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In all my 50 years,
I have never held a passport. Other than visiting Lebanon, I’d never
left Syria when, in fall 2004, I was barred from leaving the country. I
tried many times afterward to get a passport, but to no avail.

I spent 16 years of
my youth in my country’s prisons, incarcerated for being a member of a
communist pro-democracy group. During the recent protests, many more
friends have been detained – most of them young — under the
government’s catch-all emergency laws.

The state of
emergency, under which Syria has lived for 48 years, has extended the
ruling elite’s authority into all spheres of Syrians’ public and
private lives, and there is nothing to stop the regime from using this
power to abuse the Syrian population. Today, promises follow one after
the other that these all-pervasive restrictions will be lifted. But one
must ask, will it be possible for the Baath Party to rule Syria without
the state of emergency that has for so long sustained it?

The official
pretext for the emergency laws is the country’s state of war with
Israel. However, restricting Syrians’ freedoms did no good in the 1967
war, which ended with the occupation of the Golan Heights, nor did it
help in any other confrontations with the Jewish state, nor in any true
emergencies. Because in the government’s eyes everything has been an
emergency for the last half-century, nothing is an emergency.

Syria’s struggle
against an aggressive Israel has encouraged the militarization of
political life – a development that has been particularly favourable to
single-party rule. And the suspension of the rule of law has created an
environment conducive to the growth of a new ruling elite.

In 2005, the Baath
Party decided, without any serious public discussion, to move toward
what was dubbed a “social market economy.” It was supposed to combine
competition and private initiative with a good measure of traditional
socialism. In reality, as the state retreated, new monopolies arose and
the quality of goods and services declined. Because local courts are
corrupt and lack independence, grievances could not be fairly heard.
Add to that a venal and idle bureaucracy, and the supposed economic
reforms became a justification for the appropriation of economic power
for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

Economic
liberalization was in no way linked to political liberalization. After
a half-century of “socialist” rule, a new aristocratic class has risen
in Syria that does not accept the principles of equality,
accountability or the rule of law. It was no accident that protesters
in the cities of Daraa and Latakia went after the property of this
feared and hated aristocracy, most notably that of President Bashar
Assad’s cousin Rami Makhlouf, a businessman who controls the country’s
cellphone network and, more than anyone else, represents the
intertwining of power and wealth in Syria. Today’s ruling class has
undeservedly accumulated alarming material and political power. Its
members are fundamentally disengaged from the everyday realities of the
majority of Syrians and no longer hear their muffled voices. In recent
years, a culture of contempt for the public has developed among them.

Although some argue
that the demonstrations are religiously motivated, there is no
indication that Islamists have played a major role in the recent
protests, though many began in mosques. Believers praying in mosques
are the only “gatherings” the government cannot disperse, and religious
texts are the only “opinions” the government cannot suppress. Rather
than Islamist slogans, the most prominent chant raised in the Rifai
Mosque in Damascus on April 1 was “One, one, one, the Syrian people are
one!” Syrians want freedom, and they are fully aware that it cannot be
sown in the soil of fear, which Montesquieu deemed the fount of all
tyranny. We know this better than anyone else.

A search for
equality, justice, dignity and freedom — not religion — is what compels
Syrians to engage in protests today. It has spurred many of them to
overcome their fear of the government and is putting the regime on the
defensive.

The Syrian regime
enjoys broader support than did Hosni Mubarak in Egypt or Zine El
Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia. This is a source of strength, and one that
Assad appears not to consider when he relies on the security forces to
quell protests. If the regime is to keep any of its deeply damaged
legitimacy, it will have to answer the protesters’ demands and
recognize the popular longing for freedom and equality.

Whatever the
outcome of the protests, Syria has a difficult road ahead. Between the
pains of oppression and the hardships of liberation, I of course prefer
the latter. Personally, I want to live nowhere but in Syria, although I
am looking forward to acquiring a passport to visit my brothers in
Europe, whom I have not seen for 10 years. I also want, finally, to
feel safe.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a writer and political activist. This essay was translated from the Arabic.

New York Times