Redrawing the map: a fragmented Syria

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. From London to Melbourne to Mexico City, protests are calling attention to violence against women. But it's in the poor world where the problem is most widespread, least addressed and most costly to societies. And a frightened lizard might drop its tail to distract a predator. No matter, it can grow a new one. Now, scientists have happened across a creature that can drop its entire body and head off. But first, 10 years ago today, in cities across Syria, thousands of people took to the streets to demonstrate against the government of Bashar Al Assad. As with other movements in the Arab Spring, protesters called for democratic and economic reforms after decades of stagnating living standards. But unlike their counterparts in Egypt or Tunisia, whose governments were overthrown, the Syrian people came up against a regime that was willing to use everything in its power to stop them. Within days, security forces were opening fire on protesters. A month later, government tanks were rolling into cities. And By July of 2012, Syria was in full blown civil war. It's estimated that more than 400,000 people have since died in the conflict. Schools and hospitals have been attacked. Chemical weapons have been used at least 40 times. And half of Syria's pre war population, nearly 12 million people, remain displaced from their homes. Later today, the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, is scheduled to brief the Security Council on the desperate need for constructive international diplomacy. Last week, the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michel Bachelet, urged countries to step up their trials of Syria's suspected war crimes.

We owe it to the victims to ensure the next decade is one of accountability and remedy, with their rights and needs addressed so they can rebuild their lives.

But the prospect of rebuilding is distant. After 10 years of war, Syria no longer looks like a single nation, rather a patchwork of states controlled by rival powers both inside and outside the country. And while the armed conflict may have peaked, the Suffering of the country's people has not.

The Syrian economy is in worse shape now than at any time in the 10 years since the war began.

Nicholas Pelham is our Middle east correspondent.

The price of food has soared, leaving many people at risk of going hungry. Wages have completely collapsed. I mean, the average civil servant in regime held territory now earns about $15 a month. And that money just so quickly erodes. And there's no way that a family can get by just even for their basic food needs, let alone to start to repair the horrific war damage that just spreads across cities all over Syria.

And all of that is a result of the war over the past 10 years.

The situation economically is now so much worse than even at the height of the war. I mean, the Syrian pound was probably worth about 10 times what it is now, even when the fighting was right in the heart of Damascus. And that's because there are just so many other factors that are contributing to this economic degradation. It's American sanctions, it's the collapse of Lebanese banks where rich Syrians stash their cash. It's the slow degradation exacerbated by the war of the infrastructure. It's corruption, it's Covid. But in terms of the fighting itself, what you're seeing now is outside powers carving out agreements amongst themselves as to kind of who has what. So although fighting has declined, what you're left with is a sort of patchwork state where each foreign power has its own enclave.

So in that sense, how much control does Mr. Assad actually have now?

He's clawed back quite a lot of territory at the nadir for the regime. He probably held less than a third of Syria and he's managed to double that. He holds most of the big cities. His government even has enclaves in the northeast which has otherwise fallen out of government control. He remains head of state and he determines the political process in regime held areas. So in May or June, we're expecting that there's going to be another presidential election in which Bashar Al Assad is likely to stand for a fourth seven year term. This month, the Assad family is celebrating its rule over Syria. For half a century, Bashar's father, half has ran the country before him. But if you travel much beyond the capital, Damascus, Mr. Assad's government looks less in charge even in the areas he normally controls.

And in those areas, who is in control.

You have sort of patchwork of forces. You've got Russian troops operating unchecked. You've got Iranian backed militias which control the borders between regime held areas and Iraq and Lebanon. Israel drops bombs on militias above. And then there are areas which are completely outside government control, where Turkey is a dominant force in the northwest, or the Americans in the northeast. And then even inside government territory, you sort of have an unraveling of central power because the government is just a spent force. It doesn't have the means to provide. And so this is also exacerbating the country's divisions.

So it sounds very much like that the country is just splitting apart here.

Yes, I mean, under the patronage of these foreign powers, you've got almost kind of separate political processes emerging. You've got separate militias who are controlling their own territory, and you've got separate economies. And even languages are changing. So in the portion of Syria controlled by the Kurds, for instance, in the northeast, locals have ditched Arabic for Kurdish and increasingly preferring the dollar. And then you've also got Turkey, where you've got a separate political process in the areas that it controls in the northwest, the Turkish lira, which is the prevailing currency. You've got the territories increasingly tied into the electricity grid of Turkey and its infrastructure. You've got the country really being pulled in multiple different directions in its west.

East and south, and in its economies, in its languages. Even the infrastructure, it seems. I mean, is there anything that Mr. Assad can do to turn the tide here?

A more pragmatic Serem president might have tried to cut deals with regional authorities and devolve some power in an attempt to keep the country unified. But it's just not Mr. Assad's way to compromise. He fears that compromise will be taken as a sign of weakness. He doesn't like political processes, and so instead he just does what he's done for the past 10 years. Threaten more war, look for military options. The language that he uses that is used by state broadcasters denounced Syrians outside regime held areas as terrorists and fifth columnists. There's even a new law that the parliament in Damascus ratified at the start of the month which strips citizenship from anyone who fails to renew their identity card after 10 years. So that's aimed at people who are living outside his territory. But, you know, the fact is that even if people would like to return, they're not going to do so as long as his regime remains in charge.

And so is that to say that you think this fracturing of Syria might turn out to be permanent?

The sad fact of Syria today is that it's just too weak and too broken to decide its own fate. It's foreign powers that are determining the future of Syria. And as long as those foreign powers themselves can't come to an agreement on a united Syria, and as long as each of them carves out bits of the country for their own self interest, there's not going to be a healing process, the country's not going to come together. What you're seeing instead is a steady Balkanisation of a once united Syrian Arab Republic.

But you say that a leader that were more interested in unity could do something. I mean, is this a function of Assad's continued rule? If by chance he were to be replaced in some way, could Syria again be unified?

He's an obstacle to unification in as much as his way is not to negotiate, it's not to compromise. He can make tactical moves on the ground militarily, but what he doesn't do is in any way negotiate a sharing of power, he still has this sort of mirage of Syria as essentially sort of absolute totalitarian monarchy with him as the absolute ruler. And until you have some form of power sharing and a ruler who's ready to power share, it's really hard to see how this country is going to come together again.

Nicholas, thank you very much for joining us.

Jason, it's always a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

Earlier this month in London, Sarah Everard was murdered when walking home from a friend's house on Saturday, hundreds of women gathered in her honor.

For centuries. We've had enough of being scared to leave the house. Yeah, We've just come to show that it's not something that we're going to accept. It should be something that's normal.

The case has sparked outrage in Britain, which only intensified when the gathering was broken up heavy handedly by police.

The conversation around how men behave towards women on the streets has got to change and we need to educate and talk to them.

In cities across Australia over the weekend, thousands took part in the March for Justice, calling for an end to violence against women.

We are here because it's unfathomable that we are still having to fight this same stale, tired fight.

In Mexico City last week on International Women's Day, protesters bashed barricades with hammers as they protested with a similar message. The list goes on. In Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka late last year, women staged street protests. Break the dark hands of the rapist, they chanted. We want justice. Violence against women has long been a global problem, but it's in places like Dhaka that the effects of it are more widely felt.

Obviously, huge problems in terms of women's rights, gender equality, Violence against women still exist in rich countries, and some rich countries have utterly terrible records on this. But in developing countries, it definitely is more widespread.

Susanna Savage writes for the Economist.

Women in Africa, for example, are four times as likely as women in Europe to be killed by their partner or a family member. In Sub Saharan Africa and South Asia, almost a quarter of women who have ever been in a relationship say that they've been beaten or attacked sexually by their partners. In the last year alone in countries like Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, more than one in three have been assaulted by their husbands in the past year. So these are huge numbers.

And so why is there that pattern? Why is violence against women more widespread in poorer countries, do you think?

There are a few simple answers. When people are cash strapped, when people are living in poverty, there's more stress, and so men are more likely to lash out. But then there are also much more fundamental reasons behind this. So violence towards women in general is rooted in gender inequality. The reason men can lash out when they're stressed is because they have more power than women generally. And I don't mean physical strength when I say that in developing countries, far fewer women than men finish school. A lot of women end up being married, as children or as teenagers. And so this keeps the status of women low, which means that it bolsters men's sense of entitlement to abuse women. This also means that women lack the skills and the confidence to defend their rights and that they have far fewer options. So, unlike in richer countries, there's seldom much of a welfare state to fall back on. If they leave their husbands and they can't find work, for example, so many women are trapped.

And all of this discussion so far has been essentially around violence in the home. What about outside it?

Homes are the most dangerous place for women. But when they are attacked outside, most victims never report such assaults, and if they do, they're often blamed for them. So last September, near Lahore in Pakistan, a woman driving on the motorway late at night ran out of fuel. She pulled over onto the hard shoulder and. And while she waited for a relative to come and help her, two men emerged from the darkness and dragged her from the vehicle and raped her with her children sitting watching. So this attack was obviously really shocking. But the outrage it created in Pakistan was added to because after the attack, Omar Sheikh, Lahore's police chief, spoke in a television interview about the attack. He asked why the woman was on the motorway after dark, why hadn't she gone a safer route? And he questioned whether she had asked her husband's permission to drive alone at night. And Mr. Sheikh echoed a common logic for sexual attacks in South Asia and elsewhere, which is punishing women for straying outside of their traditional roles.

What about unpacking the general levels of violence in these countries is a factor here, that the poor countries suffer higher levels of violence in a general sense as well.

So women in countries beset by violence in general, like El Salvador, Honduras, are more likely to be murdered than women almost anywhere else. In some countries, women are also assaulted for political reasons. This is an especially vicious way to intimidate dissidents. We spoke to a woman I'll call Dembe, but it's not her real name. A Ugandan student in 2019, she planned a protest against higher university fees. She was detained by police for a day and then she was released. But after that, she was followed by thugs and bundled into a van. They beat her up and assaulted her. There are increasing numbers of this type of incident. There's a non profit organization called ACLED that says that political violence targeting women is increasing across Africa, in parts of Asia and the Middle East. So this problem is getting worse.

And what about a countercurrent? How much of a movement is there to start addressing all of these problems?

This is a colossal task in South Asia. A lot of people came forward after recent high profile gang rapes in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and they called for governments to hang rapists. Some forms of rape are already punishable by death in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. But Bangladesh sort of tweaked the law to ramp this up a bit. But experts are really clear on this. The death penalty just does not work in terms of deterring these types of crimes. The certainty of the punishment is a lot more important than its severity. And this is where the problem is. So in Bangladesh, the prosecution rate for cases that are reported is only about 2%. It's barely any higher in Pakistan.

So if the legal system as it's laid out now isn't working for women, what else is there to be done?

The biggest thing that needs to happen is a change in perceptions and challenging bigotry. This is what's crucial. There are a lot of movements that are aiming to achieve this in Zambia. A while ago, I met members of the Zambian Men's Network, which goes into rural communities and discusses violence against women, not just with men, but also with women, to try and tackle some of these underlying attitudes. It was actually really lovely. So we were in this village communal space and the community came together and they were singing they sang peace between men and women. No more abuse and child defilement. Show the right way for our children. Thank you for gender equality.

But as you say, this is a colossal problem and one that has been tackled for really quite some time. How much difference do you think that these kind of piecemeal schemes can make?

I think they do make a difference, mainly because they help to break the cycle and that's what's needed. We know that people who suffer or witness violence are more likely to become perpetrators of violence later or to suffer it themselves. So one NGO in Ghana, for example, which has been working to tackle violence against women through numerous means for the last 20 years, has seen more than a 50% reduction in violence against women in the households that they've worked with. And similarly, a study in Bihar, which is a northeastern state of India with a particularly high rate of violence against women, found that if you talk to boys about non sexist attitudes during sports coaching sessions that they were less likely to approve of violence against women and then five years later, they were less likely to actually perpetrate violence against their wives, both sexual and physical violence.

So bit by bit, place by place, these efforts are making a difference.

Yes, campaigners efforts are definitely bearing fruit. In about three quarters of poor countries where surveys have been repeated over a number of years, the share of women who report physical or sexual abuse from their husbands has fallen. So we are seeing progress. But the thing is, hundreds of millions of women are still attacked every year, so immeasurably more is needed to combat this.

Susanna, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

The ability to self heal and regenerate body parts has long been the stuff of science fiction, such as in the classic British series Doctor who.

Someone didn't tell me what's going on when he's dying. Is it his body repairs itself, it changes. But you can't.

I'm sorry, it's too late.

I'm regenerated.

The idea though, comes from science fact. Some animals really can grow back a limb. But the truth is not even scientists have explored the full scope of regeneration that's possible in the animal kingdom.

Researchers have known for a long time that there are animals that when they injure parts of their body, they can ditch the part that's injured and grow it back.

Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent for the Economist.

Salamanders are famous for this. If an arm gets ripped off, it's an inconvenience. The salamander will grow the arm back. This kind of regeneration is almost exclusively limited to things like limbs and tails. Except now a team of researchers have found an animal that can ditch its entire body and then grow it back.

So an animal effectively decapitates itself. How does this work?

There are these species of slug that belong in the ocean, and researchers had brought them into a lab in Japan. And while they were monitoring them in captivity, five of these captive slugs spontaneously dumped their bodies and then started growing new ones.

So the heads and the bodies essentially part ways and carry on.

So the bodies that were discarded included the kidneys, the heart, the intestines, reproductive organs, everything except the brain. Eventually they succumb to decay and the heart stops beating and the body rots. The head parts way with the body and carries on. The heads crawl around and they busy themselves capturing algae and they're taking the energy producing organs that are found inside algae and they grab these chloroplasts and they stuff them into the tissues around the head, which the slug then appears to use to generate energy for itself. In this case, the slug is using the energy provided by the chloropaths, presumably to regrow its body.

And this is the sort of thing that these sea slugs do all the time, or only in extremis?

Well, we don't really know. So the researchers found that the animals do this both early in their lives and late in their lives. Yet whether they're successful depends upon their age. If they're relatively young, a full body is regrown within just shy of three weeks. With really old slugs, they discard their bodies and the body dies, and then the head dies too, about 10 days later. So that raises the question of why on earth would an old animal discard its body when it's gonna die anyway?

Well, I mean, the broader question is why do these animals do it at all, at any age?

Yeah, and that's a fair question. So the researchers ran a bunch of experiments where they teased the animals with pincers and tried to poke them and injure them in little bits of ways to see if the animals would then discard their bodies. And that didn't work. What they found in a follow up experiment was that if the slug was infected with a parasite, then the animal was much more likely to discard its body. Parasite free slugs never shed their bodies. So this is the theory that they're going on, that if the animal is infected with the parasite that's going to harm them in a significant way, the best solution for the slug is dump the body and grow a new one.

So beyond being a frankly creepy discovery. Is it a useful and informative one for science?

Well, there's a lot of interest in how animals regenerate. There are teams that have been looking at salamander regeneration for a long time, and that's because there is the potential for us to see how salamanders do it and then take those mechanisms and import them into people. With regards to the slugs, the slugs are very different from us, but that doesn't mean that the slugs might not have some cellular mechanisms that can help illuminate the process of regeneration and teach us a few things that we could one day use ourselves.

Matt, thank you very much for joining us.

It was my pleasure, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow.