Bashar Assad
Familiar temptation that turned Assad to a dictator, By Kelechi Okoronkwo
The feeling of freedom in Syria at the moment is conspicuous. Nobody knows what the post Bashar al-Assad’s era will bring to the country. But at least, at the moment, Syrians and their allies are happy that decades of regimes largely described as anti-people is fallen.
Bad leadership chokes to death. It makes the people believe that their suffering will have no end, and they start dying physically and psychologically. Good governance the other way round gives hope to the people. Even if the people still go through suffering, they will have a feeling that their situation would soon change. And they will continue to live by hope.
Most times, leaders do not come to power with intention to be bad rulers. They are often tempted, and they fail the test. Assad rose to power at the wake of the millennium in the year 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled the country from 1971 until his death in 2000. He was just 34 years old. Young, tender, geeky with his foreign education and medical practice in the UK. Bashar Assad initially seemed completely unlike his strongman father. Admirably tall and lanky with a slight stutter, he had a quiet, gentle demeanour. Before becoming president, he headed the Syrian Computer Society. He was so loved because of his personality. His wife, Asma al-Akhras, whom he married some months after taking office, was attractive, stylish and British-born. The young couple seemed to shun trappings of power. They lived in an apartment in the upscale Abu Rummaneh district of Damascus, as opposed to a palatial mansion like other Arab leaders. When he took control, he freed political prisoners and tended to allow more open discourse. He was open to intellectual gatherings where Syrians discussed art, culture and politics to a degree impossible under his father.
So, Syrians believed that Assad’s regime would be a drastic departure from his father’s deadly autocracy which had lasted for nearly 30 years. But the people’s optimism about Assad’s government lasted for just a few months, less than a year. In 2001, a group of politicians and intellectuals signed a public petition calling for multiparty democracy and greater participatory democracy. Other individuals who saw the emergence of Assad as a window to a democratic dispensation in Syria tried to form a political party. Assad saw this move as a threat to his dominance. Instead of welcoming the new era, and using his political position to build democratic institutions, young Assad became irritated and used state power to dismantle the democratic formations and jailed dozens of activists.
This was the first trigger. Optimism about Assad’s regime started to wane when it had not even risen. The fear that Assad might just be a chip of the old block started growing. The young ruler failed the first test of genuine leadership—openness to opposition and criticism. From that early stage in the life of his administration, Assad started fighting to hold onto power instead of fighting to lead the people to their aspirations. His popularity deteriorated within a few years. Assad literally managed to hold on to power. Things turned worse for him in 2011 at the wake of the Arab Spring. When faced with protests against his rule in March 2011, Assad turned to the brutal tactics of his father in an attempt to crush dissent. As the uprising haemorrhaged into an outright civil war, he unleashed his military to blast opposition-held cities, with support from allies Iran and Russia.
International rights groups and prosecutors alleged widespread use of torture and extrajudicial killings in Syria’s government-run detention centers. The war has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half of the country’s prewar population of 23 million.
The conflict appeared to be frozen in recent years, with Assad’s government regaining control of most of Syria’s territory while the northwest remained under the control of opposition groups and the northeast under Kurdish control. Then the latest onslaught which threw him out of power erupted two weeks ago.
The temptation which Assad fell for was a familiar one. It is the temptation that leaders often encounter in their bid to establish themselves against any dissenting opinion. To achieve this, political leaders are often tempted to breach the constitution and silence avenues for fertilisation of political ideas.
Instead of allowing home-grown solutions to political issues, Assad like many leaders in the developing countries would do, strengthened his relationship with foreign powers in Rusia and Iraq, the very allies that his father relied upon to dehumanise his people. He also turned to his own family. His younger brother Maher headed the elite Presidential Guard and would lead the crackdown against the uprising. Their sister Bushra was a strong voice in his inner circle, along with her husband, Deputy Defence Minister Assef Shawkat, until he was killed in a 2012 bombing. Bashar’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf, became the country’s biggest businessman, heading a financial empire before the two had a falling-out that led to Makhlouf being pushed aside. He thought that by so doing, he would not loss control forever.
Having seen the trappings of his own flaws, he quickly fell back on the same power base at home as his father: his Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam comprising around 10 per cent of the population. Many of the positions in his government went to younger generations of the same families that had worked for his father. Drawn in as well were members of the new middle class created by his reforms, including prominent Sunni merchant families.
This weekend, at the time Assad would have been at ease and not thinking about it, opposition mounted and swept him off. Syrian rebels, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate, reached Damascus over the weekend and overthrew Assad’s government.
Assad has fled the country on Sunday, bringing to a dramatic close his nearly 14-year struggle to hold onto control as his country fragmented in a brutal civil war that became a proxy battlefield for regional and international powers.
The Kremlin said on Monday that Russia has granted political asylum to Assad.
Assad’s overthrow, which appeared unthinkable just two weeks ago, raises hopes for a more peaceful future in Syria, and at the same time, concerns about a potential security vacuum in the country, which is still split among armed groups.
Kelechi Okoronkwo, a public affairs analyst writes from Abuja, Nigeria
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