Hafez al-Assad is still dead (thank God)

You may recall my earlier post involving the wacky Syrian Arab News Agency and their frankly bizarre article about the celebration isosceles trapezoid? Naturally, I've started reading their website religiously, partly for weird, poorly translated stories about Syria, but also because SANA is a perfect example of what dictatorships do to the press.

Case in point: this article about Syrian cabinet ministers "celebrating" the seventh anniversary of Hafez al-Assad's long overdue demise. I admit that I'm no expert on Arab culture, but celebrating the demise of a dictator whose cult of personality was (and still is) a part of everyday political life in Syria seems, at best, a very strange choice of word. I can understand Syria's long suffering neighbors (Israel and Lebanon) breaking out the champagne, but why would Syrian officials publicly celebrate the death of someone whose boots they're still officially required to lick?

We may never get a sense of how ordinary people in Syria feel about the demise of their most notorious dictator. People in Syria will immediately change the topic when someone begins discussing religion or politics; after all, you never know who might be eavesdropping. Who knows what Syrians might say about the old man given a chance to speak freely? After all, there was no shortage of people in Syria who nursed serious grudges against Assad.

After seizing power in a coup in 1970, Hafez al-Assad turned Syria into a dictatorial police state, rivaled only by that of his neighbor, Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Like Saddam, al-Assad used his power to settle grudges, often in a spectacularly bloody fashion. When the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood seized the city of Hama, al-Assad swore he would rather level the city to the ground than tolerate any challenge to his authority, and level it he did. Without any hesitation, al-Assad called in the army, who assaulted the city with artillery and poison gas until over 30,000 people perished. In fact, "the politics of revenge" more or less defined the style of Hafez al-Assad, whether it involved his own Kurdish population, his dealings with Israel and Lebanon, or even his penchant for doling out money and support to terrorist groups - every move made by Hafez al-Assad was invariably shrewd while simultaneously being brutal, vicious and repugnant. Is it any wonder that people would rather not discuss his legacy in public?

If anyone inside Syria has reason, and permission, to publicly celebrate the demise of Hafez al-Assad, it's his weak chinned son Bashar al-Assad, who inherited the top job when his more capable and ruthless elder brother, Basil, died in a car accident. An ophthalmologist by training, Bashar al-Assad appears to be learning the ins and outs of the dictator business as he goes. While Bashar has preserved his father's aggressive secret police and penchant for preserving rule by a tiny Alawite elite, Bashar lacks his father's instincts for making intuitively shrewd moves. Hafez conquered Lebanon, but Bashar lost it.

So while I doubt that Bashar al-Assad's sycophantic cronies are celebrating the demise of Hafez al-Assad, I think I'll take a minute today to do so myself. I think I'll save the champagne, however, until Bashar kicks the bucket, too.

Mandatory celebration isosceles trapezoid

Part of what makes blogging about tyrants such a pleasure is reading the bizarre articles from dictatorships that have been either poorly or hastily translated into English. Such is the case with this blurb from the Syrian Arab News Agency which hails the arrival of something called the "al-Mahaba carnival" to the city of Aleppo. The article breezily informs us that that:

al-Mahaba (amity) carnival arrived in Aleppo, the capital of Islamic culture, celebrating the re-election of of President Bashar al-Assad. The carnival, held by several economic and culture activities in Syria, set out from Damascus, crossing the Syrian cities from the south to the north. It marched through the streets of Aleppo city where people gathered and welcomed the arrival of the carnival.

The only photo included in the article doesn't really look much like a traveling "carnival" so much as it resembles a vaguely menacing isosceles trapezoid floating down an empty street, daring the terrified natives to behold its power, magnificence, and triumph over gravity. Compared to the way some other dictators glorify themselves, this is a pretty low rent display of self-glorification by Bashar al-Assad. I'm aware Junior is a pretty bush league kind of dictator compared to his old man, but surely he can do better than this, right?

UPDATE: The trapezoid arrives in Idelb!

Bashar al-Assad "wins" re-election

Against all odds, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has managed to win "re-election" in the non-existent race for the Presidency in Syria by the only-in-a-dictatorship margin of 97.6% of the vote. Interestingly enough, this is a marginal improvement over his first "election" where he succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, where junior only tallied 97.29% of the vote. I suppose we can infer that he's become .31% more popular during his first term?

There are idiots, especially here in the United States, who will point to a result like this and mistake it for genuine political legitimacy. Don't laugh - I heard people making this argument for the legitimacy of Saddam Hussein and Josef Stalin (ie, "why would 99% of the people vote for a dictator? You're just smearing them!"). It's a bit like asking why people would love pro-wrestling so much if they even suspected that it's fixed. I suppose we'll have to spell it for them:

Ahem. This election, like elections in any dictatorship, was a complete and deliberate farce. Bashar al-Assad's ruling Syrian Baath party is the only party allowed to compete in elections, and al-Assad was the only candidate to appear on this completely ridiculous ballot. Even the 2.4% that al-Assad "officially" lost is bogus, since blank ballots are simply discarded, and write in candidates are not allowed (or advisable - there's little in the way of ballot secrecy in dictatorships). al-Assad received 100% of the vote because, like so many elections in a dictatorship, it was only a formality to try and put on a veneer of respectability on al-Assad's otherwise completely unrepentant tyranny.

Status quo maintained for Arab dictator duo

There was a small burst of excitement from Libya where unconfirmed reports from a Palestinian news agency stated that the venerable Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi had suffered a stroke and gone into a coma. Now the ever nattily attired Colonel Qaddafi has not only declared that not only is he alive and well, but that he intends to sue the reporters who released the story. In a bizarre news conference in Tripoli, Qaddafi vowed vengeance, declaring bombastically, "the one who fires at you, you should fire at him too. The one who tells you 'I am your enemy', consider yourself his enemy."

Whatever the hell that means.

In other news, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad wants the world to know he's just getting comfortable running the family business. Since assuming power after the death of his father, the bloodthirsty Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad has had a somewhat tough time of things. All that work his father put into turning Lebanon into a satellite state? That turned out badly, no thanks to Junior. However, a family dictatorship is still a dictatorship, and one bad turn deserves another. So when the Syrian Ba'ath Party nominated Bashar al-Assad to run for a second 7 year term as President, we here at Dictators of the World congratulated al-Assad, knowing that the May 27th popular election is a mere cynical exercise in ballot box stuffing. Frankly, since al-Assad is the only candidate on the ballot, one wonders: why is this election even required as a formality?

Like father, unlike son

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is, at present, the most powerful Arab dictator in the Middle East. Oh sure, I hear you say, he's only gained this distinction because Saddam Hussein is dead. What's more, the weak chinned al-Assad is nowhere nearly as formidable as his late father, the infamous Hafez al-Assad. So what gives?

Perhaps the fact that an utter mediocrity like Bashar al-Assad finds himself in charge of Syria is a testament to the nearly extinct influence of pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism, the twin ideologies that spawned so many Arab dictators like his father, the aforementioned Saddam, Gamal Abdel Nasser, et al. Perhaps it's because Bashar was not groomed for the job. When his eldest brother, Basil, died behind the wheel of his Mercedes 560-SEL, the old man elevated Bashar to the position of heir apparent, regardless of whether or not he might actually have what it takes to be an Arab strongman.

The answer is "just barely". For example, nearly 30 yearis ago, his infamous father managed to turn Lebanon into a helpless client state. Fast forward 30 years, and the junior Assad has managed to drop the ball completely, by clumsily arranging for the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, an event that started a political chain reaction concluding with the hasty, and humiliating, Syrian withdrawal in 2005. In fact, things are so bad, Bashar al-Assad has given up on trying to force concessions from George W. Bush, and instead, has bent over backwards to accommodate Nancy Pelosi. Can anyone imagine Anwar Sadat dealing with second stringers?

Just when you think things can't get any worse, it's come down to this - being interviewed by Mother Jones magazine. Not Time, not Newsweek, but Mother Jones. Was he really so desperate to have Volvo drivers in Oregon hear about Syria's role as power broker in the Middle East or something? At least he found a publication who hates George Bush nearly as much (if not more) than he does, but really, what's next? An appearance on Fresh Air? A blog on the Huffington Post? How humiliating must it be for a dictator to be interviewed like any run of the mill Zinn, Churchill or Chomsky?

Saddam and Syria in the news

I've long since returned from vacation, but I've been terribly remiss in updating this blog. Then again, most of the world's dictators have been laying low. I'm not the only one who takes some vacation time in the summer, after all!

One dictator who has been in the news lately is former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein who has recently broken his hunger strike, and told his prosecutors that, if convicted, he would rather be shot by a firing squad than hanged. In this age of execution by lethal injection, we have become somewhat squeamish about capital punishment, and some people may have forgotten that hanging is a punishment traditionally reserved for common criminals - an indignity Saddam feels is beneath him as befits his status as president of Iraq. Well, former president of Iraq, but Saddam has never quite accepted his demotion from "president" to "defendant" in a graceful way.

Staying the Middle East, one may have noticed the current dust up between Israel and Hezbollah. I cannot help but wonder: was the Hezbollah offensive that triggered this war part of a power play by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to strengthen Syria's weakening grip on its former client state, Lebanon?

After the hamfisted assassination of Rafik Hariri and the subsequent diastrous (for Syria, anyway) Cedar Revolution, it seemed Lebanon's days as a de facto Syrian colony were at an end. Could the junior Assad be as inept as the senior Assad was shrewd? Are Damascus and Tehran waging their proxy war against Israel to satisfy hard liners domestically? Does Assad hope to reverse Syria's loss of regional influence? Most importantly, why has Assad been silent during the fighting? Obviously, Assad doesn't dare challenge Israel directly, and he certainly won't be sending the Syrian military back to Southern Lebanon while the nearly invincible Israeli military is there. Given the current anti-Israeli mood in Europe and the United Nations, it seems safe to bet that he's weighing the pros and cons of jumping back into Lebanon the very second the Israelis pull out.

I have always thought Bashar al-Assad to be a shadow of the dictator his father was, but if he's looking through his father's old playbook for the next move, I may be forced to review my estimation of his skills as a dictator.