Baathist Syria

Abstract

By the 1980s the Syrian political structure was in most features quite close to the orthodox Baathist model of a party-state regime, with its virtually Leninist or Communist-style political structure (see Appendix II). The main deviation from orthodoxy was that the regime was headed by a military man and was actually a military-party regime. A 1970 coup had brought Defence Minister (General) Hafiz al-Asad to power, after years of factional squabbling within the Baathist regime that had been established after a 1963 military coup. The struggle for power in the 1960s between rival military-civilian alliances within the new Baathist regime had already led to an internal coup in 1966 that had brought a left-wing faction of Baath officers to power – establishing what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Neo-Baath regime’. But in 1970 a moderate member of the Neo-Baathists, the aforementioned General Asad, had staged what was to be the last act of instability within Syrian Baathist rule for more than 25 years.¹