The Brutal Legacy Of Syria’s Assad Regime

When a year ago a revolt erupted in Tunisia, President Ben Ali fled his country within weeks after having been in power for 23 years. When early last year thousands of Egyptians rioted in the streets, President Hosni Mubarak resigned after 30 years of autocratic rule.  In Yemen, sustained anti-government protests eventually led to the departure of President Ali Abdullah Saleh into exile in the United States.

In Libya it took about seven months for rebels to topple and kill dictator Moammar Gadhafi.  In Syria, however, the 46-year old President Bashar al-Assad remains in power, despite eleven months of popular uprisings, bloody government crackdowns against civilians, and worldwide outrage about the deaths of 8,161 persons (as of February 14) in intense fighting between government and opposition forces.  The violence started last March 15 when mass protests first erupted in the city of Daara near the border with Jordan.  With amazing tenacity, the sparsely armed Syrian opposition continues to demand the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad and his cronies.

His father, strongman Hafez al-Assad, presided over Syria for 29 years.  He never hesitated to repress and eliminate opposition to his rule.  In 1982 he ordered the massacre of some 40,000 Syrians (according to the Syrian Human Rights Committee) in the city of Hama.  Some 1,000 soldiers died in the fighting, and large parts of the old city fell in ruins.  That carnage has been described as "the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East."   Eighteen years later, I still saw rows of bullet-scarred houses in Hama.  Hafez also ordered massacres at the Tadmor Prison and during the siege of Aleppo, as well as on October 13, 1990, when hundreds of Lebanese soldiers were executed after they surrendered to Syrian forces.

The elder Assad had been grooming Bashar's older brother, Basil, to become the country’s next president.  In 1994, however, Basil died unexpectedly in an automobile accident, so that Hafez decided to recall Bashar from his ophthalmological studies in Britain and groom him to become his successor in his own uncompromising mold.  Upon his father’s death in 2000, Bashar was elected and re-elected in 2007, unopposed each time.

Two study tours to Syria and Lebanon--one under Hafez’ and the second under Bashar’s rule--allowed me to observe their autocratic style, particularly in their clumsy meddling into the affairs of neighboring Lebanon.  Bashar succeeded in moving his ally Emile Lahoud into Lebanon’s presidency.  By 2003 Syrian corruption in Lebanon became publicly exposed when the al-Madina Bank collapsed after it had been used to launder some $1 billion in kickbacks of the United Nation's Iraqi oil-for-food program.

When in 2005 Lebanon’s anti-Syrian Prime Minister Rafic Hariri was assassinated, many observers accused Bashar of being involved.  This lingering suspicion, however, sped up the final withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon by May 2005.

Under Bashar’s early administration, the country underwent some relaxation.  Hundreds of political prisoners were being released, and a few restrictions on the media eased.  As an American visitor, I could freely roam from the Israeli border at the Golan heights in the south to the Turkish border in the north and meet with Muslim clergy as unhindered as with Syrian Orthodox Christians.

But the pace of change slowed--and now has slipped into reverse. The 46-year old Bashar al-Assad has made it clear that he is more interested in economic rather than political improvements. As Bashar rose to power, Arab observers often ridiculed not only his lack of political “instinct” and charisma but also the fact his father and he have turned the Syrian "Socialist Democratic Popular Republic" into a de facto monarchy.

When I asked a taxi driver in Aleppo, whether Syrians wanted Bashar as their leader, he answered: "There just isn't anyone else (ma fi ghayru)!"  He thought Bashar became president by default after his brother died.

Uri Lubrani, the former coordinator of Israeli policy toward Lebanon, oberved that “Bashar has no chance at all of long-term survival in power because the generals in the Syrian army will never come to terms with this ‘kid’ ruling over them.”