Contre-réforme agraire et conflits fonciers en Jazîra syrienne (2000-2005)

• Main Author: Myriam Ababsa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Provence 2006-12-01
• Series: Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/3033
• ISSN: 0997-1327; 2105-2271

Between December 2000 and January 2005, the Ba‘thist government promulgated a series of political decisions (taqârîr) and decrees aimed at privatising all state farms in Syria. The principle decree, decision number 83, promulgated on December 16, 2000, allocates land in shares of 3 ha for irrigated land and 8 ha for non-irrigated land. Decision 83 called for land to be distributed by order of priority, to landholders expropriated in the agrarian reforms of 1958, 1963 and 1966, to farm workers and to employees of the General Administration of the Euphrates Basin (GADEB). In January 2005, 12,500 beneficiaries received 38,500 ha. Half of them were former landowners or beneficiaries of the earlier land reforms, a third were sharecroppers with leaseholds and a fifth were workers and GADEB employees. This paper explores the legislative principles of this decision and its impact on agrarian structures and social hierarchies in the Syrian Jazira. The process is used as a case study of a counter-reform that marks the end of the socialist Ba‘thist ideology. The primary beneficiaries of the reform process are not the traditional rural constituents of the Ba’th party, but a re-emergent class of latifundists tied to the central state and to traditional power structures.