The Persistence of Bedouin Identity and Increasing Political Self-Representation in Lebanon and Syria

THE PERSISTENCE OF BEDOUIN IDENTITY AND INCREASING POLITICAL SELF-REPRESENTATION IN LEBANON AND SYRIA

Dawn Chatty

Al-Bedu, Bedu wa al Hadr, Hadr [The Bedouin are Bedouin while the Urbanites are Urbanites]

(Bedouin, KH17)

Abstract

This paper examines the persistence of tribal identity and authority and the increasingly public self-representation of Bedouin in the Badia of Syria and the Bekaa of Lebanon. It sets out the significant challenges to Bedouin tribal identity and authority over the past three decades. The paper argues that, despite the formal annulling of the Bedouin tribes legal status in Syrian law in 1958 and the silenced legal status of most Bedouin in Lebanon, tribal identity and the authority attached to traditional leaders continues to exist.

KEYWORDS: Bedouin identity, Self Representation, Authority, Lebanon, Syria

This paper examines the persistence of tribal identity and authority and the increasingly public and political self-representation of tribesmen in the Badia of Syria and the Bekaa of Lebanon over the past three decades. It commences with a brief examination of the nature of the Bedouin tribe in Greater Syria (Bilad al Sham) in the recent past. It briefly examines the twentieth century history of pacification and revival (19001970). It then sets out the significant challenges to Bedouin tribal identity and authority over the past three dec-ades: in Syria after the Correctionist Movement of Hafez al Asad and his son Bashar; and in Lebanon after the ending of the civil war and the Taif Agreement of the late 1980s. The paper argues that, despite the formal annulling of the Bedouin tribes legal status in Syrian law in 1958 and the unwillingness of the Lebanese state to recognise Bedouin as citizens, tribal identity and the author-ity attached to tribal leaders continued to exist and were played out in different ways in both countries, reflecting the different approaches to authority of each state. In the wake of the Arab Uprising, tribal identity, affiliation and political

NOMADIC PEOPLES 18, 2 (2014): 1633. doi: 10.3197/np.2014.180203 2014 Commission for Nomadic Peoples

The Persistence of Bedouin Identity

17Nomadic Peoples 18 No.2 (2014)

solidarity have emerged anew as significant elements in the conflict that en-gulfs the Middle East.

A decade ago Donald Cole wrote Where Have the Bedouin Gone? (Cole 2003: 235267). Today the question could be revised to ask Where have all the Bedouin come from? to set the stage for analysing the growing trend in the past decade of growing self-identification as Bedu or Arab. For most of the past fifty years it has been impossible to get census figures on the Bedouin as they have not been recognised as an ethnic group or minority either in Lebanon or in Syria. This paper sets out to show that the Bedouin tribes of Syria, and to a lesser extent of Lebanon, continue to function as groups tied in relations of real and fictive kinship and that these bonds provide the tribal members with a political solidarity and cohesiveness which the state has not been able to sup-press, despite either total neglect or decades of discrimination. The Bedouin of Syria and Lebanon do constitute a coherent ethnicity expressed in segmen-tary tribal organisation. They construct themselves as groups, forming moral societies based on clearly articulated concepts of right and wrong, expressed largely through notions that shape institutions such as hospitality and hon-our as well as behaviour such as expulsion and generosity. At the same time, Bedouin and Bedouin-ness, as a social construct and identity, continue to be regarded by some with both the romanticism directed at the noble savage and the ambiguity and distrust associated with the backward and primitive.

Much of the analysis in this paper is based on interviews and participant observation over several decades in the LebanonSyria border region and in the central Syrian Badia between Homs, Hama and Palmyra, where significant tribal activity and interaction with the state takes place.

The nature of Bedouin tribes in the past and today

The term bedu is derived from the Arabic word Badia, the semi-arid and arid steppe land which covers so much of Northern Arabia, and refers to those who live in the Badia. The opposition of bedu (desert dweller) to hadar (urban dweller) is specifically an Arab cultural tradition. The other term commonly used to refer to the Bedouin is Arab.

The social organisation of Bedouin tribes has been described by many as based on opposing and parallel segmentation of units at various levels of re-ality and fiction. The Arab expression me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the world perfectly describes this layered outlook on alliances and enmity among fami-lies, lineages and tribes. The segmentation refers to the way in which the tribe is divided into smaller parallel sections ashiras and afkhadhs sub-tribes

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18 Nomadic Peoples 18 No.2 (2014)

or clans and lineages and then, at the base, large extended groups of related households sometimes called bayts or qom/aqwam. These groups often move or live together in adjacent hamlets; they work together in herding and in ag-ricultural activities and often share pastures, agricultural fields and watering points. At the head of these social groups, the tribal leader (shaykh) is generally the politically strongest and most charismatic male of the shaykhly lineage. He negotiates access, arbitrates disputes and generally represents the tribe in its relations with the central authority of the state. This leadership is also vested with a moral authority that can be augmented or lost by behaviour which re-spects or disregards tribal custom (Chatty 1977: 385397). Ernest Gellner (1958) and more recently James Scott (2009) have regarded such tribal peo-ples as specialised and sophisticated resistance communities, in that evidence increasingly suggests a complex but adaptive organisation developed in oppo-sition to the centralising and often oppressive authority of the state.

Throughout history, the semi-arid steppe lands bordering the Mediterranean coastline have been a zone of conflict and contest between agricultural activ-ity and pastoral grazing. This area is called the Mamoura and is a transitional zone where some of the best pastures are found and where extensive cultiva-tion can also take place in the right conditions. Sheep-raising Bedouin tribes have moved into and out of the Bekaa Valley for centuries during their yearly seasonal migrations (Burckhardt 1822; Chatty 1977; Cole 2003). There are accounts of the Bedouin presence in the Bekaa Valley as early as the thirteenth century (Oppenheim 1939: 325).

In the mid-seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire turned its attention and its resources to its war against Austria, which resulted in a decline in agricul-ture. Numerous noble camel-raising Bedouin tribes from deep in the interior of Northern Arabia began to drift north to fill what was in effect a vacuum. This ex-pansion continued into the late nineteenth century when once again the Ottoman authorities took measures to control, settle or co-opt Bedouin leadership. During these two centuries, the great Aneza and Shammar camel-raising tribes estab-lished themselves in the Badia and Jezireh (the semi-arid steppeland across the Euphrates River) of Greater Syria (Toth 2000). The Shammar confederation of tribes moved into the region first. They were followed by Aneza tribes including the Hassanna, the Fedaan, the Sbaa, the Ruwalla, Wuld Ali and Amarat.

The local sheep-herding tribes generally attached themselves to local patrons such as the Ottoman governor in Aleppo and paid taxes to the state au-thority. In the mid-nineteenth century, approximately one hundred common, sheep- herding tribes were registered with the city of Aleppo and regularly paid taxes in lieu of paying tribute (khuwa) to a more powerful noble Bedouin tribe. The noble camel-herding tribes, such as the Fedaan and the Sbaa did not see themselves as subject to the Ottoman Sultan or his governors; they did



not generally pay taxes and regarded themselves as free. Large in number and well-organised for mobility, they also had a role in the states regional secu-rity strategy. Those tribes controlling a main Ottoman military district where lines of communications were important were granted control of these areas against a payment from the Sultan, and sometimes rations and food. Invariably control of a district also gave the tribe rights to levy passage taxes on passing traffic (Rae 1999: 64).

By the middle of the nineteenth century the Aneza and Shammar tribes controlled the important trans-urban trade and much of the pilgrimage car-avan routes between Damascus and Baghdad and Damascus and Mecca. Occasionally the Ottomans launched punitive expeditions against these tribes when their inter-tribal wars and raiding disturbed the security of the Mamoura and the cities of Syria, particularly Homs and Aleppo (Toth 2000). Hence, in the 1870s and 1880s, troops were dispatched to the border zone from Aleppo to the Hauran. In addition, the Ottoman authorities began to purposefully settle and arm Muslim refugees from the OttomanRussian wars along this border region. Between 1870 and 1900, Circassians, Abkhazi, and Chechnyans were forced to settle along the Mamoura in a line extending from Ras al Ain on the Euphrates to Amman (Lewis 1987; Chatty 2010b: 106). In the Golan Heights, these settlers, along with other new arrivals, the Druze, fleeing fighting in

Map 1. Tribal areas

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Mount Lebanon, formed an effective fighting force to break the power of the Bedouin tribes. In the region around Homs, Hama and Salamiyah, new milita-rised Circassian settlements encircled Mawali, Haddiddiyn and Fadl Bedouin.

For Bedouin and villagers in the Mamoura, a basic notion of common rights existed, based on Islamic law which differentiated between privately held land (mulk), state land (miri), state land with common use rights (musha) and dead land (mawat). The Haddiddiyn and the Mawali, for example, were rec-ognised by the Ottoman state to have habitual (customary) summer grazing grounds to the south of Aleppo. The size and borders of these traditional tribal areas were not fixed and often overlapped with neighbouring Bedouin groups. Strong tribal leaders could also allocate particular water sources and pastures to particular sub-tribes or lineages for undefined periods of time. By and large, the common tribes were in good relations with the agricultural settlements, but they were often in patronclient relationships with the stronger noble tribes.

Recent history of pacification, rejection, and revival (19001970)

Many Bedouin leaders and their tribesmen supported the Arab Revolt of World War I and then the establishment of an Arab independent state under Emir Faysal over a part of Syria. The leaders of three Bedouin tribes with close proximity to Damascus the Ruwalla, the Fadl and the Hassanna were partic-ularly active in first supporting the Hashemite Kingdom in Syria (19191920) and later in protesting against the policy of the French Mandate authorities in Lebanon and Syria. The Fadl threw their support behind Emir Faysals movement for independence from Ottoman rule as did Nuri Shalaan of the Ruwalla and Trad al Melhim of the Hassanna. In 1918 both Nuri Shalaan of the Ruwalla and Trad al Melhim of the Hassanna entered Damascus with the troops of General Allenby and the Emir Faysal to establish the Kingdom of Syria. After the defeat of Emir Faysal by the French in 1920 and the es-tablishment of the French (and also British) Mandate over the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, each of these tribal leaders continued their protest and opposition. Shaykh Trad al Melhim of the Hassanna continued his campaign for the establishment of an independent Arab nation. In 1920 both Hassanna and Fadl tribesmen engaged French forces in battle in the Bekaa Valley in Marjaoun and in Rayak (Hopwood 1988: 178180). Despite de-feat, these Bedouin continued to consider the French mandate authority as illegitimate and expressed their opposition through general strikes and armed struggle throughout Lebanon and Syria. Many in the Fadl then went into exile into the newly created British Mandate state of Trans-Jordan. The Shalaan vacillated between both the French and the English until they finally reached



an agreement with the French to remain outside the authority of the state but at the same time to safeguard official caravans crossing in the Badia and to secure peace among the tribes in payment of a monthly stipend of 2,000 gold pounds.

In their mandate the French sought to increase their strength and followed the classical policy of divide and rule. The Bedouin of the Badia were sepa-rated out from the rest of Greater Syria and some claim that Nuri Shalaan was encouraged to set up his own nation under the light supervision of a special French unit, the Contrle Bedouin. This was more than some sort of simple French romanticism toward the Bedouin as noble savages. The French needed the cooperation of the Bedouin. First they could not leave two-thirds of their newly acquired mandate territory (the Badia) out of their control. They needed to guarantee a continuous and safe passage through the region for com-merce and travel to Baghdad. Furthermore, the petroleum line to Mosul had to be secured, as did the oil pipeline to Haifa. The French had two options. They could either pacify the area by force of arms or they could buy the support of the tribes by catering to their leaders. Both approaches were attempted at the same time with a number of unexpected results.

In creating the new state of Greater Lebanon, the French affixed the Bekaa Valley of Greater Syria to the predominantly Christian Mount Lebanon. The French began collecting statistical records in Lebanon 1926 and conducted the first National Census in 1932 Census (which remains the most recent Lebanese population count). Many Bedouin were not registered in this census, either because they happened to be seasonally out of the Bekaa Valley at the time or because they refused to be registered, in opposition to the French colonial presence. Without a nationality, the majority of the Bedouin tribes residing in the Bekaa Valley were not able to purchase land in their own name; nor did they have access to education and public health care. As the French sold off their common pastureland in the Bekaa Valley for agriculture, the Bedouin were increasingly pushed to reduce their migrations, to reduce their herd size and to build houses for themselves and their families (Haj 1991; Thomas 2003).

In Syria, the French set up the Contrle Bedouin in 1920 to encouraged the Bedouin to conduct their affairs in their traditional manner in such a way as to not disturb the settled population. This meant Bedouin not carrying arms in set-tled regions and that they should fight only among themselves, leaving the settled communities in peace (see also Bssow 2011). The latter, of course, was not possible and in 1921 the French severely disciplined these recalcitrant tribes in operations of unusual violence. Several winter tribal settlements were burned and flocks dispersed, and large numbers of people were killed (Glubb 1942). Finally a financial-political understanding between the French authorities and some of the senior Bedouin tribal leaders resulted in an element of tolerance for the oc-casional raid and skirmish (Oppenheim 1939; Glubb 1942; Al-Faour 1968).

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Over the next two decades, the French arrested the once-fluid social and physical universes of the Bedouin in order better to administer and manage this region. Tribal rights to particular pastures and water points were recognised as belonging to particular leaders and their tribe and were patrolled by the French to ensure no further return to contestation and violence. Yet the very nature of the tribal way of life in these arid lands revolved around recognising the need for constant flexibility and adaptation in order to negotiate access to resources when environmental conditions made that necessary. For example, by the 1930s the French had set up a new land code and system of title to re-place the Ottoman system. In the Badia, grazing land traditionally held by the tribe communally came to be registered in the names of individuals gener-ally tribal leaders. In the Homs-Hama area, for example, land encompassing twenty villages was registered in the name of Shaykh Trad al Melhim. In this manner, the Shammar registered in the name of their tribal leaders over two million hectares of land in the Jezireh. This rapid agricultural push at the ex-pense of communal grazing was not well received by the Bedouin. Some left Syria and removed themselves from the political sphere of the French. These included sub-tribal sections and lineages of the Hassanna, Ruwalla, Sbaa and Fedaan (Ministre Des Affaires Etrangres 1938). Rakan, shaykh of the Sbaa Butaynat, established an estate for himself in the region of Wadi Hasna and Wadi al Azaib the tribes former summer grazing area. Other tribes, reported first in the 1930s, progressively abandoned camel-raising as it became less lucrative and turned to sheep raising (Ministre Des Affaires Etrangres 1931).

By 1940, in an effort to consolidate their hold over the Bedouin, Arrt no. 132/LR was entered into the French mandated statute books. Law 132, often called the Law of the Tribes, brought together all the previous relevant laws that had been introduced over the past two decades to support the Bedouin state within a state. When, soon after, nationalist deputies submitted a bill calling for an end to French Mandatory rule, only one of the nine Bedouin deputies appeared to vote. This was the Emir of the Mawali tribe. By and large, the French had succeeded in bringing most Bedouin leaders round to their side. Instead of fighting to free Syria from French mandatory rule, they largely with-drew and abstained from taking a position, content to hang on to the special status accorded them by the French.

The independent nation and its relations with the Bedouin tribes

The separate status of state-like character which the French had granted the Bedouin tribes was an immediate thorn in the side of the independent national-ist rulers of Syria. Where the French had used the tribes as leverage against the



nationalists, the new Syrian government policy wanted to convert this wild population into Syrian citizens liable to common law (qanun). The national-ist government thus pursued an aggressive tribal policy aimed ultimately at abolishing all tribal privileges and power. Settling the Bedouin was regarded as a key part of this process. Furthermore, it was felt that the Bedouin mo-bile method of sheep-raising was not only primitive but also non-viable on the scant resources of the Badia. A move to agriculture and intensive sheep ranching was considered the appropriate model, which was supported by vari-ous international development agencies (see Bocco 2006).

In 1953, the French Mandate Law of the Tribes (1940) was annulled and replaced with a new Syrian Law of the Tribes Decree No. 124 which contin-ued to permit the Bedouin to carry arms in the Badia, but only those classified as nomadic (the Aneza and Shammar confederations of tribes as well as the Haddiddiin and Mawali and a further fifteen semi-nomadic tribes). The Minister of Interior was empowered to remove tribes from this list as he saw fit and re-register them as a settled community. Settled tribes were not allowed to carry arms. The nine seats granted to the Bedouin tribes during the French Mandate were now reduced to six. Of these, four were specified for particu-lar tribes: the Mawali and Haddiddiyn from Aleppo, the Shammar from the Jezireh and the Hassanna from Damascus.

In 1958, after nearly a decade of political turmoil both within the coun-try and abroad, the Syrian Parliament voted for a union with Egypt. On 28 September 1958, Egyptian President Gamal Abd Al-Nasir repealed the Law of the Tribes of 1956 and proclaimed that henceforth tribes would cease to possess any separate legal identity. This was the last legislation to deal specifi-cally with the Bedouin tribes and marked the final legal act in the long struggle between central governments and the Bedouin tribes and their leaders (see SAR 1956). For some Bedouin tribes this was a signal for their departure from Syria. Some sections of Aneza tribes left for Saudi Arabia, particularly the Fedaan and the Sbaa. Many continued to leave until 1973.

Two years later, in 1963, the Bath party came to power and the Union with Egypt collapsed. In a desire to shift the balance of power from the city centres to the rural areas, the Bath Party set out to establish a radical policy of land reform (Hinnebusch 1989). The tribal leadership was seen as part of the old order and the pastoral economy an anachronism in the modern Bathi state. The Bath Party set out to strip the Bedouin leaders of their land and power, much as they had done with other landowners. An official party document on sectarianism, regionalism and tribalism stated that the Party [c]onsidered that any social struggle that was based on regionalism, sectarianism or tribalism would be a struggle that threatened the livelihood and existence of the people (Van Dam 1996: 146). The Bath Party considered nomadism to be a primitive

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form of production, and thus inherently inefficient. The Bath Constitution stated:

Nomadism is a primitive social state. It decreases the national output and makes an important part of the nation a paralysed member and an obstacle to its development and progress. The party struggles for the sedentarisation of nomads by the grants of land to them [and] for the abolition of tribal custom (Article 43).

This language was in perfect harmony with the modernisation theory that was being promulgated by Western nations and international development aid agencies. The emphasis was on the singular evolutionary progress from savagery to civilisation. Bedouin and their way of life were considered far removed from the apex of civilisation and needed to be guided through the steps to reach civilised existence. Land was appropriated from the tribal elite and given to tribal families so that they could benefit from the conditions of settlement (El-Zoobi 1971: 120). By the end of the 1960s, more than 1.5 mil-lion hectares had been expropriated, much of it from tribal leaders. Some was distributed to landless peasants and others set aside to settle Bedouin families.

In Lebanon a different process of disenfranchisement was taking place. The early independence period found most Bedouin encapsulated in marginal areas within well-populated agricultural regions (Chatty 1978: 400, 1986; Thomas 2003). The gradual settlement of Bedouin in the Bekaa Valley was less spe-cifically state policy and more the result of the restrictions imposed on their migratory movements by the rapid privatisation of land ownership. By the 1970s many of the Bedouin group had begun to build informal settlements on former grazing land and they began to negotiate access to agricultural fields after har-vest. For the most part, these small settlements were irregular if not illegal.

In 1958 a Lebanese law was passed giving Bedouin who had not registered in the 1932 census a special qayd al dars (under-study) nationality status. This status was an improvement over the identification document most Bedouin in Lebanon carried, maktum al qayd (no nationality / without records). However, an under-study status still imposed major restrictions on acquiring basic government services especially health services. In 1994 the Lebanese govern-ment granted those Bedouin with an under-study status from 1958 the right to Lebanese nationality. This was extended to approximately 10,000 Bedouin out of a total population estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000. In Lebanon today, about two-thirds of all Bedouin in the country are unrecognised and with-out nationality. The attempts of the Bedouin leaders and their constituencies to regularise their presence in Lebanon have resulted in a confusing array of iden-tification categories; at the same time these various nationality statuses are emerging as clearly of great political significance in Lebanons contemporary consociational form of governance (Chatty et al. 2013).



Hafiz al Asad, the Correctionist Movement and the Bedouin

In 1970 Hafiz al Asad led an internal coup within the Syrian Bath Party on a platform of creating a credible opponent to the state of Israel. Asad needed to broaden support for his own regime through a liberalisation of politics and the economy. He moved to distance himself from the pre-independence neo-colonial era by paying tribute to the unity of the 19251927 Great Arab Revolt against the major European power the French Mandate which had drawn so many of Syrias minorities to take part. He also set out to invite tribal shaykhs and other dissidents to return to Syria. Asad felt that national unity and recon-ciliation of all its minorities, including the Bedouin, was paramount if Syria were ever to be a challenge to Israel.

Asad also consolidated his grip on the state through the inclusion of disaf-fected groups including his own minority community, the Alawites. Within a very short period of time, he had managed to appoint Alawaites as the majority of the members of the Central Committee of the Bath party, as well as the crucial military elite (Van Dam 1996: 122). Furthermore, Asad expanded the traditional patronage networks of Syrian society, and made himself absolute head of a military and political dictatorship. He was able to create a system of distribution of national resources based on the political calculation of pow-ers and loyalties and the pre-emption of threatening alliances (Zubaida 1993: 164). In order to shore up such a system, he expanded the military and security apparatus of the country so that, by the 1990s, these services employed fifteen per cent of the countrys total workforce (Perthes 1991: 147). The security services became ubiquitous; their powers were often unchecked and only oc-casionally tempered by the supremacy of patronclient relationships.

Throughout this period Asad took a flexible approach to relations with the Bedouin tribes. In contradiction to the Law of 1958 stripping the Bedouin tribes of their right to settle disputes among themselves on the principles of customary law, Asad encouraged them to settle disputes through traditional tribal channels. In 1977, for example, Asad was reported to have sent a close advisor, Ali Adil to the Haddiddiyn, to settle a decades-long blood feud in which more than ten tribal members had been killed. Local police had been turned away numerous times under heavy fire when they had sought to deal with this disturbance. Ali Adil commenced a process of customary reconcili-ation which was completed a year and a half later in 1978 when the Governors of Aleppo and Hama as well as Razi Gayyan and other members of the Internal Security forces met with the leaders of the two Haddiddiyn sub-tribes (see, for example SAR 1975, 1981). A peace was agreed and blood money was paid. This example underscores the complexity of Asads rule and his recognition of the potential power of Bedouin tribal society. Hafiz al Asad instituted reforms

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that permitted the Bedouin tribes, among other minority groups, to continue to operate an alternative system of authority and thus also power but power allied to his regime.

Several years later, Asad called in his favours. In 1982 he quashed the Islamist insurrection based in Hama. There is some evidence and certainly strong belief among Bedouin elite that, during the governments three-week battle with the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, one, if not more, of the Bedouin tribes were called upon to assist the regime. In conversations with key inform-ants among the Haddiddiyn, Rae was able to establish that Jamil al Asad, the brother of the President, visited Boueidar, the capital of the Haddiddiyn, to ask tribal leaders to be the governments eyes and ears in the Badia and to moni-tor movements around the cities of Hama and Aleppo (Rae 1999: 221). The tribal leadership of the Haddiddiyn was asked to check the flow of arms being run in from the Iraqi border as well as to prevent the Badia from becoming a refuge for Muslim Brotherhood members (Chatty 2010a). We know from other sources that Bedouin support of the governments policy was not univer-sal. Other tribal leaders the Hassanna, in particular were the first to come forward with humanitarian assistance to the survivors of the Hama massacre (Schoel 2011: 104). Thus, towards the end of the twentieth century, the Syrian Bathi (and largely Alawite) regime needed Haddiddiyn support and got it. In return this tribe and its allies received de facto, if not formal, recognition of its role in managing affairs in the Badia.

In the years since 1982, the Syrian regime of the Asad family seems to have suspended any clear tribal policy. There have been no new settlement schemes for semi-nomadic or nomadic Bedouin. Land reform in the Mamoura had taken place in the 1970s and there was little room for expansion along the bor-der fringes with the Badia. Laws forbidding cultivation, especially of barley, in the Badia had been passed in order to protect traditional grazing areas. The ban was meant to prohibit the large-scale agricultural activity which was not often carried out by the Bedouin themselves. However those most affected were the small-scale Bedouin settled farmers who had traditionally grown barely enough to feed their own herds. In 1989 a final and absolute ban of all cultivation in the Badia was promulgated by the President himself. Yet even this Presidential decree could not be systematically applied in the extensive areas of the Badia where rain-fed agriculture is occasionally possible. Once in a while, a Bedouin is prevented from growing barley but, by and large, these tribesmen continue to plant it when conditions permit to feed their own herds. The ban on cultivation is continually imposed and then reversed, often depending on who holds the position of Minister of Agriculture and what kind of patronclient relationship he holds with the Bedouin tribal leadership.

In the most recent decades, numerous important posts both in the Bath



Party and in government have been held by individuals who self-identify as / celebrate being Bedouin. The Governor of Dera in 2010, for example, was uni-versally recognised as the Shaykh of the Agheidat tribe. A number of important Bath Party members are widely understood to claim Bedouin origins. The cur-rent head of the Bath party Regional Command, for example, identifies himself as Bedouin, as do several other important members of the Internal Security apparatus in the country. In recent years, the Minister of Agriculture has been of Bedouin origin (Haddiddiyn) and has regularly come down on the side of Bedouin in disputes between the tribes and the Directorate of Badia Affairs.

Political rhetoric and Bedouin realities

Between 1958 and the early 1970s, the Bedouin tribes of Syria and Lebanon were politically isolated from government. With the ascendancy of Hafez Al-Asad and his pragmatic Correctionist Movement, political contacts between the state and the tribes both in the Syrian Badia and, after 1975, in the Bekaa Valley (once Syria had entered the Lebanese Civil War) were tacitly re-established, and more formal channels of communications and patronage were set up.

This realistic approach to the alternative system of authority and power in the Badia remains a core feature of the Asad governments, that of the father and now the son. The Asad regime has continued to invite Bedouin to return to the country and has played an active part in setting up customary arbitration over disputed claims to grazing areas and water. In the 1990s a major re-adjustment of the borders of the Mamoura and the lands that had belonged to the Haib came into effect after months of statetribe sponsored arbitration, culminating with some Haib land being sold to the Haddiddiyn. Among the Bedouin it is dominance rather than formal ownership that is the basis underpinning control of resource. Possession is nine tenths of the law; the remaining percentage comes through legitimising the claim by occupation (or investment).

Thus contemporary Bedouin leadership in the Badia was derived not only from the allegiance of individual tribesmen, but also the de facto recognition by the state of the tribal leaders ability to smoothly manage natural resource allocation and customary process for conflict resolution. This recognition is not codified in law; it is the working relationship of the tribal leaders with the military and security services, the Ministry of Interior and parts of the Ministry of Agriculture as well as the Presidential Offices that determines success. In the past few decades in Lebanon this working relationship between Syrian security forces and the Bedouin was clearly in evidence in the Bekaa Valley. Several tribal leaders from among the Fadl and the Mawali have emerged as important political figures in the Bekaa, leading the protests against the

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marginalisation of the Bedouin (Ashair) in Lebanon. In Syria, a number of Bedouin leaders have been appointed to government and Party offices since the 1990s. The Presidential appointment of the Minister of Agriculture is fre-quently bestowed on a Bedouin, as are important appointments to the Ministry of Interior and the Bath Party Regional Command. Rumour circulating in Damascus in 2010 had it that Assef Shawqat, the brother-in-law of Bashar al Asad and, until April 2008, the head of Internal Security, was associated with the Beni Khalid, a Syrian sheep-raising tribe with traditional grazing lands near the Alawite Mountains. This trend to identify or create fictive kinship links with Bedouin is very recent among Bath party members; it suggests a contemporary recognition that some Bedouin leaders have a strong following in the Badia which is potentially beneficial to the Party and to the government.

No official statistics exist in Syria or Lebanon regarding the size of the Bedouin population in the country. The Syrian National Bureau of Statistics does not have a category of Bedouin, but it is possible to extrapolate from livestock figures a sense of the Bedouin presence and importance to state poli-tics and economy. Estimates made in 1999 by the then Minister of Health put the number of Bedouin in the country at 900,000. As a percentage of the total population of the country Bedouin represent between five and seven per cent of the total. Estimates from Lebanon put the total number of Bedouin in the country at nearly 150,000, with about 100,000 of these lacking citizenship.

In Lebanon, with the decline in seasonal migration, and with the failure of the 1994 Naturalisation Law to come into effect, Bedouin have developed a close engagement with local and national politics. This seems to have flour-ished after 2005 when the Lebanese political landscape changed after the withdrawal of the Syrian Army from the country. A transformation is taking place that is apparent in popular discourse; facts on the ground indicate that the nave, rural bumpkin naturalised Bedouin being bussed in to polling sta-tions in the 1990s is being replaced by the political Bedouin. The March 14th Future Movement Party of Lebanon is today actively seeking these largely Sunni Muslim votes. One Bedouin leader in the Bekaa commented, We started recruiting people to the Future Movement (Hariris Party) until we had around 300400 people. This is the reason the Future Movement agreed to establish a dispensary in the village ... This is politics today. (Bedouin BW044)

Increasingly the discourse of the Bedouin as a distinctive cultural sub-group has become more assertive. In 2008, on the eve of the 2009 Parliamentary elec-tions, Bedouin mobilisation peaked in what was named the Intifadat al Ashair (Tribal Uprising). This forum created a new political discourse about the distinc-tiveness and rights of Bedouin in Lebanon (Diab and Abu Rjeili, 2008).

In Syria, Bedouin political self-identity and voice are being expressed in voting trends. If one considers that, in 1943, ten seats out of 135 (seven per



cent) were set aside for Bedouin representatives (a carryover from the French Mandate policy), then the current situation is much changed. In 2010, thirty of the 250 elected members of Parliament (twelve per cent of the total) were Bedouin. This is not a reflection of government policy, but rather an expression of Bedouin strength in the Badia. The size of this representation suggests that the Bedouin voice in Parliament is twice what would be expected if seats in Parliament were based solely on population size rather than on territorial con-trol. The Syrian Uprising has also seen an active internet voice among Bedouin leaders and their followers, not surprisingly with Shaykh Abdallah Milhem of the Hassanna tribe actively engaged with the Syrian National Coalition as well as other Aneza and Shammar Confederation leaders. Other tribal groups sup-port the Syrian government, particularly tribal leaders once actively engaged with the Ministries of Interior in Syria and Lebanon.

Conclusion

Bedouin tribes have occupied the semi-arid Badia of Syria and Lebanon for cen-turies. Their lack of total self-sufficiency, however, has meant that they have always been linked to non-pastoral societies by economic, social and political relations. In the contemporary local Syrian and Lebanese context, a Bedouin can be a regional specialist in livestock breeding whose closest social and politi-cal ties are with his/her pastoral kinsmen (i.e. tribes). He may also be a merchant, a transnational transportation specialist and even an agricultural worker. Change and adaptation are key aspects of Bedouin livelihood strategies and, in the current global economy, many Bedouin have sought out multi-resource strate-gies, seeking wage labour in related activities such as transport and commerce in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Some Bedouin women and men enter the unskilled daily wage labour market in agriculture. Some Bedouin men migrate for jobs in construction. Others have settled and become less mobile, refocusing their livelihoods on farming. However, regard-less of their multiple occupations and residence patterns, they remain Bedouin culturally as long as they maintain close social ties with pastoral kin and retain the local linguistic and cultural markers that identify them as Bedouin. The term Bedouin, originally regarded by some as meaning a desert dweller, has taken on an important sense of cultural identity derived from the association with the tribal genealogies, myths of origin and moral society and leadership.

For those Bedouin who have remained primarily focused on herding, the past thirty years has seen immense transformation. The land they regarded theirs to use has been legally stripped from them and given away or sold off to urban en-trepreneurs or tribal elites. For some Bedouin this has meant the transformation

Dawn Chatty


from a mobile lifestyle to a more settled existence cultivating barley and other crops while managing a dwindling herd of sheep. In the 1970s, trucks and other motor vehicles came to replace camels as beasts of burden (Chatty 1986, 2013) making some Bedouin even more mobile than in the past. Today the truck is often used to bring feed and water to the herds deep in the Badia or to take livestock to distant markets. Modern trucking has also come to be identified with Bedouin, particularly interstate commerce and trade. The movement of goods from one market to another when significant price differentials appear is commonly a Bedouin activity, particularly when it is between countries (even watermel-ons and lemons fall into this category). Furthermore, the truck has allowed the Bedouin to settle for much of the year in permanent villages (especially for the young and the old), while still maintaining access to water, pastures, herds and places of employment beyond the arid steppe land that is their home.

The Bedouin tribes of contemporary Syria and Lebanon have managed to maintain their tribal identity and the authority of their leadership for decades in the face of formal legislation, but very little real interference in their affairs and their management of resources. Increasingly over the past few decades, self-identifying Bedouin and their leaders have been drawn into government agreements and active political engagement. In Syria, in 1982 the cordon sanitaire which some tribal groups maintained around Hama was a turning point that resulted in the re-recognition by the state of Bedouin tribal lead-ers authority and control in the Badia of Syria. Today, many of these leaders are now also parliamentarians. Others are actively involved in the current up-rising; some with the regime and others with the opposition. In Lebanon the active political involvement of the Bedouin is expressed as patronage politics. The Bedouin leadership has recognised that its vote a Sunni Muslim one is a negotiating factor to bring greater social services to its informal settlements. Votes count and can be parleyed into social provisions and political strength.

The Arab Spring of 2010 has turned into an armed uprising in Syria, with reverberations in Lebanon. In March 2011, confrontations between protes-tors and Syrian security forces turned violent in Dera, followed soon after by violence in Homs, Hama and Aleppo. This string of towns and cities along what was once known as the Mamoura had a strong tribal presence. It is evident that the Bedouin communities at these flashpoints resorted to armed self-defence. In the past two years, Bedouin tribal leaders have issued mani-festos against the Asad government (e.g. Hassanna). Other largely Aneza Bedouin elements have formed tribal gatherings in exile, in Amman and in Istanbul, where they have joined forces with the largest opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition (SNC). In 2013, the elected head of the SNC was a Shammar Bedouin. Other Bedouin have remained with the government. In July 2012, Bashar al Asad appointed a Haddiddiyn tribesman as Minister of



Defence after the assassination of Dawoud Rajiha. What is striking is not so much that Bedouin are taking sides in this violent regional conflict, but rather that so many are self-identifying, culturally and politically, as Bedouin.

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Interviews

Interview with Bedouin Key Informant BW044, Faour, 22 February 2008.

Interview with Bedouin Key Informant KH 17, Damascus, 10 December 2010.



Dawn Chatty is University Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration and Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth house, University of Oxford, UK. Her research interests include coping strategies and resilience of refugee youth, nomadic pastoralism and conservation, gender and development, health, illness and culture. Her most recent books include: Dispossession and Displacement in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Middle East and North Africa (ed. with Bill Finlayson, Oxford University Press, 2010); Deterritorialized Youth: Sahrawi and Afghan Refugees at the Margins of the Middle East (ed. Berghahn Books, 2010); Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa: Facing the 21st Century (Brill, 2006); Children of Palestine: Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East (ed. with Gillian Lewando-Hundt, Berghahn Books, 2005); and Conservation and Mobile Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development (ed. with Marcus Colchester, Berghahn Press, 2002). Email: [email protected]

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The Persistence of Bedouin Identity and Increasing Political Self-Representation in Lebanon and Syria