Bashar al-Assad -appearances can deceive

When Bashar-al Assad came to power in 2000, he seemed like an unlikely successor to the brutal rule of his father.

When I met him two years later, I took away an abiding impression of a strangely gawky, almost shy man – a far cry from the monstrous tyrant he became. He seemed a reluctant dictator who would have been more comfortable continuing his chosen profession as an ophthalmologist in London. So much for first impressions.  

Samia Nakhoul, then Beirut bureau chief, used her legendary network of contacts to secure a rare interview with Assad for Editor-in-Chief Geert Linnebank and me when I was Middle East editor.

At the time, Bashar was seen as an accidental and perhaps weak successor to his late father Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled with an iron fist since staging a coup in 1970. His chosen successor was his eldest son Bassel, who looked in the pictures still displayed around Damascus during our visit like a tough hardman in the mould of his father.

But Bassel died in a car accident in 1994 and the succession moved to Bashar. Initially, some believed he was being manipulated by other powerful Syrians or that he would not last very long.

When we arrived from Beirut at the luxurious presidential palace on a hill overlooking the city, we were shown down a paved pathway between two lines of columns. Plainclothes guards with machine guns made a half-hearted attempt to remain hidden behind the pillars for appearances sake.

We reached a high, heavily embossed bronze door. To my astonishment it was opened by the tall, skinny Bashar himself instead of a flunky, and he showed us in.

I was expecting somebody similar to the hostile, aggressive Syrian ministers I had met before, but he was polite and quietly spoken. I focussed on his rather drab black shoes, nothing like the designer accessories worn by some other powerful Middle Eastern leaders.

Ever since that interview I have wrestled with the question of whether Bashar was concealing his real identity and his readiness to kill hundreds of thousands of his own people, including with chemical weapons. Or had he gradually discovered the brutality of his father within his own character once his minority Alawite dictatorship was threatened in the Arab Spring of 2011?

The interview produced a series of what now look like prophetic warnings against a U.S. invasion of neighbouring Iraq. He said: “You cannot change the regime without killing millions of Iraqis…Even the United States does not know how a war in Iraq is going to end.

“Impoverishment, a flood of refugees and many other aspects directly and indirectly in the region.”

The invasion went ahead the following year with many of the consequences Bashar predicted. He hung on to power until last weekend through the inherited cruelty of his family, the skilful manipulation of terrorist groups and alliances with Russia and Iran.

In consolation, I wasn’t the only one deceived. For a while Bashar was seen as a possible reformer more open to relations with the West. British Prime Minister Tony Blair invited him on a visit to Britain with his glamorous British-born wife, during which they met Queen Elizabeth.

But under Bashar, Syria was a glaring example of a failure of Western foreign policy, becoming a route for Iran to supply weapons to its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon and as a key regional ally for Vladimir Putin. So perhaps exile in Moscow is a fitting humiliation, although no doubt insufficiently painful for most Syrians.    

  ■