The Assads in Moscow

There is somethiing satisfyingly serendipitous about Bashar al-Assad fleeing to a "humanitarian" welcome in Moscow after the collapse of the family regime in Damascus.

Hardly the bear-hugs and slobbery kisses from Brezhnev et al. on prime-time state TV, with which his father Hafez al-Assad was routinely welcomed in his time.

Al-Assad senior, an air force general trained as a fighter pilot at a Soviet military academy in the early 1960s, became Syrian president in 1971 following his coup the previous year, and only a few weeks passed before he flew to Moscow to seek Kremlin blessing.

When I started my second posting there for Reuters in 1973, he was already a regular visitor, and over the next two decades he seemed to be in and out every few weeks.

But despite doorstepping (or rather closed iron-gate stopping) none of us in Reuters ever got sight of him. However, Soviet state television loved him, showing him on farms and in factories, including a car plant in the Urals. No visits to arms-making plants were ever shown or mentioned, although his main interest was obviously military hardware.

My own time in Moscow covered 13 of his 29 years in power, but over all that time our requests for an interview via the Syrian embassy or the Soviet Foreign Ministry went unanswered. However, we did once get a press conference with his foreign minister of the time. This amounted to the minister reading a prepared statement of platitudes and refusing to answer questions.

It doesn't seem that Assad Jr. will be giving any Moscow press conferences either, especially since his demise seems a major blow to Russia. ■