By P R Kumaraswamy
Since it began with Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia in January 2011, the Arab Spring protests consumed Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and now President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. The Arab Spring protest spread over time, pursued different trajectories and timeframes but consumed all the leaders who were at the receiving end of popular protests and dissent. While the political fate remained the same, their personal fate differed; Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, where he died in September 2019. As an Egyptian patriot, Mubarak stepped down from office, was tried, convicted, imprisoned and died in Egypt in February 2020. If Gaddafi faced a gruesome death when a mob lynched him, Saleh fell to a sniper attack in Sa’ana. And initial reports suggest that Assad had fled Syria—presumably to Russia—where his family believed to have fled a few days earlier.
Bashar al-Assad was not a natural politician and was thrust into it due to the tragic death of his elder brother Basil in a traffic accident in January 1994. Their father, Hafiz al-Assad, provided stability to Syria after becoming president in March 1971; for the next three decades, he ruled the country with an iron fist, suppressed dissent but provided political stability that eluded Syria since the termination of the French mandate in October 1945. Before becoming president, Hafez was also Syrian Defence Minister since February 1966 and ingloriously presided over the loss of Golan Heights to Israel in the June 1967 War. Seeking a republican dynasty, Hafez groomed his sons Basil and later Bashar. The parliament formalized this within hours after his death on 10 June 2000; the constitution was amended to lower the minimum age for candidates for president from 40 to 34, Bashar’s age at the time.
When other leaders faced popular protests in early 2011, Syria looked an exception and was hailed as a model. This did not last. First protests broke out in the city of Daraa on 6 March and persisted since then. The refusal of the regime to listen to saner advice from friends like India and IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) only accentuated the internal divide, tension and conflict. More than half the population are currently displaced internally or are refugees, with countries like Lebanon, Jordan and Türkiye hosting millions of Syrian refugees. The size is mind boggling; Türkiye hosts over three million; Syrian refugees comprise a quarter of the Lebanese population and about 15 percent of the Jordanian population. Towards pushing back the refugees, Türkiye has been at the forefront of anti-regime forces in Syria and, this time around managed to succeed as rebel groups supported by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were one of the first to enter Damascus.
For over five decades, Assads—Hafez and Bashar—presided over a country struggling to make its regional relevance. During the Cold War, Syria was the key opponent of normalization with Israel, especially in the wake of President Anwar Sadat’s Jerusalem visit and subsequent Camp David Accords in 1978. The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the USSR enabled Assad to pursue a ‘strategic’ choice and go to the Madrid Peace Conference of October 1991. Though he was not enamoured by Yasser Arafat’s willingness to pursue the Oslo process, Hafez al-Assad was keen on the Egyptian precedent: full Israeli withdrawal for full peace. There are indications that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was not averse to returning the Golan Heights if Israeli security concerns were adequately addressed.
Trading on this path, Ehud Barak even sought a triangular arrangement: in return for the Israeli pullout from the Golan Heights, Syria would rein in Hizballah and ensure peace along Israeli-Lebanon borders. However, senior Assad’s desire for the smooth succession of Bashar—who was an ophthalmologist in London and without any military background—took precedence over peace with Israel. In the early months, President Bashar looked like a liberal who would provide space for difference and disagreement, but this never happened. Following his father’s footsteps, he was regularly elected president with an overwhelming majority: 99.7 percent approval in July 2000; 99.2 percent in May 2007; 92.2 percent in June 2014; and 95.1 percent in May 2019. Even popular protests within Syria and the fall of his Arab compatriots did not dilute Assad’s resolve to stay in office.
Assad benefited immensely from the strategic calculations of Iran and Russia and their willingness to be militarily involved in the Syrian civil war. Hezbollah fighters and commanders from the Iranian revolutionary guards fought along with the government forces. in recent months things changed dramatically. The preoccupations of Russia (with the Ukraine crisis), Iran (with its ongoing conflict with Israel) and Hizballah (conflict with Israel and the resultant weakening of its domestic support inside Lebanon) have weakened the ability and appetite of the external players to maintain their commitments to Assad. For their part, several other countries, especially the US, Gulf Arab states and Türkiye, have been supporting several—often conflictual—rebel groups to undermine the Syrian regime. The dilution of commitments of the friends and the relentless actions of the adversaries was an uncoordinated pincer movement with one simple outcome: the downfall of Bashar al-Assad.
The author is teaching contemporary Middle East in Jawaharlal Nehru University.
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