Bashar Al Assad (second from the left) wanted to be seen as more enlightened than his dictator dad. Instead, he has been more brutal. In the late ’70s, Sunni Islamists, led by Baath’s old rival, the Muslim Brotherhood, unleashed a campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations that killed several hundred officers and civil servants. Many of their targets were Alawites, the Muslim minority to which the Assads belong. The faith combines tenets of Shia Islam, elements of Christianity and even Zoroastrian mysticism, and heterodox beliefs like reincarnation. (The thirteenth-century Syrian theologian Ibn Taymiyya, a godfather of today’s militant Sunni Islam, issued three fatwas against its followers.) Historically, Syria’s Alawites were among the poorest of the poor. But during the country’s decades as a colony of France, many of them found a path out of poverty through the military. Alawites continued to use armed service to rise in influence after Syria won independence. In June 1980, as the power struggle between Baath and Brotherhood took on an increasingly sectarian tone, Hafez narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. His military responded by unleashing its full wrath on the Brotherhood, crushing its Islamist uprising through torture, mass executions, commando raids, and the assault on Hama, a three-week siege that killed tens of thousands of people, the vast majority of them civilians. Hafez liked to call himself “a peasant and the son of a peasant,” but the Assads came to position themselves as a cosmopolitan bulwark against the primitive forces of militant Islam—a modern, enlightened clan ruling a backward people, gently but firmly, for their own good. “In the end,” says a former adviser, “they see themselves much higher than others, as a family.” Suriyet al-Assad, the Syria of Assad, would have to be preserved at all costs. Hafez ran his household the way he ran his country: demanding total loyalty and tolerating no complaint. Bashar’s older brother, Basil, who was being groomed to take over the presidency, would bully and beat up his little brother, according to one former adviser; but his parents, in keeping with the family code, did not discuss the matter. As a father, Hafez “was not the type of person who ever said ‘bravo’ or good job—he rather told you about the things you should not do, the negative,” Bashar told his biographer, the Middle East history professor David Lesch. Ali Duba, Hafez’s dreaded head of military intelligence, starred in another bit of Assad parenting lore. One day, according to a story told by Syrians with contacts in the regime, Hafez was sitting around with friends, indulging a rare moment of relaxation, when he exclaimed, “I wish my sons were tough, like Ali Duba’s sons!” Years later, when Duba tried to challenge Bashar’s succession, the son would not dare ask his father for help. It was all part of the strange silence, verging on hostility, between the two. “No, no!” shouted Abdelnour, in alarm, when I asked him if Bashar ever discussed his problems with Hafez. “Even in his mind, he doesn’t discuss it!” “I do not think [Hafez] was very enthusiastic to see his son replacing him,” Farouk Al Sharaa, a former Syrian foreign minister, told Lesch, “simply because perhaps he never thought he was going to die.” This coldness inspired in Bashar a quiet rebellion against his father’s cult of personality. In his heyday, Hafez staged massive, North Korean–style extravaganzas, with a sea of people flashing cards to make a picture of his face. Crowds would clap wildly whenever the leader’s name was mentioned; Bashar’s tiny gesture of defiance was refusing to join in, because he did not think a man should be applauded without doing something to earn it. He showed other flashes of independence. The Assad children attended exclusive, French-language schools, alongside the sons of the Damascene elite. Though they had people to do their homework for them, in the finest ruling-class tradition, friends of the family say a young Bashar always insisted on doing his own. “He wants to do things his way,” a former adviser says. Bashar got his chance to prove himself in January 1994, when Basil crashed his Mercedes Benz on his way to the Damascus airport and died. Bashar was called in from London, where he was doing a residency in ophthalmology, to begin a residency in dictatorship. He planned to succeed where his father had failed: at being liked, not just feared. His Syria would be modern and technocratic, a new model for the Middle East. “He wants approval—from the West, from educated Damascenes, from the artists and the intellectual class,” says a Syrian intellectual who asks not to be named. But the boy who grew up without approval did not understand how to earn it. He lacked what the Syrian intellectual calls “the celestial imagination”—the ability to understand the motivations and desires of other people, who might be dreaming of something beyond how much they admire him. After his return to Damascus, Bashar joined the officer corps and took over the Syrian Computer Society, formerly Basil’s fiefdom. He started working out and learned how to speak without his youthful habit of covering his mouth. He also set out to build a kitchen cabinet of young reformers and technocrats. Bashar’s people were fellow doctors, engineers, college professors: nerds. They wanted Internet access, better technology, and a country with less corruption and more freedom of expression. Abdelnour was now a close adviser and confidant who drew up proposals for “management by objective” and modernizing the regime from within. When Hafez died in June 2000, a special referendum installed Bashar as president. He had finally forced out his nemesis, Ali Duba, a few months earlier and now pushed other members of the old guard into retirement. On New Year’s Day 2001, Bashar married Asma Al Akhras, an investment banker from an elite Sunni family who had grown up in London. “There was almost a sense that he came to power reluctantly,” says Mona Yacoubian, a former State Department official who lived in Syria during Hafez Al Assad’s reign and is now a senior adviser for the Middle East program at the Stimson Center. “He wasn’t Basil, who was the more thuggish, stronger brother. He had this beautiful wife. They struck this picture of what people hoped Syria would become.” The new president announced a series of changes. He released hundreds of political prisoners and permitted Syrians to host salons in their homes to discuss politics and ideas, which was previously forbidden. He allowed private ownership of banks. The government even granted a license to the country’s first independent newspaper, The Lamplighter, a satirical broadsheet run by the brilliant political cartoonist Ali Ferzat. And Syria finally got Internet access, albeit limited and heavily supervised. “At the time, I and millions of Syrians were hoping for the best, and wanting for him to open up the economy, to liberalize politics, to allow freedoms,” says Murhaf Jouejati, a professor at the National Defense University, who met with Bashar early in his presidency. “We were expecting that he would.” Bashar took pains to appear more modern than his father. He liked to throw on jeans and drive his Audi A6 to Naranj, an upscale restaurant with an open kitchen that served an elegantly simple take on Syrian peasant cuisine. According to a friend, Bashar was partial to a toshi, a Damascene pressed sandwich—classic, regular-guy street food. Another story told of him walking into a restaurant in Aleppo unannounced and politely asking an old woman how she was enjoying her meal. “There is what I call the ‘modest king’ theory in Middle Eastern history: He wears normal clothes, he goes among the people, he sits normally,” says the Syrian intellectual. “And Bashar fits into this tradition.” But the gestures were mostly symbolic; the so-called “Damascus Spring” would prove short-lived. In January 2001, a group of Syrian activists, intellectuals, and professionals, encouraged by the apparent opening of their country’s political culture, issued a declaration known as the “Statement of 1,000.” They called for an end to martial law and emergency rule and the release of all remaining political prisoners. (Then, as now, nobody knew how many the regime held.) They also demanded democratic, multiparty elections, under the supervision of an independent judiciary. Some of the activists had the temerity to form new political parties. The Assad regime struck back immediately, beginning a campaign of harassment and intimidation that would last, with varying intensity, for the next ten years. A number of the citizens responsible for the Statement of 1,000 were arrested. By early 2002, the government had forced The Lamplighter out of print and thrown leaders of the fledgling discussion groups in jail. Despite his early feints at democracy, Assad was not interested in surrendering even an inch of his power. Suriyet al-Assad needed his benevolent guidance. To Bashar and his wife, it wasn’t the Syrian regime that required real reform. It was the Syrian people. Asma’s official biography, passed to me by an old friend of Bashar’s, distills their governing ideology. It reads like a tract from Rand Paul: Syrians need to stop depending on the state and assume “personal responsibility for achieving the common good,” the document proclaims, adding, “the sustainable answer to social need is not aid but opportunity” and “creating circumstances where people can help themselves.” That the Assad family and its loyalists have been helping themselves to Syria’s national wealth for decades does not enter into this narrative. During the winter of 2006, one of Assad’s advisers showed up for a meeting at the president’s office. He found his boss hyperventilating, unable to speak. “They will reach me,” Assad finally gasped. The adviser desperately attempted to calm him down, offering him juice and coffee. Assad was in an abject state of panic—“complete moral collapse” is how the adviser recalls the scene. After 15 minutes, the dictator collected himself and began the meeting, as if nothing had happened.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 17:27:22 +0000
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