Asma Assad: #Syria Dictator’s Wife A ‘Rose In The Desert’ Crushed By Uprising Violence

Syrian president Bashar Assad’s wife Asma is pictured at the Bristol hotel on December 11, 2010 in Paris. (MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images)


By Maria Golovnina

LONDON, March 19 (Reuters) - She was supposed to be the gentler face of a would-be reformist regime. Now Asma al-Assad has become a hate figure for many.

Syria’s London-born first lady, once breathlessly described as a “rose in the desert”, is ensconced at the heart of the shadowy inner circle of President Bashar al-Assad.

As Syria slides towards civil war and foreign powers watch for cracks within the ruling clan, understanding Asma could prove vital to understanding the Assads and the future of the Syrian crisis.

A British-educated former investment banker, Asma cultivated the image of a glamorous yet serious-minded woman with strong Western-inspired values who was meant to humanise the increasingly secretive and isolated Assad family.

That image crumbled when her husband responded to an anti-government rebellion with extreme violence a year ago. Asma had clearly decided to stand by her man despite international revulsion at his actions. Assad himself says he is fighting an insurrection, involving foreign-backed “terrorists”.

Asma’s ancestral home is the city of Homs, now a symbol of the revolt which has been subjected to particularly fierce attack by her husband’s tanks to become ground zero in the year-long conflict.

With her penchant for crystal-encrusted Christian Louboutin shoes and Chanel dresses, Asma is a puzzle for many. The opposition roundly rejects suggestions that she is effectively a prisoner of conscience in the presidential palace.

“She was very much, as we would say, left wing. She (created) a very, very good impression. She seemed to be very bright, very respectful of others,” said Gaia Servadio, a writer and historian who has worked with Asma on several art projects.

“It’s a very nasty regime … Thousands of people have been killed. So it’s very difficult to say: poor woman. She certainly should have found a way to talk.”

The world was smitten by her immaculate facade. In the Western media, Asma, a 36-year-old mother of three, was described as sophisticated, elegant, confident, with a “killer IQ” and an interest in opening up Syria though art and charity.

For those who pinned their hopes on Assad as a potential reformer, his photogenic wife bolstered that image, lending a touch of glamour to his awkward public appearances.

A glowing article in Vogue magazine described her as “a rose in the desert” and her household as “wildly democratic”. A French newspaper said she was an “element of light in a country full of shadow zones”.

People were charmed by her classy demeanour, liberal views and British accent. She received the Gold Medal of the Presidency of The Italian Republic for humanitarian work in 2008 and won an honorary archaeology doctorate from La Sapienza university in Rome.

“THE REAL DICTATOR”

Yet emails published by Britain’s Guardian newspaper this month from accounts believed to belong to the family offer a different portrait, showing her as a capricious dictator’s wife spending tens of thousands of pounds on jewels, fancy furniture, and a Venetian glass vase from Harrods.

“I am the real dictator, he has no choice,” she apparently said in one of the emails in a comment about her husband.

Her London contact, a Syrian businessman, appears to send emails to her using an address he has nicknamed “Party party”.

The story of how the London-born daughter of a Sunni Muslim Syrian doctor married into Assad’s family, members of the powerful minority Alawite sect, reads like a cautionary tale.

She was born in the west London suburbs, whose sleepy streets are lined with neat houses, just like her family’s. Twelve years after she married Assad, the family home appears almost abandoned, its curtains drawn. Neighbours said her father still lives there with his wife, a former diplomat.

“We know they are there but we don’t see them,” said one neighbour, a veiled Arab woman who asked not to be named. No one answered the door bell when Reuters called at the weekend.

A Syrian dissident from Aleppo, who lives nearby and asked to be identified only by his nickname, Zayed, said most Syrians in Britain despised Asma now.

Zayed, angrily comparing Asma to Marie Antoinette or the wife of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, called on the Syrian leader’s wife to “make a stand for your own sake, for your own people … She never did.”

A senior member of the British Syrian Society, set up with Assad’s help to promote business ties, said he has met the first couple in London and used warm words to describe them.

“They were quite impressive to talk to. He came across as someone who wanted to listen, get ideas, get advice, open to everybody, he made it plain that he wanted Syrians abroad to help building the country again. He was welcoming and warm.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity in a gentlemen’s club in a smart London neighbourhood, he added: “We all felt there was an opportunity that he, the president, representing the younger generation, could lead Syria to a new age of change.

“Perhaps he feels betrayed. Why are they (the West) ganging up on him? Now some people say, he is in full control, others say that he is not. Maybe he is shocked by the fact that … in the end they all turned against them.”

Asma’s father, Fawaz Akhras, a cardiologist and founder of the British Syrian Society, has not responded to a Reuters request for a meeting, made through an intermediary.


“WARLORDS, ONE AGAINST THE OTHER”

Known as Emma to her British friends, Asma spent the first 25 years of her life in North Acton, went to a smart London girls school, Queen’s College, and read computer science at King’s College London.

She was a rising star at JP Morgan when she met Bashar, who had studied ophthalmology in London but was sent home to be groomed for the presidency after his elder brother, Basil, died in a car crash in 1994.

“I was always very serious at work, and suddenly I started to take weekends (off), or disappear, and people just couldn’t figure it out,” she told Vogue. “What do you say - ‘I am dating the son of a president?’”

They married in 2000. What followed was a life full of glamour. They once dined with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in Syria. Bashar joked, according to Vogue: “Brad Pitt wanted to send his security guards here to come and get some training!”

One photograph from happier days depicts them playing with their children, toys scattered around on the carpet.

The Assad side of the clan, however, didn’t like Asma, not least because of her Sunni Muslim origins.

“Certainly the Assad family doesn’t like her, to put it mildly … She was constantly under watch, her telephone, she was very careful,” Servadio, who spent time with the family in Syria before the uprising, told Reuters in London.

“She was shouted at. How odd, frankly, (that) somebody who is meant to be the wife of the president who is an autocrat, can be shouted at in this way.” She added: “It was like a mediaeval power, warlords, one against the other.”


CHILLING GLIMPSE

Asma’s husband was elected president with 97 percent of the vote in 2000 after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria with an iron fist for decades.

Before the start of the 2011 uprising, there was hope Syria could change. Syrians saw his choice of wife as proof that things were about to change.

“When he came to power, people said, ‘Okay … let’s give him a chance and see what he’s going to do,’” said Ghassan Ibrahim, Global Arab Network’s London-based editor. “What happened is that he made corruption even more organised, Mafia appeared, poverty grew sharply … (But) she is standing by the criminal and she supports him.”

Emails leaked by Syria’s opposition offer a chilling glimpse into the lavish lifestyle the couple enjoyed even as Assad’s troops shelled opposition strongholds.

The tone of those emails is incongruously jokey. In one, Asma’s husband disparages his own reforms as “rubbish”. He also shares a pun playing on the words “elections” and “erections”.

Asma appears to have written in an email: “If we are strong together, we will overcome this together … I love you.”

As the revolt unfolded she gradually disappeared from public view but broke her silence in February, saying in a statement: “The president is the president of Syria, not a faction of Syrians, and the first lady supports him in that role.”

In a haunting interview with CNN, looking nervous, she once said: “We are losing time. We are working against the clock. Three thousand and three hundred people injured. More than that, 22,000 people have been displaced from their homes … This is the 21st century. Where in the world could this happen?”

She was talking in 2009 about an Israeli operation in Gaza.


“VIRTUALLY A PRISONER”

Some believe she is a propaganda tool of the Assad family, a liberal going through a moral crisis in Damascus, unable to speak up or escape.

“She is virtually a prisoner. The two of them missed their boat,” said Servadio. “I would certainly accuse him (Assad) of being a coward. … I think he is a puppet, very much used.

“For them (the family) it’s wonderful to have a scapegoat, these two people at the top who are absorbing all the hatred.”

Ibrahim disagreed. “It’s not true at all. Assad has been in power for over 12 years. He is in full control. Giving such excuses to him is unacceptable. They are like the Mafia.”

As battles raged across Syria, Asma kept spending on designer baubles from London, according to the emails.

For ordinary Syrians, Asma al-Assad is now a hate figure.

“They have stolen Syrian money. She is squandering it here in London,” said Fawaz, a man who came to an opposition fund-raising event in London wrapped in a Syrian flag.

“She and her father are accomplices to this crime. They learned nothing from the democracy here in the UK.” (Writing By Maria Golovnina Editing by Giles Elgood)

Source: The Huffington Post

Syrian Activist ‘Wants Change Without Disasters’ #Syria

Tim Marshall January 19, 2012 6:43 PM

Walking through a sunlit square in the old quarter of the port city of Tartus, Mahmoud Issa cut a lonely figure.

Mr Issa, once a lawyer, now unemployed, is an opposition activist in a regime stronghold. He has served three terms in prison totalling 12 years.

There were no checkpoints, no sandbagged army bunkers here.

No need, the ever present Mukhabarat, the secret police, are enough to keep this Mediterranean town under control, and besides, much of the population appear to back the government.

A recent opposition demonstration attracted about 200 people, a pro-government rally was attended by thousands.

Our government minders wanted to come with us to our interview with Mr Issa.

After a robust exchange of views they agreed not to come into the square.

The Mukhabarat would know soon enough who we had come to see, besides, our interview would be on television, but it was a matter of principle that we had the right to speak to someone without supervision.

Mr Issa arrived and we sat a small cafe, the weak sun only slightly relieving the bitter cold of a Syrian winter. There was no tea to be had, the cafe was closed for midday prayers at the mosque across the road.

Throughout our meeting Mr Issa glanced nervously about him.

It seemed to be force of habit. He knew someone in the square would tell the Mukhabarat that he had been talking to foreigners but he couldn’t help himself from periodically checking who was who and what was what.

Why, I asked him, was he risking talking to us. ‘Because I am an activist’ he replied. ‘this is what I do, this is what I believe. I want democracy, I want freedom, I want change, but without disasters’.

There was the regime’s trump card…. Change without disasters. President Assad promises reform, but tells the public that the current upheaval is the work of terrorists who risk plunging Syria into civil war.

Millions fear what might follow the violent overthrow of the President and his family.

Dissidents such as Mr Issa are trying to ensure that the protests do not degenerate into sectarian fighting. There are signs that the fractures are beginning to appear.

All Syrians know who is what religion, or ethnicity, by their names and or where they live. They also insist it does not matter and most become embarrassed if the subject comes up in conversation.

Most insist the uprising has nothing to do sectarianism. That was partially true when the protests first broke out last March, but a clear pattern has subsequently emerged.

The most vociferous protests are in majority Sunni neighbourhoods and cities, the calmest areas in the country are in the majority Allawite areas and it is no co-incidence that the ruling Assad family are Allawites.

Senior opposition activists are concerned that, because there has been so much killing, more and more protesters will arm themselves.

That is what has happened in Homs and there the battle ground is in Sunni districts.

Many Allawites and Christians, who lived in those districts, have gone to live with friends and relatives in predominately Allawi/Christian neighbourhoods. Suspicion is growing between the communities.

This is Mahmoud Issa’s greatest fear. Once the cement starts to crack, it is very, very difficult to put it back together.

Source: blogs.news.sky.com

Out of jail, lifelong dissident joins #Syria revolt

(AP)  AMMAN, Jordan — One of Syria’s most prominent dissidents, who worked for years against the Assad family regime, stepped out of prison two months ago to discover that his country was aflame with the revolution he long hoped for.

Jailed since 2005, Kamal al-Labwani had heard hints about what was happening on the outside the past year from visitors and even from guards. But prison authorities kept him and other prisoners under an information blackout — no newspapers or TV news over the past 10 months when hundreds of thousands of Syrians were taking to the streets nearly daily despite a relentless and bloody crackdown, demanding President Bashar Assad’s ouster.

So he was stunned to see the full extent of the revolt when he was freed in November as part of an amnesty Assad’s regime ordered as a reform gesture.

“I am seeing my long-time dreams come true, even better. For years, I dreamt of revolution, change. I was astonished to see it all happening,” the 54-year-old al-Labwani told The Associated Press this week in the Jordanian capital Amman, his voice welling with emotion.

To a generation of opposition figures like al-Labwani, Syria’s popular uprising is a vindication for their years of largely stifled efforts against the authoritarian regime. For four decades, they struggled to find ways to raise a voice of dissent in one of the region’s most tightly controlled nations, where people were wary of criticizing their rulers even in personal conversations. Now that regime is facing its strongest challenge ever, lashing back with a crackdown that the United Nations estimates has left more than 5,000 dead.

The older generation of dissidents is trying to help the movement. Weeks after his release, al-Labwani slipped into neighboring Jordan, smuggled across the border in a nighttime escape, to join exiles helping organize activists inside Syria and garner them international support.

“Time is blood now, not money. It means more victims, torture and destruction of our country. We have to move very fast,” he told a cheering anti-Assad rally in Amman last weekWith his salt-and-pepper hair and dignified grey suit, al-Labwani — a trained doctor — stood out in the crowd of mostly young protesters, many in hooded sweat shirts or the robes of religious conservatives.

He has been using his international prominence to lobby governments to act. He said his ideal would be for a no-fly zone to be imposed to create a “safe zone” inside Syria where people can flee to, but he doesn’t think that’s likely, given the West’s deep reluctance over any military action over Syria.

The alternative would be international backing for the Free Syrian Army, a group of army defectors who sided with the protesters and have carried out attacks on regime forces.

“So far, the international community hasn’t done its job to help protect civilians in Syria,” he said. “So we will need to try to do this ourselves by supporting the Free Army and revolutionaries. We may have to resort to arms to protect our civilians.”

Al-Labwani first participated in street demonstrations as a 6-year-old, when he joined classmates at protests against the Baathist military takeover of Syria. At university, he joined the banned opposition Shaab, or People’s, Party, going into hiding for months to elude arrest.

He was a military doctor in Hama during the 1982 assault on the city to crush the opposition Muslim Brotherhood. Thousands were killed in the crackdown. Al-Labwani says he and other doctors were allowed only to treat soldiers, not residents — and the experience convinced him the Assad regime had to end.

“I saw the city bombed, attacked, people killed,” he said. “I felt terrible because I could not do anything to help the people at this time. That’s why I insist I must help them now.”

He came to prominence during the Damascus Spring in 2000, when Bashar Assad ascended to power after the death of his father, longtime strongman Hafez Assad. The succession brought a loosening of restrictions, and there was a flourishing of unusually open forums by activists and intellectuals discussing change.

But the short-lived opening ended with a 2001 crackdown. Al-Labwani was among those arrested, thrown into solitary confinement for three years.

Soon after his release, he became the first human rights defender from inside Syria invited by the White House to discuss the case for Syrian democracy, in 2005. After visiting the U.S., Britain and Europe, he was arrested at Damascus airport and sentenced to 12 years in prison, the harshest sentence against a prominent dissident since Bashar took power.

“My crime was contact with the U.S. government,” he joked. “I demanded democracy and human rights. The regime regarded this as an attack, because human rights will destroy it.”

The amnesty cut his sentence in half, leading to his release in November. But he was warned he would be jailed again if he carried out any political activity. He says he decided the only way to help in the uprising was to work from exile.

His wife, son and two daughters crossed legally into Jordan. But al-Labwani had no passport and was banned from travel. Activists moved him secretly to Daraa, the town where the uprising first erupted early last year, near the Jordanian border. He moved from house to house for days until one December night he was taken by motorbike through the hills to the border. Under cover of darkness, he made the half-hour walk on foot across no-man’s land to the Jordanian side.

He has since joined the Syrian National Council, one of the main opposition umbrella groups to emerge as the uprising’s leadership. Some 3,000 Syrians have fled into Jordan since the protests began in March, and thousands more have escaped into Turkey and Lebanon, forming networks of opposition activists to try to organize the movement.

So far, the Free Syrian Army has remained relatively small, with the military largely staying loyal to Assad. But al-Labwani claims more soldiers are contacting the opposition for help to defect. If massive defections take place, he said, it could take three to six months to win the battle on the ground.

From Jordan, he has been in communication with organizers inside Syria via email, Skype and telephone.

He said he was in “minute by minute” contact with on activists in his hometown of Zabadani, a mountain town 17 miles (27 kilometers) west of Damascus, during a fierce assault by government forces the past six days, with heavy bombardment and clashes with army defectors. On Wednesday, government forces pulled back, leaving the opposition in control of the town.

In the unprecedented protests the past year, he sees hope for a post-Assad Syria.

“Peaceful protests are the foundation of our revolution,” he said. “It’s from these protests that we are building our membership base and new institutions that belong to the people, not the regime.”

Source: cbsnews.com

For Syria’s Dissidents, Even Exile Isn’t Safe #Syria

ENLARGE PHOTO+

In this undated family photo, Mona Ghorayib, left, poses with her son in Alexandria, Egypt. Ghorayib, wife of an exiled Syrian dissident, said Syrian men kidnapped and held her captive for 30 hours in November

Courtesy Thaer al-Nashef / AP
On Friday, Nov. 25, Mona Ghorayib woke up on a metal bed in a tiny room that she didn’t recognize. Someone had boarded up the only window, and a fan was switched on at full blast despite the fact that it was cold outside. Ghorayib tried to sit up, but she felt dizzy and couldn’t see straight.

The last thing she remembered doing was walking into the lobby of her parents’ apartment building in downtown Cairo and hearing her phone ring from her purse. “I opened my purse to take out the phone, and I could feel someone coming up behind me on the right,” she says. “I moved to the left to let him pass, but I felt someone else on my left.” Her attackers sprayed a chemical in her face and she lost consciousness.(See photos of protests in Syria.)

Ghorayib had no idea where she was taken. The only sound outside was the rhythmic croaking of frogs, suggesting that she was no longer in the noisy Egyptian capital. But when she heard the Syrian accents in the hallway, she knew exactly why she was there. “The only thing I could hear was one asking the other: ‘Is she Thaer’s wife?’ And the other said, ‘Yes.’”

Ghorayib’s husband, Thaer al-Nashef, is a prominent Syrian journalist and dissident — and one of the Syrian regime’s most vocal critics in exile. Ever since he fled Damascus in 2005, al-Nashef and his family have dealt with threats and harassment via phone and e-mail — including a few recent messages that warned Ghorayib that her husband was a spy and adulterer. But after the Syrian uprising began in March, and al-Nashef began documenting the ongoing massacres and abuses, the harassment took a turn for the worse. “They started to threaten me, saying they would kidnap my wife and kill her, and then kill me. And the messages got much more frequent,” al-Nashef says. “Before the revolution, their messages were always in reaction to my articles. Since the revolution, it’s become completely random.”

Navi Pillay , the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Monday that more than 5,000 people have been killed so far amid Syria’s worsening violence. Meanwhile tens of thousands of refugees and activists have fled the country. The ones with connections and money head to Europe or North America; many more have arrived by the thousands at refugee camps in Lebanon and Turkey. Others have ended up in Egypt, Jordan and Libya. But just as the regime of President Bashir Assad has stepped up its crackdown on opponents at home, so too does it appear to be escalating its campaign against critics abroad, particularly in nearby countries.(Read more about the regime in Syria.)

On Sunday night, Syrian activist Rami Jarrah was detained by the Qatari authorities when he landed at Doha International Airport. “Im not told why, im just told that im not allowed entry,” Jarrah tweeted under his pseudonym, Alexander Page. “i said ok ill go back, he said ‘you are #Syria’n then thats where you go.’” Jarrah, who was arrested and tortured for his participation in antigovernment protests before fleeing Syria, believes that had he been deported he most certainly would have been killed. (The Qataris ultimately allowed him to enter the country.) A week before he was detained, Jarrah told TIME that several men with Syrian accents had chased him through the streets of downtown Cairo several days earlier. A week before that, the shopkeeper below his building reported that Syrian men had come looking for him, asking what apartment he lived in and if he was at home. “No Syrians would know where I live,” says Jarrah, who is certain that his visitors were sent by the Syrian government. For two months, he has been receiving threatening phone calls. “They’re mainly at six in the morning,” he says. “That seems to be some sort of strategy, cause that’s when they can really scare you. We wake up to these phone calls saying ‘Assad owns you. Assad is the king.’ Stuff like that. It’s always a Syrian voice.”

Another recent escapee, Tareq Sharabi, was talking on his cell phone in the lobby of a Cairo hotel last week when two large men grabbed him from behind and dragged him across the floor. Sharabi instantly flashed back to the protests in Damascus where he had seen friends and colleagues drop like flies, shot down by government death squads popularly known as shibih — literally, ghosts. The men were muscled, with cropped hair, he says. “It was the same guys we used to see in the demonstrations in Syria. And when he grabbed me and said, ‘Are you with us or not?’ I felt like I was right back in Syria.” Sharabi’s friend, another Syrian, quickly pulled him back and the two ran out of the hotel. The men chased them for several blocks before giving up.

See the top 10 world news stories of 2011.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2102131,00.html#ixzz1gQhBdvHY

Source: TIME