Bashar Assad, Syria’s enigma.
How Syria’s Bashar al-Assad went from a painfully shy eye doctor to a murderous tyrant waging war on his own people
HE NEVER seemed cut out to be a dictator. As a young man Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was so painfully shy that in conversation “he wouldn’t look in your eye . . . he covered his mouth with his hands when he talked, and spoke in a low voice”, says Ayman Abdel Nour, a university friend.
Indeed Assad, the second son of strongman president Hafez al-Assad, generally avoided gatherings of more than a handful of people, and would hunch over to make his tall frame less conspicuous. “He was a totally regular citizen; you wouldn’t guess he was the son of the president unless you knew him personally,” Abdel Nour remembers.
While Bashar’s flashy older brother, Bassel, quickly rose through the ranks of the military, Bashar chose to study ophthalmology and took a softer posting as an army doctor. “The doctors aren’t considered real army,” Abdel Nour says. “They’re not real fighters – there’s no army in the world where the major general is a doctor.”
But Assad’s relatively quiet life changed dramatically when Bassel died in a car accident in 1993. Studying in London at the time of the crash, Assad was called back to Syria where his father, who’d clung to power since 1971, dubbed him the new “hope” of the Syrian people.
Seven years later, after his father’s death from a heart attack, he took over as president. In 2013 the gentle Phil Collins-loving would-be eye doctor reportedly slaughtered around 1 400 people in what the United Nations called the “most significant confirmed use of chemical weapons against civilians since Saddam Hussein” in 1988. On 4 April this year Assad used chemical weapons on his own people again.
“There’s an irreconcilable Dr Jekyll-Mr Hyde tension in the person of Assad,” says Nadim Houry, who directs Human Rights Watch’s terrorism programme and spent 11 years monitoring Assad’s regime. “There’s this clean-cut guy who gets interviewed by outlets, always has an Apple laptop on his desk and speaks very calmly. He’s very far from the image ofanArabdictatorlikeSaddamorGadaffi with their rifles in the air. Yet when you look at the behaviour of the regime it behaves very much like a typical brutal Arab dictatorship – massive torture, massive killing of civilians, indiscriminate and deliberate bombing.”
The world has reacted with horror to Assad’s brutality but while his cruelty is nothing new in the region, his transformation is more perplexing. What could possibly have caused this soft-spoken man, who promised to reform his late father’s heavy-handed dictatorship, to change into a tyrant so desperate to hold onto power that he’d eventually gas his own people to do so?
Ask 10 different Syrian experts and you’ll get 10 different answers. No one really knows if Assad (51) ever genuinely cared about the reformist ideas he initially championed, but there was at least some early inclination towards economic liberalism. What we do know is that these desires were repeatedly trampled by two factors: the entrenched authoritarianism of the forces around him, and the instincts that shaped him.
“He’s a child of the Cold War on the side of the USSR; of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the side of the Arab states; and most of all, he’s the child of his father,” says David Lesch, a history professor at Trinity University in Texas, and the author of two books on Assad’s Syria. “These are the influences that shaped his worldview, rather than [him] being a computer nerd and liking Western music.”
AFTER 29 years of Hafez al-Assad, a ruthless air force commander who came to power in a coup, Bashar’s sleek suits and British-born investment-banker wife, Asma, seemed like a breath of fresh air. His inaugural speech in July 2000 called for “democracy,” “transparency,” and “constructive criticism” – it even contained implicit criticisms of his father. “The speech created a great deal of hope,” Lesch says.
The inauguration was followed by a period of relative openness, known as the “Damascus Spring”. Some opposition parties were allowed, the press got a bit freer and hundreds of political prisoners were released.
Liberal intellectuals founded discussion salons across the Syrian capital and put together political pamphlets and petitions for reform.
But this openness didn’t last long. “It didn’t take more than a few weeks before people were demanding regime change because the regime was so corrupt,” says Joshua Landis, director of the University of Oklahoma’s Centre for Middle East Studies and author of the Syria Comment blog. “It stank. The whole thing stank – so any kind of critique had to lead to regime change.”
Within months Assad was warning that civil society groups criticising the
‘He’s a child of the Cold War, of the Arab-Israeli conflict; most of all, he’s the child of his father’
(From previous page) government were, consciously or unconsciously, helping “the country’s enemies” and, ominously, would be “dealt with”. A few months later 10 opposition leaders were imprisoned.
Even now, there’s little agreement among analysts on whether Assad actually wanted the “Damascus Spring” to last. Dovish voices like Lesch believe his mildly progressive ambitions were thwarted by hardliners from his father’s government. Many others believe the early rhetoric was merely a front to attract international investment to Syria’s backward economy. “It was a PR campaign to normalise the government,” says Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Radwan Ziadeh, a human rights activist and fellow at the Arab Centre in Washington, DC, agrees. “The Damascus Spring was only a cosmetic step to try to get legitimacy,” he says. “Assad actually got this because a lot of international leaders praised him early on.”
Ziadeh has good reason to be sceptical of Assad’s motives – he was one of the opposition intellectuals Assad targeted in 2001. When the crackdown started the government took his passport away, censored his writing, and had him followed for almost a year, he says. He eventually fled to the US in 2007.
Even if political reforms were a veneer, Assad did seem committed to economic liberalisation. His father had shored up power through what Landis calls an “authoritarian bargain”. In this Soviet-style model, the regime provides the means for basic sustenance for the rural working class, who in exchange give their political allegiance to it.
But during his father’s almost three-decade reign, the country’s population had more than doubled, and as the world globalised the country badly needed to open its economy up to allow non-oil sectors to develop. So once his son took over banks were privatised, the internet was introduced and foreign investment was made easier.
But bringing about change to help ordinary Syrians was far from the top of Assad’s priorities, argues Abdel Nour, who worked as a voluntary government adviser in the early 2000s. In reality, he says, what was most important to Assad was enriching his friends, and especially his family.
Abdel Nour says this ulterior motive finally Former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and his wife, Anisa. Behind them, from left to right, are their children Maher, Bashar, Bassel, Majd and Bushra. Bassel was meant to succeed his father but died in a car crash in 1993. dawned on him in 2003, when Syria’s parliament passed a reform bill he’d worked on. Assad’s uncle persuaded the president not to sign the bill until it had been changed to include six or seven clauses that would directly benefit his cousin’s businesses.
That was the last time Abdel Nour spoke to Assad. “I realised then that I’m not working for a country; I’m working for a family business,” he says. “I discovered that all this about reforms was wrong; it was bullshit and propaganda. So I decided to inform the Syrian people about what was happening so they’d push for reforms themselves.”
Abdel Nour stopped advising Assad, and set up the opposition news website All4Syria, which he now runs from Los Angeles.
Assad’s cronyism eventually backfired, Landis says, as it undermined the “authoritarian bargain” that had kept his father in power. “The class gap suddenly just widened,” he says. “That created tremendous resentment because the elite would get wealthy beyond belief.”
This division would set the stage for Syria’s 2011 revolution – an event that would also solidify Assad’s transformation into a cold-blooded mass murderer.
Assad would also learn that even limited change can embolden the opposi- tion. For example, by insisting on bringing the internet to Syria, he made surveillance impossible at the levels his father had maintained.
The security services had managed easily when snooping meant tapping phone lines and reading mail – but they just weren’t capable of covering the giant spider web of the internet. The web also gave people access to information and enabled debate. Both factors helped spark the 2011 uprising.
ASSAD’S shift away from reform dovetailed with a change in his personality, as he withdrew into a bubble of authoritarian power. Lesch had spent hours interviewing the president, who’s a father of three, while writing a book about him in 2004, and says he got to know a “self- deprecating, unpretentious, humble guy”.
But he noticed a change when talking to him shortly after his re-election in 2007. The only candidate in what was technically a referendum on his presidency, Assad waltzed to victory with 97,6 percent of the vote.
But when Lesch asked him his thoughts on the sham vote that had brought him back to power, he was taken aback by the reply. “I really thought he’d say, ‘You know, it’s not a real election’,” Lesch said. “But he sat back and said, ‘The people love me; this shows they really love me.’ I remember thinking to myself
Assad became an insecure dictator obsessed with the conceit that his people loved him
at that moment that he’d drunk the KoolAid of power and that he’d be president for life.”
Assad’s paranoia too began to noticeably increase. “He became a psychopath, believing that if you’re not with me you’re against me, and you should be killed,” says Abdel Nour.
Assad’s fears were only heightened by the Iraq War and US president George W Bush’s rhetoric of “democracy promotion” and “regime change”. Dictators throughout the region saw their fears of external enemies validated.
Assad’s tough talk regarding the Anglo-American invasion further soured his relations with the US, which had been fraught ever since Bush widened the “axis of evil” in 2002 to include Syria, Cuba and Libya. Then came a more direct attack: in December 2003 Bush placed sanctions on Syria over its decades-long occupation of Lebanon and backing of terrorist groups.
Assad initially refused to withdraw his troops from Lebanon. But after being accused of ordering the murder of Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, he bowed to the international pressure and pulled out. The capitulation stung and “fed the feeling that [Assad] is insecure, and that he can’t handle these regional or international crises”, Ziadeh says.
By the time journalist Reese Erlich interviewed Assad in 2006 he found an insecure dictator obsessed with the conceit that his people loved him and reforms weren’t needed. The forces that would shape the 2011 civil war were becoming clearer. And yet Assad refused to address prominent issues such as the possibility of free elections or opposition parties, whether Syria should grant citizenship to its hundreds of thousands of ethnic Kurds, or how to deal with the country’s rampant inequality.
“He basically brushed off all these things as either unimportant or plots from the West,” says Erlich, whose book Inside Syria documents the dynamics that led to the civil war.
Paranoia marked those interviews too. Assad became jittery at the sight of Erlich’s radio microphone, which ever so slightly resembles a gun. “The security people had checked it so they knew it wasn’t a weapon,” Erlich said. “But he got all nervous . . . I’d point the microphone at my own mouth when I spoke and then when I turned the mic to him he’d suddenly jump.”
The 2011 revolution crystallised Assad’s psychological and political decline. When protesters took to the streets – at first calling not for regime change, but for political reforms – his reaction was a telling one.
Assad “demonise[d] his opponents as Saudi terrorists who are bringing Islamic fascism to Syria,” Landis said. His narrative was that these weren’t Syrians, but foreign forces seeking to undermine one of the last bastions of pan-Arab secularism. “He began to see this as an existential
Sstruggle and that these people who were fighting against him were foreign terrorists – and he believed his own rhetoric,” Landis said. “The West looks at this like he’s killing his own countrymen and unfortunately he doesn’t see it this way.”
Once you’ve persuaded yourself of this falsehood, Lesch says, fighting an existential threat can justify terrible means. Assad’s forces “don’t have the resources to go town to town to retake them from the opposition,” Lesch says, “so they need to use the asymmetric methods [such as chemical weapons] to brutalise them.”
Another view, from dissidents like Ziadeh and Abdel Nour, is that Assad didn’t justify his slaughter by “othering” the rebels. Instead, he was invoking something akin to mediaeval Western monarchs’ belief in the “divine right of kings”.
“Like his father, he always believed that he had the right to do whatever he wants to his own people; to kill them, torture them, disappear them: ‘They’re my own people and that’s the sovereignty that I have’,” Ziadeh explains. Assad, he says, sees himself as a father punishing his errant sons. “The father is allowed to do whatever when the sons make mistakes. He doesn’t understand that this is a social contract between the Syrians and elected officials.”
Abdel Nour agrees: “His brain doesn’t keep him up at night telling him not to do these terrible things. Because he thinks he’s the representative of God,that people who are against him are sinning against God,” he says.
The question of what turns a man into a monster is never an easy one. For Assad, it’s possible the seeds of brutality were planted very early on, lying dormant but ready to emerge when the time was right. Or perhaps he simply succumbed to a system that for decades had existed with the principle goal of keeping hold of power. Certainly, after 2011 there’d be no turning back.
As Houry points out, a leader’s true colours come out when their regime is under threat. “Gaddafi didn’t start out as a crazy man; he ended up that way,” he says. “The real test comes when your authority is really challenged, and Assad’s authority was never challenged before 2011.”
When the challenge came, Assad met it, in the eyes of hawks like Tabler, by being “more brutal on his own people than Saddam or Gadaffi ever were”.