The celebration of suffering

The announcement by French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé on April 17 that Syria’s foreign currency reserves had halved since the beginning of the popular uprising in the country is hardly something to celebrate. Valued at $17 billion at the end of 2010, they would now be standing at some $8.5 billion according to Juppé’s estimate.  Providing a correct measure of Syria’s foreign reserves has always been problematic. While in most parts of the world foreign reserves are handled by the central bank, in Syria they are managed by two separate institutions: the Central Bank of Syria and the Commercial Bank of Syria (CBS). This is a consequence of the fact that CBS has been acting for decades as the bank of all public sector enterprises, including the Syrian Petroleum Company whose exports of crude oil were the main source of the Syrian government’s foreign reserve accumulation in the last 20