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In Syria, 2-3 million Alawites control a country of about 23 million. They dominate the country, putting down Sunni/Islamist revolts from the majority in Hama and elsewhere. It isn't so starkly obvious as apartheid but when all is said and done, the Alawites are in control. There's always an Alawite subordinate to any non-Alawite in the officer corps and they are in charge of the security forces. Their minority status unites them - they know that if they give up power, the Islamists will massacre them. And they have a powerful foreign backer in Russia. If Russia had turned away and demanded that they allow competitive elections and give up control over the country, they would've collapsed. There'd be no flow of arms, no backer in the UN, they'd be isolated.
In South Africa, whites would've had the advantage of superior HBD whereas Alawites are roughly on par with everyone else. In Rhodesia they fought for 15 years despite crushing sanctions on oil, weapons and huge numerical mismatch. If there had been a full-scale race war between white South Africa (with moderate Western support) and black South Africa (with moderate Soviet support) then I'd bet on the whites every time. They'd have the vast majority of military hardware and the skills to use it effectively. There's a reason white empires conquered the vast majority of the world in the first place.
The British mauled insurgents in Malaya, they put down the Mau Maus. South Africa would be easier than either of those campaigns since there'd be a good number of trustworthy locals to help an expeditionary force from overseas.
Well, being starkly obvious was a big part of the problem. Apartheid was dead the moment Jim Crow ended; America was the Western hegemon, American policy was eventually going to implemented everywhere. They could have held on, but there was a lot of malaise in the country. The British were reticent, even under Thatcher; Anglo South Africans had always opposed the ANC and were generally skeptical of apartheid, and so increasingly were even many young Afrikaners.
What the white South Africans should have done is retreated en masse to the Southern Cape where they could have declared independence and, with some gerrymandering, established a state with a white majority (certainly a white and cape colored majority). But they didn’t, perhaps because unlike the Alawaites they didn’t actually expect to be massacred when apartheid ended (and indeed, thirty years later, most of them haven’t been).
In Syria maintaining Alawite rule came at an extraordinarily high cost; something like half of young Alawi men died in the war (some estimates are even higher); Sunni businessmen are increasingly close to Assad and other inner circle leaders. The final chapter of that story is not yet written.
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