real_estate_disputes – Syria Report

State farms are lands owned by the state, which the state invests directly or leases to others for specific periods to cultivate agreed-upon crops. The state provided these farms with paid agricultural services at official rates, i.e., at subsidised prices, such as seeding, fertilising, harvesting and irrigation. The state also purchased their crops.

The concept of state farms is often confused with other state-owned and managed establishments such as poultry farms, dairies, fish farms, and model villages. All of these are situated on lands expropriated by the state according to the Agrarian Reform Law No. 161 of 1958. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to determine the extent of state farmlands and the number of workers employed there.

The Agrarian Reform Law No. 61 of 1958 established a public institution named the Agrarian Reform Institution (in 1976, the institution was dissolved and replaced by the Directorate of State Property and Agricultural Reform affiliated with the Ministry of Agriculture and Agricultural Reform) to implement the Agrarian Reform Law and the state property laws. Law No. 61 of 1958 allowed the institution to retain some of the expropriated lands without distributing them to farmers, to carry out projects or establish facilities for the public benefit.

There are no official Syrian figures on the extent of land expropriated by the state during the agrarian reform period, nor on what was redistributed to farmers or what land was used to establish state farms. Some circulated figures indicate that the state expropriated about 1.5 million hectares of agricultural land, with more than 75 percent not distributed to the farmers by the mid-1970s when distribution stopped.

The first mention of state farms occurred when the Regional Leadership of Syria’s ruling Baath Party formed a committee named “Reconstruction of State Farms” under Resolution No. 521 in 1974. One of the committee’s most notable actions was establishing state farms in the area known as the Arab Belt, adjacent to the Syrian-Turkish border in the predominantly Kurdish Hassakeh province, to cause demographic change in the region.

In 2000, the Baath Party’s Regional Leadership issued Resolution No. 83, which included the dissolution of state farms and their distribution to beneficiaries. The reason for dissolving the farms was not justified. However, some opposition members considered it one of the propaganda measures accompanying the power transfer from the late President Hafez al-Assad to his son Bashar, suggesting a shift towards a more flexible and liberal policy. The dissolution of state farms meant transferring the ownership of their land to the identified beneficiaries, categorised into four groups:

The employees working on those farms.
Those who had land extorted before the state expropriated them and who became de facto tenants.
Residents of villages adjacent to the farms.
Farmers whose lands were submerged due to the construction of the Euphrates Dam.

However, a 2007 document (number 1682) from the Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform indicated that the distribution of state farmlands had only been completed for some of the employees working on the farms. The document redefined the groups entitled to state farmlands, with a new order:

Farmers whose lands were submerged by Lake Assad and the Baath Dam built in 1991 on the Khabour River south of Hassakeh.
Those affected by the establishment of the Jabal AbdulAziz reserve in Hassakeh, which was declared by a decision of the Ministry of Agriculture No. 20 in 1993 and had its area modified several times (the last being by Ministry decision No. 27 in 2002, encompassing 50 villages with a population of 15,000).
Farmers with suspended transactions, i.e., those who had applied for agricultural lands under agrarian reform but were not granted any due to the cessation of distribution operations in the 1970s.

It is unclear whether the state farmlands have been distributed to their beneficiaries at any recent stage, what the theoretical mechanisms and criteria for distribution are, or how the distributed areas were estimated. In the town of Maskanah in the Aleppo countryside, which included the Tishreen farm, farmers, during their efforts to obtain agricultural regulation documents, are still treated as beneficiaries of the lands and beneficiaries of Baath Party Regional Command Resolution No. 83 of 2000 – not as owners of the holdings they invest in. Therefore, an agricultural regulation document was exceptionally granted to the farmers of Maskanah for the current season, based on a physical inventory conducted by a specialised committee, indicating the absence of ownership documents.

In 2023, Malak Maktabi, the head of the Directorate of State Property and Agricultural Reform affiliated with the Ministry of Agriculture and Agricultural Reform, told the official newspaper Al-Jamahir that the directorate would register the usufruct shares in the Land Registry in the name of the beneficiary listed in the distribution decision. However, this task appears to be extremely complicated, as according to Ms Maktabi, the directorate is still in the process of completing expropriation procedures and paying compensation to those whose lands were expropriated. This means that the expropriation processes in the 1960s and 1970s have not yet concluded.

The Directorate of Cadastral Affairs in the city of Daraa is experiencing a staff shortage due to the de facto resignations caused by low wages and the retirement of some employees. This has led to a backlog of unprocessed real estate transactions and delays in documenting and registering property incidents.

Two sub-departments for real estate documentation in the cities of Izraa and Sanamein, along with four real estate documentation offices in the rural areas of the governorate, are affiliated with the main directorate in the Daraa Al-Mahatta neighbourhood. Operations were partially halted during opposition control over Daraa between 2012-2018 but resumed after regime forces regained control of the governorate under the so-called reconciliation agreement in mid-2018. None of these offices or branches were damaged during the years of armed conflict.

However, the shortage of technical staff across the various departments of the directorate is now hindering many people’s desires to complete their real estate transactions that accumulated during the years of war, Basil Al-Jayoush, the director of the Daraa Directorate of Cadastral Affairs, told the official Al-Baath newspaper on November 14, 2023.

Mr Jayoush stated that the directorate currently operates with no more than 20 technical staff, including four engineers, to provide all real estate services to individuals and government entities. The director added that the directorate’s work is “on the edge of a cliff” following the retirement of the last employees of the Surveying Department at the end of 2023. The Surveying Department is essential to the directorate’s operations, requiring significant expertise and the ability to use specialised equipment for measuring land areas.

The Surveying Department provides essential surveying services, including area statement service, boundary statement service, property ownership statement for beautification and common ownership termination, supplying public entities with triangulation point coordinates, subdivision transactions, plot consolidation transactions, property unification transactions, subdivision plan transactions, and expropriation execution.

Mr Jayoush confirmed that the staff shortage in the Surveying Department has slowed down the completion of real estate transactions, calling for the replenishment of the department with new employees through recruitment calls.

A former directorate employee in Daraa told The Syria Report that the total number of staff across all departments decreased from about 33 to 20 during 2023. He explained that the Surveying Department alone lost five employees, i.e. all of its staff, in the last six months of 2023. Two of them reportedly resigned (because state institutions rarely accept resignation requests from their employees, resignations practically take the form of employees simply stopping coming to work) due to insufficient salary to cover transportation costs. Meanwhile, three were retired upon reaching the legal retirement age.

The former employee stated that the main problem is not with the recruitment calls but with the lack of incentives to apply for the jobs in the first place. Many experienced surveyors prefer to work independently as freelance surveyors without being tied to an official position.

A local correspondent for The Syria Report said there is no agreed-upon fixed pricing for the work of freelance surveyors. The fee is negotiated between the surveyor and the employer, based on factors such as the number of points that need to be marked to define boundaries, the size of the property, and the surveyor’s experience. Generally, a freelance surveyor charges a starting fee of SYP 300,000 to delineate the boundaries of a single property, which exceeds the monthly salary of an employee in the department. Freelance surveyors must have their own theodolite, a precision optical instrument for measuring angles between designated visible points in the horizontal and vertical planes.

However, the duties of an official employee in the surveying department at the Cadastral Affairs directorate go far beyond those that a freelance surveyor can perform. For example, an official’s tasks include writing report minutes on disputes over the boundaries and areas of properties. In contrast, a freelance surveyor is not authorised to perform this task. Disputes over property boundaries have become common recently, with many property sales not officially registered with the Cadastral Affairs directorate. This leads to conflicts between sellers, buyers, and neighbours over the boundaries of the sold properties.

Another source explained that a second problem hindering recruitment in the surveying department of the Daraa directorate is the internal regulations that limit hiring in the surveying department to graduates of the Technical Engineering Institute (Intermediate Engineering Institute) affiliated with the Ministry of Higher Education. There is no branch of this institute in Daraa; instead, it is associated with the Civil Engineering Faculty at Damascus University. Since the 2011 uprising, there has been a significant decline in the number of students from Daraa studying at this institute due to harassment and arbitrary arrests of people from Daraa at security and military checkpoints. This has resulted in a shortage of recent graduates from the institute.

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