The Syrian leader has frequently promised reform while his security forces mete out death to Arab spring protesters. Will he change his ways now the US and Russia say he must?
Peter Beaumont
The Observer, Sunday 7 August 2011
"....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....
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.....
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.....
"Assad has decided to shut this down," one western diplomat told the Guardian 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.".....
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.....
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"."
Peter Beaumont
The Observer, Sunday 7 August 2011
"....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....
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.....
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.....
"Assad has decided to shut this down," one western diplomat told the Guardian 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.".....
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.....
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"."
