Fri. 22 July. 2011
WALL st. JOURNAL
Ø Being Bashar Assad…………………………………………1
GULF NEWS
Ø Way out of the Syrian crisis…………………………………4
TODAY’S ZAMAN
Ø US-Syrian expats raise concerns during meeting with Assad.8
GLOBAL POST
Ø Pretty much everyone writes off Assad regime……...…….11
FINANCIAL TIMES
Ø Worried Syrians withdraw bank deposits………….……….13
GUARDIAN
Ø Qatar breaks Arab ranks over Syria…………..……………16
NYTIMES
Ø Lyrical Message for Syrian Leader: ‘Come on Bashar, Leave’……………………………...……………………….19
HOME PAGE
Being Bashar Assad
The transformation of a quiet Syrian doctor into a brutal Middle Eastern despot.
Neill Lochery,
Wall Street Journal,
JULY 21, 2011,
Sometimes life doesn't work out quite as expected. Today Bashar Assad is known as the Syrian dictator whose gruesome crackdown against protesters has killed hundreds of civilians since March. But during his time in London in the early 1990s, it would have been hard to guess what lay in store for the young trainee doctor. Then, Mr. Assad's reputation was as a rather shy, scholarly and cultured man, who was not without charm.
At the time, Mr. Assad seemed destined to spend his life in the wards of leading eye hospitals, far away from politics. His father, Syrian President Hafez Assad, had chosen his eldest son Bassel to succeed him in the presidency. But when in 1994 his chosen heir died in a car wreck, the rest of Bashar Assad's life, as they say, was history. Bashar was recalled to Damascus and hastily prepared for high office by his ailing father.
When Bashar Assad assumed power upon his father's death in 2000, he called for both economic and political reform. In European diplomatic circles, the consensus was that this political outsider might just be the man to lead Syria away from the Baathist dogma that characterized his father's rule. The American assessment was more sober, but nonetheless the Bush administration, then in its infancy, appeared willing to go with the European flow.
Central to Assad's program of reform was the liberalization of the Syrian economy. The cartels that his father's supporters had employed to control key sectors of the economy were broken up and replaced by more competitive structures. Damascus promised to start respecting human rights and to allow some form of opposition to the ruling party. Mr. Assad's government loosened its ties with Iran and began looking to America for commercial and political links.
A resolution to the Israeli-Syrian conflict might have been a catalyst for these reforms. Making peace with Israel would have heralded an end to the broader Arab-Israeli conflict, and by achieving it Mr. Assad might have transformed the Middle East's political and economic maps. But he soon realized that he was not strong enough to make peace with Israel and survive politically.
For decades his father's regime had justified its high defense spending, and conversely low spending on areas such as health care, by pointing to the conflict with Israel. In truth Damascus spent so much on its defense for internal reasons: to buy the loyalty of its armed forces and to keep the regime in power. Eliminating Israel as an external threat would have eliminated the justification of excessive defense spending.
So Mr. Assad, like his father, wanted any peace deal with Israel to come with some kind of external arms package or other economic aid, that would let him continue to feed the military and keep his regime in power. The Americans refused, and Mr. Assad's interest in peacemaking largely ended there. He then began to look eastward, and found that Vladimir Putin's Russia was all too happy to sell Syria huge amounts of weapons at cut-price rates in exchange for political influence in the country.
As things started to go wrong economically and politically at home, Mr. Assad turned up his rhetoric against Israel and moved to deepen his government's ties with Iran and with Hezbollah. He suddenly discovered an interest in the plight of the Palestinians and started to link any peace deal with Israel to a successful resolution of the Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, he flirted with developing a nuclear program to counter Israel's might, only to have Israel bomb the reactor.
All this prompts the question of what turned the quiet doctor into another Middle Eastern despot. The first explanation is that the internal opposition in Syria, which Mr. Assad encountered, proved to be much more robust than he expected. Central to this theory are the internal power struggles within the Assad family to control key parts of the Syrian armed forces. Mr. Assad's economic reforms were said to be vetoed by the very allies within his family who had promised him their support.
But that fails to explain the apparent change in Mr. Assad's outlook. The old adage that power corrupts may be relevant here, but does not fully explain the extent of his transformation.
Perhaps he simply doesn't understand what he is doing. He is today clinging to power, increasingly isolated from even his own supporters, for the sole reason that he feels there is no alternative. The recent meeting between Syrian Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa and some moderate opposition figures proved unproductive, but it did reveal how detached Mr. Assad seems to be from current realities in Syria and in the wider Arab world.
As the violence in Syria worsens, one wonders how many times Mr. Assad has cursed his older brother and the late-night high-speed drive in the fog that led to his fatal collision near Damascus airport. If his brother had lived, Bashar Assad would no doubt today be enjoying a much more placid summer season of international medical conferences.
Instead, Mr. Assad finds himself hopelessly out of his depth and trusting nobody—not even his own family. Such is his pariah status that he will, in all likelihood, spend the rest of his life trying to evade either Syrian or international justice for his brutal repression of the Syrian opposition. Today's tragedy in Syria is of Shakespearian proportions, both for the shy doctor and, more importantly, for the Syrian people.
Mr. Lochery is the director of the Centre for Israeli Studies at University College London. He is the author of the forthcoming "Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939-1945" (Public Affairs, 2011).
HOME PAGE
Way out of the Syrian crisis
Some observers believe that a dialogue between the regime and the opposition is the safest way forward
By Patrick Seale, Special to Gulf News
Gulf News,
22 July 2011,
The Syrian protest movement, which started in mid-March, has this week entered its fourth month. Week after week, the Friday demonstrations have grown and their tone has hardened. Increasingly, the strident call is for the fall of the regime. Angry protesters say that more than 1,500 of their number have been shot dead in the streets and well over 10,000 arrested, while the regime retorts that 400 of its soldiers and policemen have been killed by ‘armed gangs’.
As casualties mount on both sides, so the rift widens between the regime and its opponents. Ramadan is fast approaching. When the daytime fast is ended at sunset, the tradition is for the rich to feed the poor, often at trestle tables in the courtyards of mosques — or so it was before mosques became centres of protest. If large crowds gather next month for occasions of this sort, there could be serious trouble.
The opposition faces a stark choice: either to go all out to bring the regime down, or to cooperate with it in building a new and better Syria. The first course is hazardous: if the Baathist state is torn down, what will replace it? The future is uncharted. The second course requires an act of faith: it means accepting that the regime truly wants to implement radical reforms by means of a national dialogue. Its attempt to launch such a dialogue has so far failed to convince.
The regime has mishandled the protest movement. Slow to grasp the nature of the popular challenge, it has been violent and incompetent in confronting it. The security services, like President Bashar Al Assad himself, seem to have been taken by surprise. By resorting to live fire against the protesters, they displayed indiscipline and arrogant contempt for the lives of ordinary citizens. Ordinary people want respect. This has been one of the motors of the Arab Spring.
Al Assad himself has fumbled. Of his three speeches in the past four months, two were public relations disasters and the third far from the rousing, dramatic appeal to the nation that his supporters had expected and the occasion demanded. Above all, he has failed to put an end to the killings, arbitrary arrests, beatings and torture which have sullied his and the country’s reputation.
Meanwhile, the Baath party — ‘leader of state and society’, according to the notorious article 8 of the Constitution — has been virtually silent, confirming the widespread belief that it has become a hollow shell, concerned only to protect its privileges and its corrupt network of patronage.
No forceful leadership
If the regime has shown itself to be weak, the opposition is weaker still. It wants to challenge the system, but it evidently does not know how to proceed. It is split in a dozen ways between secularists, civil rights activists, democrats — and Islamists; between angry unemployed youths in the street and venerable figures of the opposition, hallowed by years in prison; between the opposition in Syria and the exiles abroad; between those who call for western intervention and those who reject any form of foreign interference.
The opposition met at Antalya in Turkey some weeks ago, and then more recently in Istanbul, but no forceful leadership or clear programme has emerged, let alone anything which might look like an alternative government. The opposition movements that have declared themselves — the National Democratic Grouping, the Damascus Declaration signatories, the National Salvation Council formed last week in Istanbul, the local coordination committees in Syria itself — are loose groupings of individuals with little structure or popular base and few clear ideas.
The truth is that, as Tunisia and Egypt have discovered, it is exceedingly difficult to bring about a transition from an autocratic, highly centralised, one-party system to anything resembling democratic pluralism. In Tunisia, no fewer than 90 political parties are planning to contest next October’s elections in conditions of great confusion.
In Syria — and for that matter in most Arab countries — there is no experience of free elections, no real political parties, no free trade unions, no state or civil society institutions, no separation of powers, no independent judiciary, little real political education. The Syrian parliament is a farce. And, as in Egypt and Tunisia, the problem of how to integrate Islamic movements into a democratic political system remains a puzzle.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood — renamed the Freedom and Justice Party in preparation for the elections — and Tunisia’s Al Nahda tend to frighten the western-educated middle and upper classes. That is why many worried secularists across the region look to Turkey as an inspiring model because Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP has proved that Islam is compatible with democracy.
In Syria, everything will have to be rebuilt from the ground up — including the ideology of the state. The old slogans of anti-colonialism, Arab unity and Arab nationalism, Baathism, radical Islamism, Arabism itself, all will need to be rethought and redefined for the political challenge ahead.
Since the task is so vast, and since any viable transition must inevitably take time, some observers have come to the view that a dialogue between the regime and the opposition is the safest way forward. Creating a new political system is not the only problem. Equally urgent is tackling the huge social and economic problems with which countries like Syria are faced: an exploding population, rampant youth unemployment, an impoverished middle class and a semi-destitute working class, a soaring cost of living, policies of economic liberalisation which have gone wrong and benefited only a tiny and corrupt elite; the neglect of workers’ rights whether on the land or in shops and factories. Syria needs a new social contract.
The rich monarchies of the Gulf can spend their way out of trouble. Saudi Arabia, for example, has announced plans to spend $70billion (Dh257billion) on low-cost housing. Syria, with about the same size of population, can only dream of such figures. If the Syrian economy is not to collapse, it will no doubt need bailing out. Iran may have to come to the rescue.
No one should suppose that the Syrian regime will go down without a fight. Most regimes seek to destroy their enemies. China had its Tiananmen Square massacre and Russia its bitter war in Chechnya. Iran crushed the Green movement. In 1982, Israel killed 17,000 people in Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the PLO and install a pro-Israeli vassal in Beirut. The use of live fire is an Israeli speciality, as Lebanon discovered in 2006 (1,600 dead), Gaza in 2008-9 (another 1,400 dead) and the Palestinians for the past 60 years.
When America was attacked on 9/11, that great bastion of democracy invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq. Hundreds of thousands died. Millions were displaced or forced to flee abroad. Many were tortured. Was it 160 times or 180 times that Khalid Shaikh Mohammad was water-boarded? Syria still plays host to about a million Iraqis, victims of America’s war.
A sectarian civil war on the Iraqi or Lebanese model is every Syrian’s nightmare. There must surely be another way out of the crisis.
Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs, including Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.
HOME PAGE
US-Syrian expats raise concerns during meeting with Assad
Celil Sagir, Istanbul,
Today's Zaman,
21 July 2011, Thursday,
Amidst escalating tensions in his country, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad met with two groups of prominent Syrian expats from the United States over the past two weeks.
“I was one of some 30 Syrian-Americans invited to go to Syria to meet with President Assad and share with him our thoughts and concerns,” one of the participants, who asked not to be named, told Today's Zaman.