Like many Syrian entrepreneurs, Adnan Tarabishy knows what it takes to survive in business today.
“We have to bribe the officials from the Ministry of Finance to all other bodies in the government,” he said. “It’s a necessary fact.”
Among obstacles to democratization in Syria, few loom larger than corruption, say analysts, diplomats and Syrian officials. Tax evasion is common. Political and family connections yield prized government contracts. Bribery is routine.
That integration of politics and economics is an important element in understanding why Syrian President Bashar Assad’s pledges to reform his government have foundered. To supporters and critics, Assad appears caught in a political spiral: Corruption and inefficiency put mounting pressure on his government, but the reforms required could undermine his power.
Syria’s economy is languishing. Economists say it has been in continuous recession, except for a few years in the early 1990s, since 1981. Moribund public companies cost the state millions in subsidies, and restrictive finance laws curtail private-sector development.
That is a bleak picture for businessmen like Tarabishy, an energetic, earnest 28-year-old who parlayed $1,500 and a roomful of rented furniture into a bustling business-training center and later an advertising firm. He sees a growing brain drain.
“We’re supplying the market with highly educated people,” he says of the Professional Development Institute he founded. “I don’t like to be pessimistic, but 90 percent of our graduates are now out of Syria.”
Assad bemoans the lack of economic and administrative reform.
“There are literally thousands of mediocre and fossilized bureaucrats who have been entrenched in their ministries for decades, don’t want to change and don’t know how to think . . . in a different way,” he told former National Security Council analyst Flynt Leverett last year.
But Assad’s family also profits from that system. His younger brother Maher “is increasingly notorious for his personal greed and complicity in corruption, as are the Makhlufs, Bashar’s uncles, aunts and cousins on his mother’s side,” Leverett writes in a new book on Syria.
Those connections circumscribe Assad and his advisers’ ability to make bold changes. “They do not want social upheaval,” said Damascus economist Riad Abrash, a former deputy minister of planning. “They want stability.”
