By David Bender

    International telephone rates from Syria are very expensive.  Usually they range from $1 to $2 a minute to non-Arab countries (calling to Arab countries is more reasonable).  In recent months, Syrians have discovered Skype and voice chat over MSN, Yahoo, and Google Talk and Internet cafes are filled with Syrians (and foreigners) chatting away with friends and family in other countries.

    The effect of this is that the state-owned telephone company has been losing huge sums of money on its international services since few people still use the regular phone for international calls.  This is not a problem unique to the Syrian telephone company, of course.  Phone companies in the West have been struggling with how to deal with Internet telephony.  Many are moving to provide Internet services themselves and pushing their own internet-based calling services.  Essentially, they are doing what business must do when an economic paradigm shifts by adapting.

    State-owned Syrian companies, though, are not particularly nimble.  Thus, last week, the government outlawed making telephone calls over the Internet from Internet cafes.  The police are checking in Internet cafes and if they see someone talking, they will close the Internet cafe and the owners will have to pay huge fines and bribes to reopen.  The odd thing is that people themselves who are talking are not punished or fined; it's just the Internet cafe.  

    More oddly, if one has Internet service at home, one is allowed to talk (or at least the police cannot enforce the ban).  The government could have blocked all the sites that allow Internet telephony, but they did not do that.  I talked with a Syrian about why this was the case.  He said that outside of Damascus and perhaps Aleppo, the ban would not be enforced.  This illustrates the peculiar sociological make-up of the Syrian government.

    A small religious sect called the Alawis runs Syria.  The Alawi are a small offshoot of Shia Islam.  Under the Ottomans they were considered a heretical sect, and thus faced horrible persecution, living in impoverished rural villages essentially as sharecroppers.  However, under the French Mandate, the Alawi made a push to join the army and after independence, their condition was beginning to improve.  When Hafiz al-Asad, an Alawi, came to power in 1971, the previously marginalized group was suddenly the elite.  

    Hafiz al-Asad filled the top police, security, and military positions with Alawis.  Huge numbers of Alawis moved from their remote rural mountain villages to Damascus in the 1980’s.  This was partly an effort by the government to create a critical mass of Alawis in the capital to guard against a Sunni coup, but it was also a natural consequence of many Alawis getting jobs in the capital.

    Natives of Damascus, though, resented the influx of comparatively unrefined, uneducated country bumpkins into their relatively sophisticated city.  With so many rural Alawis in Damascus, the enforcement of the law in the city was often cruder than in other, less important cities.  In Homs (the third largest city in Syria), for example, local elites continued to rule the city and enforce the laws (under the watchful eye of the central government, of course).  Only in Damascus, and to an extent in Aleppo, did rural people rule urban people.

    Thus, in regard to the banning of Internet telephony, a Syrian told me, “The police in Damascus [who presumably are originally from the villages in the coastal mountains] don’t even understand the Internet or telephone calls over it.  They say close it and they do without understanding what it is.”

    This is not to say that all Alawis are somehow backward peasants.  Indeed there are many who are as sophisticated and learned as anyone.  In general, Alawis lead more secular-style lives and are less traditional than other Syrians.  Some have been able to take advantage of their group’s privileged position, but others have gotten ahead on the merits of their own abilities.  Nonetheless, for many Sunnis in Damascus, the perceptions—even if they themselves would allow that there are many exceptions—is that Alawis who come from the countryside to Damascus are less sophisticated than the city’s natives.

    But back to the case of banning Skype, cheap international telephone calls are a way for Syrian to become more connected to the world.  Syria is an isolated place both politically and economically.  But being able to chat with people around the world has the potential to create international connections that could bring economic and social benefits in the future.

    It is doubtful that this law will last for very long—even by Syrian standards it is too absurd—but it is a distressing sign that when faced with uncertainty about how a new technology will influence the economy (or society, though I doubt this law has anything to do stopping Syrians from talking to outsiders), the first instinct of the government is to ban it.