Mark Twain once wrote that rumours of his death had been an exaggeration. It’s become fashionable to herald the imminent death of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but I wonder if we’re not jumping the gun. Media reporting about a situation like the Syrian protest movement and the Damascus’ government efforts to crush and coopt it can have a kind of snowball effect. International outlets are mostly shut out of Syria, they rely on information from residents who may or may not be linked to rights or opposition groups and footage that some of these organisations and individual activists manage to get outside the country and propagate. Without the ability to make judgements from inside the country about what’s going on, media are really hamstrung.

Assessing how many have died is a case in point. Media like facts and statistics, the better to judge and describe a situation. This week, reports from the rights, opposition, activists and ordinary people said on Sunday that the army’s assault on Hama had killed up to 140 people. With some news outlets that figure had been scaled back to around 80 the next day. One group being cited is Avaaz, a U.S.-based online advocacy group for democracy. Avaaz said, as of 2 August, that since 15 March 1,634 have died, 2,918 people have disappeared, and of 26,000 arrested 12,617 remained in detention in Syria, but how they could know with such accuracy I do not know.

With such figures in public space on the one hand and the inability of media to know for themselves what’s happening inside Syria on the other, the analyses have flowed. Different outlets outdo each other to come up with new takes on essentially the same theme every time: Assad’s gone too far, his time is up, it’s only a question of when. The FT, for example, tells us this week that this is Assad’s “last bloody throw of the dice”. Foreign Policy asked if this was “The Last Stand of Bashar al-Assad“.

Amid this understandable desire to see another dictator fall – we all do – regime propaganda tends to be ignored, laughed at or held up as mendacity. Xinhua still has a correspondent in Damascus, who wrote a piece titled: “Syrian state TV shows horrible footage on armed men in Hama“. It pushes the idea that the infamous “armed gangs” that are central to the government’s story of what the conflict is about were also active in Hama and the army was responding to their provocations.

I wouldn’t doubt that the daily state media story is full of lies, but I don’t think it’s the lies that has a hold on many Syrians. What does, I suspect, is the regime’s arguments about national unity and foreign conspiracy. These are tropes used by other regimes the world over, not least this year during the Arab uprisings. But Syria has a particular long history of paranoid discourse along these lines. Syria has always acted liked a wounded creature of colonialism, with bits of it lopped off in a series of historical crimes: Lebanon, Iskanderun, the Golan, the entirety of Palestine.

Farouq al-Sharaa, the former foreign minister who is often been seen as the more acceptable face of the regime, once said in a speech: 

“Syria is the only country in the Arab East or West that was broken up… Over a hundred years ago the greater part of the Arabian peninsula united to become Saudi Arabia, at the beginning of the 1970s the Sheikhdoms of seven countries united as one country [the United Arab Emirates], and at the beginning of the 1990s Yemen united and held onto its unity. Unfortunately, Syria was broken up by an English-French colonial conspiracy whose main aim was to pave the way for setting up a Jewish state in Palestine. And indeed, the Balfour Declaration came straight after the signing of the English-French Sykes-Picot agreement [which] divided Syria into four countries.” (al-Hayat, 12 June 2000)

The post-colonial state of Syria has been a model of political instability. It began the era of military coups in the Arab world when Hosni al-Za’im seized power in 1949. By 1970 when Hafez al-Assad took power, the country had had 14 presidents. It was Syrian politicians who went to Nasser in 1958 to ask him to lead a country they despaired of ruling and feared would fall to Communists. For all its obvious failures, the raison d’etre of the Baath party over the decades has really been to present a homogenizing narrative that smoothes over the putative terrifying pluralism of Syrian society. 

So when Assad addressed the armed forces in a speech published this week, what might come across as merely the crude propaganda and obfuscation of a dictator who clings to power for power’s sake is perhaps designed more sutbtly to touch on historic fears Syrians, or perhaps rather, institutions of the Syrian state, have of national break-up, as well as descent into sectarian, regional and factional fighting. 

“The President pointed out that the conspiracy was carefully plotted to fragment Syria in order to fragment the entire area, but the people who concocted the conspiracy forgot that Syria has unique characteristics that make it immune to conspiracies.” (SANA, 1 August 2011)

The country is descending into such fighting in any case because of the mistakes of the regime, but the power of the rhetorical worlds created by systems like Assad’s Syria should not be forgotten. Take Saudi Arabia – its population is not pacified simply by the threat of violence and insane handouts of petrodollars, but also through calculated appeals to history and religion: the clerics tell the people they are living in the Islamic Utopia, that protests and democracy have no place there, and many people believe it. If Assad’s regime continues to confound those announcing its imminent collapse, maybe these dizzying word games played by the state might have something to do with it?