The Bedouin in contemporary Syria: The persistence of tribal authority and control

Middle East Journal

Volumn 64, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 29-49

  Chatty, Dawn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CLIENTELISM; ETHNIC GROUP; ETHNICITY; KINSHIP;

SYRIAN ARAB REPUBLIC;

EID: 76349122240     PISSN: 00263141     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3751/64.1.12     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. For most of the last century an "evolutionary," Western-based model of progress dominated the way the Bedouin were perceived by government and international experts. Typologies based on movement (e.g., fully-nomadic, semi-nomadic, semi-settled) were used to break down the organization of the Bedouin and to confirm ideas of modernization theory that settled existence was far superior to a mobile one.
2. Bedouin, as a term, is increasingly disappearing in contemporary government and international reports and studies: instead, these people are generally placed under the broad category of "stakeholders, users, local community," and as "rural poor."
3. Anthony Tooth, "The Transformation of a Pastoral Economy: Bedouin and States in Northern Arabia, 1850-1950," PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 2000.
4. Tribal genealogies are meant to explain the past, but, in fact, generally serve to justify or rationalize present conditions of inter-tribal strength and weakness. The relationships between the tribes are generally reduced to an idiom of kinship even when explaining the expulsion of a lineage (or extended set of related family groups) and its re-attachment to another tribe.
5. Max Oppenheim, Die Beduinien [The Bedouin], Vol. 1 (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1939).
6. Jonathan Rae, "Tribe and State: Management of the Syrian Steppe," PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 1999, p. 64.
7. Ernest Gellner, "The Role and Organization of a Berber Zawiya," PhD dissertation, University of London, 1958
8. James Scott, "Zomia: A Zone of Resistance. The Last Great Enclosures and Stateless Peoples in Southeast Asia," in Annual Elizabeth Colson Lecture, Refugee Studies Centre (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2008).
9. Aref Abu-Rabia, A Bedouin Century: Education and Development among the Negev Tribes in the 20th Century (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001).
10. Eugene Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
11. Gertrude Bell, Syria, The Desert and the Sown (London: W. Herman, 1907), pp. 134-35.
12. The British did as well, as was documented in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence of 1915-6.
13. Nuri Sha'lan was reported to receive a monthly allowance of 20,000 gold pounds from Ahmad Jamal Pasha. After a clash with an Ottoman official in 1910 he was exiled to Spain. He returned to Damascus in 1916 and changed sides, accepting T.E. Lawrence's overtures to support Amir Faysal's claim to Syria.
14. Dawn Chatty, From Camel to Truck: The Bedouin in the Modern World (New York: Vantage Press, 1986), p. 19.
15. 'Abd al-Salam Al Ujayli, a Raqawi historian, claimed that for a short while between 1920 and 1921, Raqa, not Damascus, was regarded as the spiritual, if not physical, capital of the Arab (Bedouin) forces in the fight to set up a Kingdom of Syria under Amir Faysal. The leader of this movement was the Fid'an Shaykh Hajim ibn Muhayd.
16. Meriem Ababsa, "Ideologies Et Territoires Dans Un front Pionnier: Raqqa Et le Project De L'Euphrate En Jazira" ["Ideologies and Territories in the Frontier: Raqa and the Project of the Euphrates in the Jazira"], PhD dissertation, University of Tours, 2004, pp. 358-59.
17. While the Bedouin leadership was negotiating the political future of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, their own homeland, the Badia of northern Arabia, was being carved up by Mark Sykes (via the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916). Lines through the open desert created a British corridor between Trans-Jordan and Iraq and separated the Syrian Badia from its natural southern half in Saudi Arabia. These new borders separated people from fundamental elements of their economic and social universe.
18. Stephen Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon under the French Mandate (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1958), p. 283.
19. "Rapport Sur La Situation De La Syrie et Du Liban soumis au Conseil De La Société Des Nations, 1923-1938" ["Report on the Situation in Occupied Syria and Lebanon to the Council of the League of Nations, 1923-1938"], Ministère Des Affaires Etrangères, 1930.
20. The French divided the tribes of Syria into nomadic and semi-nomadic. Those classified as nomadic included the Aneza and Shammar confederations as well as the more powerful sheep herding tribes such as the Hadidiyin, the Mawali, and the Hayb. The semi-nomadic category comprised all the other sheep herding tribes. Until 1934, this distinction meant the nomadic tribes were free to carry arms and only had to lay them down when entering the Ma'mura. Classification as a semi-nomad, on the other hand, meant that they were required to have government permits to carry arms and they could be charged and tried under state law, not tribal customary law.
21. The French "sweetened" this infringement of the shaykhs' authority by building new wells and restoring old underground water systems (qanats) and by setting up mobile schools and health clinics. See "Rapport Sur La Situation De La Syrie et Du Liban soumis au Conseil De La Société Des Nations," 1931.
22. At the time of the French withdrawal from Syria, some tribal leaders were receiving considerable subsidies. It was largely the "noble" sheep raising tribe which supported the French, with the exception of the Hadidiyin. While in the second half of the 20th century, it was largely the "common" sheep herding tribes which cooperated with the Syrian Ba'thist government.
23. Jonathan Rae, "Tribe and State: Management of the Syrian Steppe," p. 151.
24. Fifty-three years later, a study by Rae indicated that these migration zones, or diras, have essentially not changed.
25. Jonathan Rae and George Arab, "Continuity is the Cousin of Change," in Caravan 3 (Aleppo: ICARDA, 1996).
26. One hectare equals 2.45 acres; one donum equals one-tenth of a hectare.
27. "Rapport Sur La Situation De La Syrie et Du Liban soumis au Conseil De La Société Des Nations," 1938.
28. "Rapport Sur La Situation De La Syrie et Du Liban soumis au Conseil De La Société Des Nations," 1931.
29. "Rapport Sur La Situation De La Syrie et Du Liban soumis au Conseil De La Société Des Nations," 1938, p. 104.
30. Albert Hourani, Syria and Lebanon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946).
31. Chatty, From Camel to Truck: the Bedouin in the Modern World, p. 32.
32. Riccardo Bocco, "The Sedentarisation of Pastoral Nomads: International Experts and the Bedouin Question in the Arab Middle East," in Dawn Chatty, ed., Nomadic Societies in the Middle east and North Africa: Entering the 21st Century (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2006).
33. They had been opposed by the People's Party and the Ba'th Party, both of which continued to challenge and contest government activities.
34. Patrick Seale, The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-War Arab Politics 1945-1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
35. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IRBD), Syria Report (1955), p. 56.
36. International Labour Organization (ILO), "Report of Technical Meeting on the Problems of Nomadism and Sedentarisation" (Geneva: ILO, 1964).
37. See "Minutes to the Damascus Tribal Conference, the Damascus Treaty, between the Sba'a, Mawali, Hadidiyin and Dependent Tribes," Syrian Ministry of Interior, August 6, 1956 and "Statement on the Tribal Division of the Syrian Badia, made by Haza al-Fakaki and witnessed by the Commander of the Steppe Forces, Adnan Osman," Syrian Ministry of Interior, 1956.
38. The outflow of the tribes slowed down as Hafiz al-Asad consolidated his power between 1970 and 1972. By 1973, the livestock cooperative movement also had turned a corner and tribal leadership had come to be accepted in the organization of livestock associations.
39. Article 15, Constitution of the Arab Ba'th Socialist Party. See Sylvia Haim, ed., Arab Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). Further evidence of this assimilationist state policy can be found in the 1958 Syrian endorsement of ILO Convention 107 on Indigenous and Tribal Populations. This was superseded in 1989 by ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal peoples, which affirmed their rights to natural resources, land, health, and education within their particular cultural framework. Syria has not endorsed ILO 169.
40. The al-Brahim family of the Hadidiyin (Kawmah), for example, was estimated to hold around 40,000 ha while Rakan ibn Muhayd of the Sba'a cultivated around 30,000 ha; the estates of Shammar Bedouin leaders in the Jazira were considerably larger. Also in this early period, the Ministry of the Interior's Directorate of Tribes produced an estimate of the number of individuals in the major tribes. These included: 30,500 Hadidiyin; 6,000 Sba'a Btayinat; 13,000 Fid'an Wuld; and 16,000 Mawali. These figures appeared in a supplement to the 1956 Damascus Tribal Conference. They are not based on any census figures but rather are estimates which reflect the relative strength of one tribal leader and his people to other tribes and ultimately to the government.
41. Van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria, p. 146.
42. Land was appropriated from the tribal elite and given to tribal families so "that they could benefit from the conditions of settlement."
43. Ahmad Mouhamad El-Zoobi, "Agricultural Extension and Rural Development in Syria 1955-1968," PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbia, 1971, p. 120.
44. These schemes, however, were not entirely successful. An internal government review of the second phase of these settlement schemes undertaken in 1967 reported that "the Bedouin who did settle and received reformed land regressed and returned back to their previous way of life." See "Annual Report Badia Directorate," Syrian Ministry of Agriculture, 1967. The review suggested that this regression was the result of pressure exerted by tribal leaders on their followers to stand up to and oppose the reforms of the Ba'th Party.
45. JPH Van de Veen, "Report to the steppe Directorate: Grazing Trial, Wadi Al 'Azib Range and Sheep Experimental Station, 1963-1966" (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization, 1967).
46. Bedouin animal husbandry is based on risk minimalization rather than profit motivation, which is more common in the Western market. The Bedouin method is more focused on maintaining healthy herd sizes, keeping the family in milk, and selling off the unwanted young, male livestock - as opposed to purely maximizing herd size, which calls for keeping most of the male young and fattening them up for larger profits. In the Bedouin case, herd numbers which can be managed by the household alone are preferred, although some families do hire shepherds when they don't have the necessary manpower themselves. The rationale behind the Bedouin method is that too rapid growth in herd size can lead to unacceptable losses in the event of a drought.
47. John Shoup, "Middle Eastern Sheep Pastoralism and the Hema System," in John Galaty and Douglas Johnson, eds., The World of Pastoralism: Herding Systems in Comparative Perspectives (London and New York: The Guildford Press, 1990), p. 200.
48. Hazim Al-Sammane, "Al-Birnamij al-Suri li Tahsin al-Mara'i wa Tarbiyat al-Aghnam" ["Syrian Program for the Improvement of Range and Sheep Production"] (Damascus: Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform, 1981).
49. "Dry farming" refers to a system of agriculture whereby there is no irrigation of the crops other than what is obtained through natural rainfall.
50. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), "Land Policy in the Near East" (Rome: FAO, 1965) and International Labour Organization (ILO), "Report of Technical Meeting on the Problems of Nomadism and Sedentarisation," 1964.
51. Rae, "Tribe and State: Management of the Syrian Steppe," p. 212.
52. Omar Draz, "An Approach for the Settlement of Nomads through Revival of the Ancient Hema System of Range Reserves in the Form of Co-Operatives within an Integrated Programme of Range Improvement in Syria," paper presented at the UN Expert Consultation of the Settlement of Nomads in Africa and the Near East, Rome, 1971 and "Role of Range Management and Fodder Production" (Beirut: UNDP Regional Offices for Western Asia, 1977)
53. The term Hema means to protect or to safeguard. It is said that in the early Islamic tradition, large swathes of pasture areas and grain fields were set aside as "Hema" in order to provide feed for the herds of the Bedouin military units serving in the expansion of the empire.
54. Garrett Hardin's article on the "Tragedy of the Commons" profoundly influenced international "rangeland experts" and government in the Middle East and North Africa.
55. Garett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science, Vol. 162 (1968), pp. 1243-48.
56. Hardin's argument that "common land" open to all users in the West would suffer as each rational man rushed to pursue his own best interests was curiously accepted as the fundamental explanation for the degradation of the steppe land in Syria. No consideration was given to the very real collective action of Bedouin society and its long history of communal land use to sustain livelihoods.
57. Interview by author with Omar Draz, Damascus, October 1977. See also Draz, "Role of Range Management and Fodder Production."
58. Movement between Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia tended to be easy for the Bedouin given the inherently porous and artificial nature of the borders drawn by Sir Mark Sykes in 1918. Indeed, Saudi Arabia and Jordan were comparatively welcoming to the Syrian Bedouin because of longstanding (and ongoing) kinship and marriage ties with the Bedouin of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In the Saudi case, it should be noted that the Al Sa'ud belong to the Aneza Confederation of tribes (a branch of the Hasana). Indeed, it can be inferred that the borders of 1918 were drawn in part to limit King 'Abd al-'Aziz Al Sa'ud's influence among the tribes of the northern Badia.
59. Interview by author with Omar Draz, Damascus, October 1977.
60. By the mid-1990s, the government claimed to have over 400 Hema cooperatives covering approximately 5 million ha of the Badia. See "Directorate of the Badia Annual Report" (Damascus: Ministry of Agriculture, 1996). In a survey conducted by Rae in 1995-6 among herders in the Badia between Aleppo and Hama, 96% of them said they had joined the cooperatives to access the subsidized feed on offer. The other 4% said they had joined because their shaykh had instructed them to do so.
61. Rae, "Tribe and Steppe: Management of the Syrian Steppe," p. 228.
62. These findings throw into doubt the reported successes of the cooperatives in managing the utilization of the Badia along principles of modern ranching in the works of John Shoup and other observers. Instead, it points to the persistence of traditional tribal systems in managing natural resource allocation.
63. After Hafiz al-Asad had launched his internal coup within the Ba'th Party in October 1970, he personally sent 'Alawite messengers to Shaykh Faysal in Jordan acknowledging his poor treatment and asking him to return, which he did.
64. Van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria, p. 122.
65. Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), p. 164.
66. Volker Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria under Asad (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1995), p. 147.
67. Syrian Arab Republic, "The Minutes of Meeting to Resolve Dispute between Muharrab Rukan al-Murshed the Representative of the Sba'a Tribe and Members of the Hadidiyin, represented by Faysal al Sfuk" (Ministry of the Interior, Homs Provincial Administration, 1975)
68. Syrian Arab Republic, "Minutes of a Meeting between the Sba'a and the Hadidiyin over the lands of al Del'a al Gharbieh" (Ministry of the Interior, 1981).
69. The intervention of a respected "elder" - in this case Asad's advisor - is a traditional method of arbitration in tribal disputes.
70. Rae, "Tribe and State: Management of the Syrian Steppe," pp. 219-20.
71. For more on the Hama Uprising and its historical context
72. Van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria and Seale, Asad.
73. Rae, "Tribe and State: Management of the Syrian Steppe," p. 221.
74. Van Dam, The Struggle for Power in Syria, p. 123.
75. Some tribes' members consider that one of the shaykhly tribal families was originally from the 'Alawite family or "tribe," the Haddadun. Such "historical" associations are common in explaining contemporary political alliances among the Bedouin.
76. Albert de Boucheman, "La sédentarisation du désert de Syrie" ["The Sedentarization of the Syrian Desert"], L'Asie Francaise, No. 320 (May 1934), pp. 140-43.
77. In recent years, the Minister of Agriculture has been of Bedouin origin (Hadidiyin) and regularly has come down on the side of the Bedouin in disputes between the tribes and the Directorate of Badia Affairs. In 1997 and again in 2001, I was present when the Minister of Agriculture overruled the ban on cultivation and permitted the limited growing of barley by small famers in the Badia where rain-fed cultivation was possible.
78. Interview by the author with retired senior Syrian government official, Damascus, June 12, 2007.
79. Lisa Truilzi, "The Bedouin between Development and the State: a Syrian Case Study," The Arab World Geographer, Vol. 5, No 2 (2002), p. 99.
80. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), "The Badia Rangelands Development Project" (Rome: IFAD, 1998)
81. United Nations Development Programme, "Poverty in Syria: 1996-2004 Diagnosis and Pro-Poor Policy Considerations" (Damascus: 2005).
82. th Army, "Reports to HM's Government," FO 226.271, 1943.
83. Interview by author with senior tribal elder and retired government official, Damascus, June 12, 2007.
84. It should be noted that in addition to these regional paradigms, in the Iraqi case, Syria has become a safe haven for a number of Iraqi tribes who are members of the Shammar tribal confederation - which populates the northern Jazira of Syria - since 2003. A significant number of Iraqi Shammar tribes have moved their herds into the Syrian Jazira and have found markets for their livestock in Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
85. Chatty, From Camel to Truck.
86. Marina Leybourne, Ronald Jaubert, and Richard Tutwiler, "Changes in Migration and feeding patterns among Semi-Nomadic Pastoralists of Northern Syria," Pastoral Development Network, No. 34a (Overseas Development Institute, 1993).
87. Dawn Chatty, Mobile Pastoralists: Development Planning and Social Change in Oman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
88. Stephan Baas and Dawn Chatty, Sourcebook: Training Guide in Participatory Processes in Co-management of Natural Resources (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2003), pp. 1-240
89. Stephan Baas and Dawn Chatty, "Rangeland Rehabilitation and Establishment of a Wildlife Reserve in Palmyra Badia," Document No. GCP/SYR/003 (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1995).
90. Between 1943 and 2008, Bedouin tribal representation in Parliament nearly doubled from 7% to 12%.