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THE SON ALSO RISES

Bashar Assad profile
The Independent on Sunday, July 2006

MORE than ever before, Bashar Al-Assad must be ruing his older brother’s heavy accelerator foot. Basil Al-Assad, four years Bashar’s senior, was the son groomed as heir to their father, long-serving Syrian tyrant Hafez Al-Assad. One foggy night in January 1994, however, Basil ploughed his Mercedes-Benz into a roundabout on a highway outside Damascus, with fatal consequences, and Bashar’s destiny was dramatically diverted. If the weather had been clearer, the impending obstacle glimpsed earlier, the original order of Syria’s succession would surely have been followed. It would have been Basil who claimed Syria’s presidency upon their father’s death in June 2000, leaving Bashar to pursue his intended career as an ophthalmologist – perhaps even in Britain, the country in which he completed his degree, and met his wife.
  Instead, Bashar became President of Syria, aged only 34 – but, just at the moment, very few London eye surgeons would offer to trade places with him. Refugees from Israel’s onslaught against Lebanon crowd at his borders. Israeli air force jets bomb the highways linking Damascus with Beirut. His own residence at Ladekye, outside Damascus, has been buzzed by Israeli warplanes. An open-mic throwaway from the President of the United States (“What they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit”) suggests that the US holds him responsible for the whole mess. Assad’s own eyes may well become irrecoverably crossed as he attempts to focus on the possibly diverging twin goals of keeping his country out of a war, and himself in a job.
  Bashar was born on September 11th, 1965, the year before the coup that delivered his father to the post of defence minister, and five years before Hafez Al-Assad seized the absolute power which he would hold, and ruthlessly wield, until his death. It is an unamusing irony that Israel’s current rather undiscriminating assault on Hizbollah almost looks lifted from the Hafez Al-Assad playbook – in 1982, confronted with an Islamist insurrection in the Syrian city of Hama, Assad ordered swathes of the city bombed flat, and the rubble bulldozed, resulting in a death toll estimated at between 10,000 and 25,000.
  When Bashar became president in June 2000, he did so in the glow of as much international and domestic warmth as an unelected leader has any right to expect. Few outside Syria, whatever the official pieties expressed at the time, were sorry to see the end of Hafez Al-Assad. He was a canny self-preserver, but an unreconstructible thug and despot who had erected an absurd personality cult around his corrupt regime – posters and statues of Assad glowered over almost every public space in Syria. Assad senior only escaped the international cartoon villain status awarded Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein by largely having the sense not to pranny about in Ruritanian military costume and unearnt medals.
  Though Bashar had shown little interest in politics prior to his brother’s death, he accepted the obligations of his elevation readily enough. To acquire the necessary military credentials, he enrolled in the Homs military academy in 1994 – and, funnily enough, had risen to the rank of colonel by 1999 (he is now, funnily enough, a Lieutenant General). He even displayed a certain flash of cynical steel as a political operator, cheerfully looking on as Syria’s constitution was hastily amended to allow someone under 40 to serve as president, and seeing off a challenge for the top job by his uncle, Rifaat Assad.
  For all that, the common view of Assad was of a young, western-educated moderniser – he remains head of the Syrian Computer Society. He even appeared, by the none-too-stringent standards of the Middle East, something of a liberal. Once in office, he released some political prisoners, closed the infamous prison/torture chamber at Mezze, allowed Syrian media to print and broadcast stuff which almost resembled journalism, and seemed prepared to tolerate a degree of debate and dissent which, while unremarkable in any remotely free country, would have been unthinkable under the police state of Hafez Al-Assad. In May 2001, Pope John Paul II visited. In June 2001, Syrian troops withdrew from Beirut, the beginning of the end of a presence in Lebanon dating back to 1976. People began to talk excitedly of the “Damascus Spring”. Was Bashar Al-Assad – this outwardly unassuming, accidental president – the sensible, effective, level-headed reformer the Middle East had so long required?
  Not really. Possibly due to pressure from the affronted old guard in Syria’s Ba’ath party, and its always influential military, several key figures of the “Damascus Spring” ended up back in gaol. The political salons that had convened in the homes of Syria’s furtive intellectual classes were closed. Assad flaunted some deeply unsavoury anti-semitic nonsense, declaring – with John Paul II at his side – that Israelis “try to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality with which they betray Jesus Christ, and in the same way they tried to kill the prophet Mohammed.” According to the UN’s investigation into the 2005 car bomb murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, the event which prompted a wave of protest that finally forced Syria to leave Lebanon, “many leads point directly to Syrian security officials as being involved with the assassination” (Assad has denied Syrian involvement; Ghazi Kanaan, Syrian interior minister, and former head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, was found dead of a gunshot wound during the investigation, apparently a suicide, though there are inevitable rumours that he was murdered). While Syria’s GDP has recorded growth on Bashar’s watch, the country faces the drying up of its oil reserves within a decade. And Bashar appears approximately as likely to throw anything resembling a free and fair election as he does to send Ariel Sharon a “get well soon” card.
  Even before recent events in the Middle East brought Syria closer to all-out war with Israel than it has been since Yom Kippur in 1973, Bashar looked like a man muddling through. He objected to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, despite the fact that Damascus hadn’t spoken officially to Baghdad since supporting Iran in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and that Syria had sent 20,000 troops to help drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm. Bashar was at least indifferent to Syria being used as a staging post for foreign jihadis seeking (depending on inclination) to fight Americans, or immolate themselves among Iraqi shoppers and worshippers, but he has bent to America’s will on occasion – Sabawi Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s half-brother, the Six of Diamonds in the Most Wanted deck, is generally believed to have been captured, and handed over to the ultimate custody of America, by Syria. It is hard to imagine that Bashar wants war with Israel – historically (1948, 1967, 1973), Syria has come off a distant second-best in such confrontations. But it is harder still to imagine him ending Syria’s support for Hizbollah, or grassing up the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad who operate from his capital.
  While satisfying Arab opinion yet avoiding promotion from adjunct to full membership of the Axis Of Evil, Assad has to make allowances for his place in Syria’s unusual religious schism. Around three quarters of Syrians are Sunni Muslims. Assad, like all the Assads, is of the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’a Islam. Many Muslim extremists – and they still lurk in Syria, despite the fearful efforts of Bashar’s father – consider the Alawites heretics.
  At a personal level, Assad remains an enigma. Joe Klein, author of the astute political character study “Primary Colours”, described him in a 2005 interview for Time magazine as having “body language more ophthalmologist than dictator. . . there was no physical sense of power or menace to the man, no sociopathic cool, just consternation.” Bashar now has every reason to be consternated. The remainder of his presidency, however long that may be, will be the political equivalent of treading a tightrope while juggling machetes and torches, perhaps having to duck the odd projectile while so doing. And, as could be confirmed by the many dictators not blessed, as Bashar’s father was, with a natural death in office, there’s an awfully long, hard fall beckoning beneath him.

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