Bashar al-Assad: A smooth talker with bloody hands

Peter Beaumont

In April, as the Arab spring was convulsing the Middle East and North Africa, Syria's Bashar al-Assad gave a speech full of fine words.Delivered after the swearing in of a new government, he talked about the need for "transparency" and to "close the gap" between the "state's institutions" (for that read his family) and "Syria's citizens".He talked too about "reform" – particularly economic – and the need for "dignity". Finally he talked about his pain at the "blood that had been spilled".It all sounded very good except, critics of the regime have alleged, for one small detail. Bashar al-Assad had waited two days to deliver the speech, which he spent all night writing, while his security forces finished operations in Latakia and Deraa, both centres of opposition.
It is a claim that was made to al-Jazeera by Ayman Abdel Nour, a former Ba'ath party reformer, now editor-in-chief of the All4Syria news agency: "He received a report from the head of intelligence and the army saying: 'We have finished, everything is calm and we are the winner.'"Except the rebellion against his family's rule was not over, nor was the bloodshed. Instead, the speech came at the beginning of the worst repression in Syria since his father crushed an Islamist uprising in 1982. By last week, as the UN Security Council condemned the months-long crackdown in Syria, more than 1,630 civilians were reported to have been killed – as well as in excess of 370 members of the security forces – with no end to the violence in sight.Last week Bashar al-Assad pulled the same trick again, announcing an end to one-party rule in his country so long dominated by his family – an announcement that was delivered even as his security forces were still killing Syrians protesting against his power.In the midst of all of this, al-Assad, paradoxically, has seemed – not like some Middle Eastern strongman, even as his tanks pounded Hama last week – as distant and diminished, a figure seen through the wrong end of a telescope.Part of the reason is that in his few public appearances and speeches at least he has stuck to his script of offering an ambiguous reassurance to his supporters and a faint hope of change. In this he has eschewed the kind of melodramatic theatre of personality embraced byMuammar Gaddafi and his sons or the heavy-handed arrogant entitlement that was displayed by Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak.
It is a sense of distance that has been amplified by the shrewd calculation to keep out the international media.But then Bashar al-Assad has always been difficult to fathom. An awkward but intelligent Anglophile who trained as a doctor in London and married a Syrian-English wife, Asma, his skill before the bloody crackdown on protesters – if it was that – was always to give the impression of being the antithesis of his authoritarian father, Hafez.He wasn't supposed to succeed his father in the first place. That was to have been his brother Basil, who was killed in a car crash in 1994.So Bashar became his father's political heir. And what followed Hafez's death in 2000 was a seamless transition that has been described as marking the emergence of the "first Arab republican hereditary regime".His greatest success since coming to power was persuading journalists, academics and diplomats that he was open to the possibility of change and genuine reform.Indeed, two and a half years ago, the Observer was told by one person who knew the family: "If you look at al-Bashar's situation, he has inherited a lot of baggage from his father, Hafez. I believe that what he has been trying to do is legitimise his presidency, not simply rely on what his father put in motion. I think he is playing a long game – and I do believe he can conceive of a future where he is no longer in power."
It is an assessment, after the events of the last few months, that seems almost impossible to credit. Increasingly it appears that what Bashar al-Assad achieved was what conjurers call "misdirection", persuading observers to look the wrong way.Perhaps that should not have been a surprise for as Human Rights Watch has noted, during his first decade of rule he failed to improve human rights in his country.
Indeed, in 2008, amid a brief thawing in relations, his courts were imprisoning pro-democracy activists – even as he was being courted both by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British foreign secretary David Miliband.And even on the most charitable reading – that Bashar al-Assad is a weak figurehead for a family franchise that includes more powerful and ruthless figures – the notion adopted by many western diplomats at the beginning of the crisis seems, with each passing day, more fanciful.But then the flip-side of Bashar al-Assad's regime was always in evidence.He has allowed al-Qaida in Iraq to set up bases on his territory for fighters heading across the border. Syria was charged, too, with assisting the re-arming of Hezbollah after the 2006 Israeli war against Lebanon – which it does not dispute – and accused of setting up a joint project with North Korea to construct a secret nuclear reactor, subsequently bombed by Israel.Some, like the Palestinian-American commentator Lamis Andoni, have argued that the two faces of Bashar al-Assad and his regime, far from reflecting a tension, have been two aspects of an identical objective – a deliberate and self-serving ambiguity in the pursuit of what she has called "survival at any cost".For the reality is that Bashar al-Assad, even as he was talking about reform, far from being an exception among Arab dictators, was using the same tactics as Mubarak, Gaddafi and other leaders.Indeed, in the book The Arab Authoritarian Regime, written three years before the advent of the Arab spring, Martin Beck argued that "liberalisation" or at least the promise of it, was used by authoritarian regimes as often as repression to prolong the regime's life.
Assad has now tried both. His liberalisation – for what it was worth – largely followed the Chinese model, more interested in an economy, controlled in any case by his family, than in political rights. And while he has spoken of political reform – in a major speech in 2005 that delivered little, and again this year – like Mubarak and Gaddafi, his default mode has been repression."Assad has decided to shut this down," one western diplomat told theGuardian this year in the same month that al-Assad once again dangled the promise of reform. "The regime is playing survival tactics. It's a security-led approach first, second and third."
And in retrospect his curious choice of language to describe the Arab spring in January in an interview in the Wall Street Journal – even before the first stirrings of discontent in his own country – was deeply suggestive of a man without much understanding of events.
"If you have stagnant water," he said, referring to fellow Arab regimes, "you will have pollution and microbes; and because you have had this stagnation for decades, and some areas in the Middle East, including Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan, because we had this stagnation we were plagued with microbes."So, what you have been seeing in this region is a kind of disease. That is how we see it."Microbes?Certainly his use of tanks to storm the city of Hama where fighting continues – a place where two decades before his father ordered the slaughter of up to 20,000 – does not suggest, despite all his talk of dignity and pain, someone overly concerned with the human consequences of his continuing repression, something that the international community has come belatedly to recognise.By last week, after months of betting pointlessly on the illusion of al-Assad he has himself promoted, Washington at last signalled it could no longer tolerate the killing that continues this weekend in Hama, Damascus and elsewhere."Syria would be a better place without President al-Assad," White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Tuesday as it emerged that the US has opened contacts with Syria's opposition.It is not only in the US that patience has come close to running out. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in an interview last week said he had sent personal letters to President al-Assad, urging him to launch reforms, reconcile with the opposition, restore civil peace and build a modern state.Failing that, the Russian leader said, al-Assad is "doomed".THE AL-ASSAD FILEBorn 11 September 1965 in Damascus, the son of Aniseh and Hafez al-Assad. He studied ophthalmology at Damascus University and in London. He is married to Asma Assad, née Akhras, of Syrian descent, raised in west London.
Best of times During the brief moment of the Damascus spring, after he came to power in 2000 following the death of his father, when he released political prisoners and began promising the liberalisation of his police state.
Worst of times The widespread international condemnation that followed the tank assault on the city of Hama last week.
What he says "We want the people to back the reforms but we must isolate true reformers from saboteurs."
– June 2011What others say " I believe that he lost all sense of humanity."
– UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon after the assault on Hama·         guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011