Pro-Assad Syrians in Germany remain silent

By Theresa Muench Feb 8, 2012, 13:21 GMT

Berlin - Syrians abroad are as divided as they are at home about the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, but the pro-Assad faction is wary of going public and tends to go underestimated, interviews this week among the Syrian community in Germany show.

The opposition have won far more attention from a sympathetic news media.

At Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate, protesters have hoisted the green, white and black revolution flag with its red stars. They have held demonstrations, and even briefly invaded the Syrian embassy compound.

Arab Spring graffiti has also shown up on walls across Germany, where data shows more than 32,000 Syrian nationals live.

Outwardly, the opposition seems to dominate, or at least to be much louder than Assad supporters are.

Interviews show that even far from home, very few Syrians can stay on the fence as their homeland is convulsed by violence.

Last year, as the violence accelerated, 2,634 Syrians applied for German political asylum. A Hamburg University political scientist Andre Bank said the vast majority of that group hope Assad will be ousted.

'However there are many others - particularly from the Christian and Alawite minorities - who don't match up with the opposition,' he said.

Tarek Abdin-Bey, chairman of the Germany-Syria Association, said pro-Assad expatriates were particularly concentrated in Berlin, where there are suspicions that some are in the pay of the Syrian embassy.

Anti-Assad Syrians claim suspicious goings on in the capital.

Ferhad Ahma, a Green Party member and Syrian activist who sits on a city ward committee, said two Arab-looking men attacked him in his Berlin apartment at night in December, hurting him slightly.

And this week, police arrested two men in Berlin who are accused of infiltrating exile groups and reporting about them to Syrian intelligence. Espionage charges are expected.

Katharina Lange, a political scientist at the Modern Orient think-tank in Berlin, said students and professors seconded to Germany with scholarships from Damascus were more likely to be pro-regime.

She said the academics were more likely to be Alawites, like the Assad family, than the demographics of Syria would suggest.

'Others join in pro-Assad demonstrations after weighing up what is most advantageous for themselves, or get pressurized to,' she said.

The academics say they have noticed a sea change recently among the Syrian students, partly because the students have access to a far wider range of news and views in Germany than they had at home.

Salam Said, a Syrian scholar, said that previously the pro and anti groups among students had been roughly even, but she had noticed a significant shift against Assad. 'There are now more opponents, because they are very aware of what is happening at home,' she said.

The opposition mainly uses online communities to network. Abazid Aktham's Facebook page on the Syrian Revolution, in German and Arabic, has 5,500 regular readers as it invites activists to vigils and demonstrations.

'There are a lot of us who wish we could go home and help fight,' he said. Some hoped to join the rebel army set up by deserters. 'They are just waiting for the right moment, but are low on hope' he said.

But opponents cannot get flights into Syria.

Bank said the most committed anti-Assad activists were much more likely to have fled to Turkey than to Germany, since they want to help the fight from north of the border.

Abdin-Bey agreed, saying very few refugees were currently showing up in Germany.

'Most of us here have been living here for 20 years or so,' he said. But it was rare to be neutral.

'You can't be, when it is about human rights,' he added.

According to Bank, the lesser faction in Germany were very conscious of the potential dangers that would arise through regime change.

'A sudden collapse could lead to an escalation in the violence,' she warned, pointing to fears of a general bloodletting directed against those religious minorities which had been comparatively privileged while the Assad family held sway.

The 'strongly critical attitude towards Assad' in the German media had annoyed many of them, particularly the fact that deadly violence by the opposition tended to be minimized in German media reports.

She said that this had prompted a certain feeling of sympathy with Damascus among those Syrian exiles who had close relatives still at home and remained in contact with them.

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