The Guardian marks ten years of Bashar al-Assad's regime
16 July 2010
This weekend sees the 10 year anniversary of Bashar al-Assad coming to power in Syria, succeeding his father Hafez. To mark a decade of his rule, Human Rights Watch published ‘A Wasted Decade’, a report focusing on the lack of improvement in Syria’s poor human rights record. The Guardian’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, covered the report in ‘Syrian human rights record unchanged under Assad, report says’, an article that detailed Syria’s multiple violations of its citizens' rights, from arbitrary arrests, to the striking absence of freedom of speech.
However, there was a marked difference in tone and content between this article, and Ian Black’s comment piece on the same topic from Wednesday. ‘Syria is yet to play its cards’ was notably uncritical of the regime and played down Assad’s dictatorial credentials, preferring instead to concentrate on superficial signs of progress.
From the outset, ‘Syria is yet to play its cards’ sought to draw a contrast between the rule of Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad. Yet the article does not clarify exactly what the distinction is between the two leaders, and barely discusses their respective human rights records. Arguing that Bashar is ‘less enigmatic’ than his father, Black limits his account of Hafez to noting that his nickname was ‘the sphinx of Damascus’, and to describing him as ‘a hard act to follow in a famously tough neighbourhood’. The approving tone of this brief assessment is interesting given that Hafez is perhaps best known for the overseeing the massacre at Hama, where for 4 weeks the Syrian army bombarded the town, resulting in, according to Amnesty International, between 10,000 and 25,000 deaths.
Black portrays Syria as having progressed under its current leader, stating that he has ‘gone a fair way in modernising the country after years of isolation.’ However, it soon becomes clear that ‘modernisation’ in the context of Syria refers solely to economic and financial improvements, rather than liberalisation and democratisation.
Black notes that Syria ‘teems nowadays with western tourists who can enjoy boutique hotels in Damascus’, which also now hosts a stock exchange (a ‘far cry from the austerity of the Ba'athist era’). He then mentions that the president’s wife is ‘resolutely secular’, and ‘fits photogenically into the picture of a modern republican dynasty and works to promote civil society organisations.’
He then proceeds to discuss Bashar’s foreign policy, stating that he is ‘a proud nationalist, supporter of the Palestinians and desperately wants – but has so far failed – to achieve a rapprochement with the United States’, before discussing Syria’s relations with Israel, Iran, and Lebanon.
It is not until the final three paragraphs that the issue of civil liberties is raised. It is noticeable that, rather than focusing on the oppressive nature of Syria’s police-state apparatus, Black presents the situation in as positive a manner as possible. For example, while stating that after Bashar al-Assad came to power, the ‘instinct to repress was stronger than the pressure to liberalise’, the article highlights that ‘Syrians like to point to progress: al-Watan has the distinction of being the country's only privately owned newspaper [which] prides itself on being more critical than the turgid state media.’
The description of the state media as ‘turgid’ suggests a lack of creativity on their part, rather than that freedom of speech and media is strictly regulated in Syria – or as Black euphemistically states, ‘Syria's ministry of information is a hangover from a more strictly controlled era.’ What isn’t explained is that this ‘hangover’ means that, according to the Syrian Human Rights Committee, journalists are frequently jailed and internet usage is carefully monitored, with many websites banned and internet cafes required to keep lists of their customers details. Reporters without Borders places the country 165th on its Index of Press Freedom, meaning that, in its view, not only does Syria have one of the least free media environments in the world, but that it has also got worse during Assad’s reign - in 2002, it was ranked 126th.
The only other mention of the imperfect situation in Syria was in the final paragraph, which contained a single perfunctory reference to the fact that ‘[r]epression has returned with the usual suspects such as lawyers and human rights activists gaoled under emergency laws at the price of pro forma protests from the US and EU.’ Again, given the comprehensive control of security forces in Syria, it’s noteworthy that an appraisal of a decade of Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian rule would only include a single reference to this, in the last paragraph.
Given the wealth of material highlighting human rights abuses in Syria, it is noteworthy that The Guardian’s Middle East editor did not focus his opinion piece on this subject, instead offering examples of how superficial progress had been made.