two thousand and one and dissidents began to there was a free newspaper that is this a non governmental newspaper and people embrace this and the impression was among many people and myself included was that he was using his popularity with the public as a weapon against elements of the of his father's government people who were still lurking around in the shadows people who were in charge of security agencies people who had been high ranking military officers who were back there getting ready or preparing to pull strings and he used his popularity as a weapon against those people but within a year once he was ensconced the repression began again and people began to be rounded up the discussion forums were closed down some of the liberalizing reforms were changed but the reforms that were not changed had to do with with capitalism with freeing capital with with privatizing certain things and stuff along those lines and so that the kind of there there emerged over the coming years kind of a new class of we could say crony capitalists of his generation who emerged and and kind of gutted the illogical component of the previous nationalist socialist government that his father had had stood for you talk about capitalism during this period of the sun liberalizing capitalism left the country open to opened it to people who were connected and so for example there was a hotel built in downtown damascus the four seasons which was built with money that came from the gulf it was built with money from what he'd been the law of the financier and it was built on the grounds of what had been a public park and a mound luke tomb complex so these public properties were destroyed to make a kind of a new monument to what we can call crony capitalism and this was i think emblematic of the kind of reforms that took place people who were close to the top became wealthy and an entire new strata received a cell phone concession and became the richest person in the country and and essentially controlled or does control virtually the entire economy so are you saying that there's no western money no european money no american investment no citibank in syria well there isn't much i mean the the money that has flowed into the country has been from gulf investors it's not like say for example the gulf states like a waiter or a cotton that are fully integrated into the world economy that have giant state stock portfolios things like that i syria is a is a poor country and during the thirty years of loss of rule the the economic engine of the country was agriculture and it remains that your culture and because of the nationalist socialist baptist idiology of the government and because of the rural origins of the ruling stratus have lost that in the people around him the countryside did pretty and the countryside was electrified there were good schools that were hospitals stuff like that and that was part of the ideology of rule and conspicuous consumption i mean there was a lot of corruption but it wasn't the kind of corruption we see today today the corruption is is huge transfers of wealth from the public treasury in some or control of capital from the public treasury to these these selected individuals and people close to them  those days it was it was different it was corruption of the military structures but the the people would say that the living standard of syrians in the ninety's in the eighty's was uniform and people within the country who are not prospering and in those rural regions and places the places in fact precisely the places that have been most involved in the uprising over the last year those are the places that have suffered  and declined in economic prosperity over the past decade as this kind of transfer has gone from from supporting the countryside supporting the pillars of legitimacy of the state to enriching a select number of people who are hooked up and close to the to the government let's talk a little bit more about the uprising and the aggrieved is is it more workers and peasants who are impoverished is it more the intellectual class or is it across class lines this this uprising that we're seeing now well what would be workers was talking with another friend who knows this guy well and and he's a prosperous farmer recently prosperous farmer in this region so he owns some land and you know he has a  pretty nice house and he has a car a truck actually a farming truck so this is by syrian standards is a pretty prosperous farmer now we were talking about him my friend and i and he said well we don't have to worry about him because he's too old to protest and his children are too young so in this way we have precisely identified the strata of the people who are most likely to be out in the street who are high school students college age students people who are frustrated unemployed who have aspirations to some kind of material prosperity and yet cannot leave their parents hounds because they they can't they can't earn enough money or even find jobs to go and make it on their own and the population has increased rapidly population growth is very high and so these people are are educated literate cosmopolitan watching satellite news  stations and and have quite a lot of knowledge about the outside world and yet are are really have really have their aspirations stunted by what they think are the limited possibilities delivered by the government group or class within damascus within aleppo people who have been opposed to government many of them have served time in jail some of these people in their eighty's even older so those people are still around too but the people who are really on the streets every day after day are people in their teens and twenty's and maybe early in in the very early stages where these people organized enough to bring specific grievances to the government and if so what was the government's response before we get to the stage we're seeing now on television yes they were i mean the grievances were the same grievances that we've seen elsewhere in in the period of from late two articulated in the first instance i think by people who were veteran activists who had spent time in prison who were sophisticated and and pointed in their criticisms but they were adopted  people who were protesting in the street who in some cases had never even known that those dissonance those those oppositional intellectuals even existed but they coalesced at this moment in early two thousand and eleven in february and march the demands were an end to the emergency law which is effective martial martial law in syria how long has the emergency law been it's been in effect since one thousand sixty three and an emergency law imposed by the colonial regime it's the same in israel and palestine many of the laws that enable people house demolitions for example are actually british mandate colonial law codes that still exist and so in theory it's a matter very much the same so this and this emergency law essentially denies all of the constitutional guarantees that people either with its citizens nor ordinary citizens should enjoy and so the demand was rights of citizenship in our own country and enter the emergency law democratic transition a multi party elections and the rule of law simply stated very simple  and based on mean it's an end it's a very pointed critique because these are things the government claims to be doing so the structures of these legal structures exist but they're not they're not respected respected by the government in the same way that they were not respected by the colonial governments that preceded these postcolonial and when these when these demands were presented to the government what was their response we can we we can talk we're studying it but this is going on for eleven years actually we need more time it takes time it's we don't want to develop or to change it's important we must change we know we have to change but we have to do it at our own pace it can't be driven by outside demand and then finally in march late march there was a speech given by the president which really was the the the crucial the power of the state and that the movement was foreign conspiracy by which of course he means foreign conspiracy motivated or or of the impetus of the united states and israel  this was a kind of an insult to people who had been protests and this really sort of severed i think the the last or undermine the legitimacy of the of the president in the state and it was a year ago now iran but i mean this is a shifting cast of characters russia and iran however are the two constants in syrian geopolitics sense in the case of russia since the sixty's the late the mid sixty's and in the case of of iran since the iranian revolution or even for syria had contacts with with the people who became the revolutionaries in iran even before the revolution and syria was was an opponent of of the government in iraq which was actually of course after the revolution a kind of an ally of the united states so there was a geo political or don't know what they're talking about it has nothing to do with the the religious component of the various governing structures it's about geopolitics and national interests and an a and a relationship a thirty year old relationship based on mutual interests and mutual trust probably at the highest echelons of the syrian iranian government what we see on television is brutal there's talk of nato there's talk of intervention and so on and some people say we should do it to save lives other people say if we do it it's the west going into another country in the middle east and so on talk to us a muslim brotherhood opposed it on religious grounds on political grounds and began a kind of a campaign of assassination and and and and not exactly armed uprising but syrian city behind damascus aleppo homes and hama is that and declared free city as the syrian government launched an assault on the city sealed it which is sort of the  the standard practice for them they seal the city they cut off electricity they cut off phone service they cut off water sealed the city and then besieged it and destroyed the central area of the city and killed some tens of of thousands citizens including probably some who were armed insurgents of the muslim brotherhood declared the membership in the muslim brotherhood of a crime punishable by death and like i say destroyed the city with artillery  exile in london now not because of what he did then although it was related he was in a way punished as a kind of a scapegoat for the repression but also because he challenged his brothers rule  that carried out this it was not the regular army and today the brother the younger brother of the current president bashar al assad is in charge of the same sorts of special forces that are in charge of of the most brutal kinds of repression within the country today the elite forces so but there were differences too i mean then the muslim brotherhood uprising was limited to these one cities and the tactics were were were kind of terror tactics and it was not broadly popular today there was a peaceful demonstration movement of demonstrations that was the kind of challenge immediately with appalling state violence so it's a different kind of a movement peaceful movement a movement of broad based opposition and finally the government as far as we know has not used really heavy weaponry against the cities except for artillery no air strikes maybe helicopter gunships but not very much the devastation is shocking but it's nothing what nothing like what a modern military could do if it really want to destroy cities i mean this is a sort of a thing that that the people who are appalled and outraged by the violence of the syrian government don't acknowledge that the government is actually not unleashing everything against peace if they did the cities would be totally so the tactics are different the outcomes are bit different and the the kind the contours of the of the of the confrontation different because this uprising is much there a way to assess how broad it really is in other words within syrian society there are those who have backed the president of those who are backed the resistance how do how does that fall in in your scholarship in terms of numbers and so on how popular is this popular uprising well i think it's it's very hard to say and i mean nobody can really say and i think that people who would claim to be able to quantify these kinds of percentages or you know are not it's not credible now there is a sectarian component which has been exploited very effectively by the state by the government which is to say that the uprising is based on islamist criminals and foreign conspiracies foreign conspiracies from the gulf by by islamic extremists the government and there's a large christian population which has been usually supportive of the government the government has made the case repeatedly and since the very beginning that that the uprising was not people with legitimate grievances for citizenship but rather armed criminal islamist terrorists and that if they were that only the government stands to keep chaos disorder and massacres bay and with thirty or forty percent of the population this is a compelling argument so the government has succeeded i think in terrifying people so seriously that they support the government because they believe that the opposition is is is worse so but the opposition or the protest movement did not start out as a sectarian movement and i'm not sure it's i don't think it's a sectarian movement today  there are islamised within it that's for sure but there are also members of every sectarian minority also represented among opposition politicians and even people out on the street  we can say that that there are you know thousands and thousands of people hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated probably millions of people have demonstrated in an opposition over the last year repeatedly at risk of peril and probably hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated in favor of the government with no risk actually to them of any kind and in some cases they were compelled for reasons of their vocation or whatever i mean it's well known that for example the schools get a holiday and all the kids are expected to go out on the streets and proclaim their love for the president everybody knows this is a kind of a performative duty that syrians are custom to does this mean that they support the government no but you know you're i mean to to not go risk something so there's a wide spectrum here the percentage of people who actually support the government under any circumstances and believe everything is probably very small and you know but then there's also people who are benefited materially in significant ways i mean who have become literally millionaires in the last ten years and of course for these people the government is extreme they may not have account swiss bank and they may not have swiss bank accounts and yet they're very wealthy within syria they're deeply committed people like this we're talking about the high ranking military officers people who are these crony capitalists and so on these people are deeply committed to the government they must be they