Numerous explanations are offered as to why Britain and other Western and Arab countries continue to countenance Bashar al-Assad as Syria’s legitimate leader. But these mealy-mouthed justifications, ranging from the morally bankrupt to the nakedly self-interested, are far outnumbered by al-Assad’s Arab spring victims — up to 800 dead and rising, on one weekend count, plus tens of thousands detained, tortured or terrorised. It’s plain this blind-eyed policy to his Saddam-esque iniquities is no longer sustainable, regional analysts warn. The new realpolitik is: al-Assad has to go.
The decrepit regime Syria’s president heads is getting really good at repression. Following Muammar Gaddafi’s Benghazi maxim of hunting down foes “alley by alley, house by house, room by room”, troops backed by tanks are sent into target towns at night, firing guns in the air, breaking down doors and seizing anybody suspected of anti-regime sympathies. Those who resist risk being shot. Those arrested simply disappear. An increasingly efficient press and social media clampdown ensures silence shrouds their fate.
These terrifying tactics, reportedly perfected with Iranian coaching, were employed in Homs, Syria’s third city, at the weekend, where machine gun fire and shelling accompanied military incursions into three residential districts. “The areas have been under total siege. There is a total blackout on the numbers of dead and injured.
Telecommunications and electricity are repeatedly being cut with the districts,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Much the same happened in the southern town of Tafas, where protesters from Dera’a, the seat of the March uprising,had taken uncertain refuge.
Surrounded and picked off one by one, many of Syria’s major towns and cities have witnessed, or are presently enduring, similar assaults and accompanying, egregious human rights abuses. One resident of Banias described regime tactics as “going to the maximum”. After nearly two months of intensifying violence, it’s clear Assad — his reform promises drowned in a sea of tears — will not back down until the revolt has been thoroughly suppressed. It’s clear, too, that whatever political legitimacy he once laid claim to has now been wholly lost.
Looking the other way
Except Western and neighbouring governments, for the moment, refuse to see it this way. The Obama administration has tightened sanctions but declines to call on Assad to resign, unlike Hosni Mubarak (whose response to Egypt’s uprising was infinitely more restrained) and Libya’s Gaddafi.
Britain and the EU have agreed travel bans and asset freezes on named regime figures, but not on Assad himself. The Arab League and neighbours such as Turkey have daintily held their noses and looked the other way.
Unlike Libya, Syria is much too close to home for unelected Arab potentates who fear Assad’s fall might presage their own.
William Hague, Britain’s foreign secretary, summed up the prevailing view in a recent BBC interview. “You can imagine him as a reformer. One of the difficulties in Syria is that President Assad’s power depends on a wider group of people, in his family and in other members of his government, and I am not sure how free he is to pursue a reform agenda.”
This generous appreciation of al-Assad, young architect of the stunted 2000-01 “Damascus Spring” and bringer of limited economic liberalisation, as a Syrian Jeremy Bentham cruelly thwarted by a reactionary “old guard” tenaciously persists despite the rising pile of corpses over which he grimly presides.
‘God, freedom, Syria’
More and more, such analyses look like excuses for international inaction. “We’ve heard all the time that the old guard was holding him back but we’ve never heard who the old guard was,” Andrew Tabler of the Institute for Near East Policy told the Washington Post, pointing the finger of blame directly at Assad. Columnist Jackson Diehl was similarly impatient. It was often argued that “a cataclysm of chaos, violence and extremism” would engulf Syria should Assad topple, he said. But where was the evidence for this? So far, there had been no sectarian strife, no al-Qaeda suicide bombers, no Iraq-style fragmentation. The protesters’ succinct slogan, “God, freedom, Syria”, was one of unity, not dissension.
It is not in the power of Western nations, without risking another Iraq, to determine events in Syria, nor is it desirable they should try. But a great deal more honesty about the unacceptable depths to which Assad, personally, has sunk is required. It’s not credible to go on blaming people around him, like his guardsman brother Maher. The man ultimately responsible for Syria’s suffering is the man who leads it, as a growing number of protesters has recognised.
Immediate root-and-branch regime change is not in prospect in Damascus. But the uprising has made it possible to contemplate a change in the regime’s leadership (as in Egypt) and, by ridding the country of his discredited presence, encourage a more constructive, inclusive national dialogue. Assad fluffed his chance. Now he has gone too far. He is beyond the pale. Britain and its allies should break with him – and demand he step down. – Guardian News & Media 2011