Assad Family Values
Ever since the Baath Party came to power in Syria in 1963, it has faced a challenge from the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic militants. These Islamists were — and still are — bitterly opposed to the Baath Party’s secular policies and to the prominence in its leadership of Syria’s minorities, notably Alawis, whom extremist Sunnis consider heretics.
The smoldering resentment burst into open conflict during the 30-year rule (1970-2000) of Hafez al-Assad, and again during the rule of his son, Bashar, who took over the presidency after his father’s death. In February 1982, Hafez al-Assad put down a rebellion in the city of Hama by his Islamist opponents. Three decades later, in February 2012, Bashar al-Assad faced down a rebellion in Homs, a sister city of Hama in the central Syrian plain. Both responded with great brutality to these regime-threatening uprisings, as if aware that they and their community would face no mercy if the Islamists were ever to come to power.
The regime’s onslaught continues and armed rebels refuse to put down their guns, yet there is a slim chance that Annan could succeed.
These two epoch-making events were remarkably similar. Both Hafez and Bashar had been slow to recognize and address the groundswell of complaint against rising poverty, corruption, and government neglect that would fuel the uprisings. Preoccupied with foreign affairs, they failed to pay sufficient attention to the domestic scene, often turning a blind eye to the abuses and profiteering of their close associates, including members of their own family. More fundamentally, both Hafez and Bashar believed in those moments of crisis that they were wrestling not only with internal dissent but with a large-scale American and Israeli conspiracy to unseat them, backed by some of their Arab enemies.
In Hafez al-Assad’s mind, his physical battle with Islamist guerrillas was an extension of his long, unsuccessful struggle with Israel and the United States over the nature of the political settlement after the October War of 1973 — a war that Hafez al-Assad and Egypt’s leader Anwar al-Sadat waged together against Israel with the aim of regaining territory captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Once the war was over, Hafez al-Assad had bitterly opposed Henry Kissinger’s 1975 Sinai disengagement agreement, which removed Egypt from the confrontation with Israel. Similarly, he interpreted the U.S.-sponsored Camp David Accords of 1978, and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of the following year, as a conspiracy to leave the Arab world defenseless in the face of Israeli power. This was only the latest, as he saw it, in a long string of Western plots to divide and enfeeble the Arabs, dating back to World War I.
In much the same way, Bashar al-Assad’s immediate reaction to the uprising of this past year was to view it as the domestic wing of a foreign conspiracy by the United States, Israel, and some Arab states to bring down his regime and Iran’s as well — and with them the whole Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah axis, which, he believed, was the only real obstacle to American and Israeli hegemony.
The foreign conspiracies with which Hafez and Bashar have had to deal were, without doubt, very real. America’s unflagging support for Israel — including an airlift of weapons during the October War — put the Arab armies at a grave disadvantage, while Kissinger’s diplomacy removed the most powerful Arab state from the Arab lineup, allowing Israel the freedom to invade Lebanon in 1982 and remain there for 18 years. But focusing on foreign conspiracies blinded both Hafez and Bashar to the legitimate grievances of their angry populations, and caused them to overreact, using excessive force when putting down their domestic opponents.
Hafez and Bashar both accused their foreign enemies of supplying the insurgents with sophisticated American-made communications equipment, as well as with weapons and cash. In 1982, the regime confiscated some 15,000 machine guns. Last month, when the regime regained control of the Baba Amr quarter of Homs, it also claimed to have captured a rich haul of foreign-supplied weapons and equipment.
There were differences, however, in the trajectories leading up to the deadly uprisings. In Bashar’s case, the revolution began as peaceful urban protests. In his father’s case, it began with a campaign of assassinations of important men close to him, and other acts of extreme violence. One of the most dramatic of these was the gunning down of 83 Alawi officer cadets at the Aleppo Artillery School in June of 1979. From their safe haven deep in the ancient warrens of Aleppo and Hama, where cars could not enter, the guerrillas emerged repeatedly to bomb and kill.