How Syria’s Bashar al-Assad got away with murder

On November 12, 2011, the Arab League suspended the membership of Syria to punish the government of President Bashar al-Assad for cracking down on anti-government protestors with a brutality so savage it shocked even the members of a group with a poor record of concern for human rights.

On May 7, 2023, the 22-member regional group formally re-admitted Syria and this week al-Assad, still a pariah in the eyes of the West, is scheduled to attend an Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia, whose autocratic de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, had been pushing for an end to Syria’s isolation.

The decision to welcome back al-Assad, who has done nothing that would merit an embrace, is an abject lesson to the fact that national self-interest and geopolitics trump human rights. Assad has made no concessions for political reform at home, scoffs at the evidence of war crimes in the 4,194 days between expulsion and re-admission, and made no effort to persuade six million refugees to return home.

The Arab League’s decision also highlighted the waning influence of the United States, once a dominant player in the Middle East, and its Western allies. At a joint press conference in Washington two days after the League’s announcement, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and his British counterpart James Cleverly made clear their opposition.

“We do not believe that Syria merits re-admission,” said Blinken. “Our position is clear: We are not going to be in the business of normalising relations with Assad and with that regime.” Not surprisingly, Russia cheered Assad’s return to the fold. “Moscow welcomes this long awaited step of returning Syria to the ‘Arab family’,” said a statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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The tide of the multi-sided civil war that followed the government’s initial wave of anti-protest repression turned in favour of the Assad regime with the 2015 intervention of Russia. Its air power, combined with Iranian-backed militias on the ground saved the government from collapse and allowed it to re-establish control over most of the country.

At the time, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the war as “a living nightmare” and said, “Syria’s people have endured some of the greatest war crimes the world has witnessed this century.”

There never was much hope that al-Assad and his regime would be held to account for a string of well-documented war crimes - from the systematic torture of prisoners and the bombing of schools and hospitals to the use of chemical weapons. Their most devastating deployment took place in August 2013 with the release of the nerve gas Sarin in the opposition-controlled Damascus district of Ghouta. It killed an estimated 1,400 people, including children.

In the early stages of the conflict, legal experts and human rights activists debated whether the Syrian leader could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. But under the treaty that established it, there can be prosecution only for crimes committed in one of the 123 member states. Syria is not a member.

When the war began, policymakers in the United States and its Western allies thought tough economic sanctions would be an effective alternative to military action and expected that it would force the Assad regime to change its behaviour.

So confident were key members of the US administration that Assad would buckle under the combined pressure of sanctions and anti-government forces that the Obama administration’s leading expert on Syria, Frederic Hof, told a Congressional committee that “our view is that this regime is the equivalent of a dead man walking…I do not see this regime surviving.”

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Famous last words. More than a decade and an estimated 300,000 dead civilians later, the West is facing a question yet to be answered: once it is clear that rogue regimes can survive sanctions, should they continue to be applied? Almost everywhere, they have been hurting the civilian population more than their ruthless rulers.

Now that Syria is back with "the Arab family,” what do its members expect? So far, they have not spelt that out explicitly but one key issue for all is the millions of Syrian refugees that the host governments would like to leave their countries. Syrians are a particular burden on Lebanon, numbering close to two million in a population of five.

Another point of “family” contention is Syria’s role as the world’s leading producer and exporter of Captagon, an amphetamine popular in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. It remains to be seen whether Assad can control the drug lords, including close affiliates, who have become multimillionaires under his rule.

Bashar escaping punishment would complete a family tradition. His father, from whom he inherited his power, also enforced authoritarian rule with mass murder. Even in a Middle East dotted with massacre sites, the way Hafez al-Assad dealt with Moslem Brotherhood dissidents in the city of Hama stood out.

On February 2, 1982, an army raid on militants of the outlawed Brotherhood sparked fighting throughout the city. The government responded by surrounding Hama with tanks and artillery and blasted the densely-populated centre for 27 days, without pause. Estimates of those killed in the assault ranged from 10,000 to 40,000, most of them civilians.

The assault ended a four-year campaign of bombing and assassinations by Sunni Muslims intent on breaking the tight grip on power of the Assad family and the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam, to which the Assads belong. The Brotherhood lost, Hafez al-Assad won. A role model for his son, he ruled for another 18 years, until his death of heart problems.

Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.

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