generalspeaking

Syria's Gracious First Lady

Asma Al-Assad, Syria's First Lady, addressing the 6th Harvard Arab Alumni Conference, Damascus, March 17, 2011."

This is an elegant, graceful and highly intelligent woman. Known and admired, however, more for her natural beauty than for her highly westernized experience and outlook on life. A Syrian Sunni whose physician-father gave her every opportunity to advance herself as an example of what women can aspire to when they live in the West. She accomplished greatly for herself in the London world of finance with her exquisite and well-honed presence.

And then her personal-social coup, in attracting the notice of a dynastic ruler who would place her beside him on the throne of rule. She turned her attention to bearing children and to bearing testimony that her country, Syria, was capable, through her ministrations of great charity work and humanitarian efforts of being an exemplary country. She would, through her influence with her husband, turn the country's closed political system into an open democracy.

And her work on behalf of the betterment of her society, speaking as an enlightened westerner, drew the admiration and attention of the celebrity circuit which proclaimed her a new princess. Pleasing her no doubt, greatly, as it must have done her husband, Bashar al-Assad. But situations change, and a mass protest occurred, when the Syrians of Sunni persuasion, her people, revolted and demanded equality from her Shia-dynasty husband.

The "freshest and most magnetic of first ladies", loyal to her husband and his rule, took no notice of the UN's hand-wringing claims of over five thousand civilians killed by her husband's Alawite regime, accepting his declaration that 'terrorists' and 'foreign interests' were attempting to subvert his authority and destabilize his country. There she was, front and centre with two of their children, rallying to his defence. The very picture of loving beauty and enlightenment.

Asma Al-Assad along with Karim and Zein Al-Assad, her two children, participating the Syrians in their march of solidarity with President Al-Assad against the conspiracy, January 11, 2012."

Highly reminiscent, in fact of other, recent events in the Arab world. The Arab Spring which awoke the possibility of changes to bring aspirational opportunities of full citizenship and freedom of expression to the Arab world came earlier to Libya when that country witnessed an arousal of Libyans yearning for freedom from oppression. Moammar Gadhafi had a son who represented the finer expressions of humility and humanity that he found in himself so difficult to express.

Saif Al-Islam went out into the Western world where his urbane worldliness and obvious understanding of the need for governments to fairly and justly represent the needs of their people with institutions that fulfilled their fundamental requirements, demonstrated his intentions to bring order and good government and fair play to Libya. He would be his father's successor; not entirely democratic, but a start in the right direction.

He would be responsible for alerting and persuading his long-ruled father that it was time Libya loosed the reigns of tyranny, became a respected world citizen no longer fomenting acts of sabotage in other countries, of encouraging terrorism to achieve his ends. Saif Al-Islam had one foot firmly planted in the East, the other in the West, and his interlocutorship would be transitional to peaceful interaction and eventual modernity.

And then, when his father cracked down on the pestiferous, invidious dissidents that were making life so difficult for loyal Libyans and the inner circle of the administration, sending his military, his tanks and his warplanes and attack helicopters to deliver his message of protest rejection, Saif Al-Islam became his father's son, unequivocally. The terrorists and Islamists and foreign elements that threatened Libya must be destroyed. And he would aid in their destruction.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi is pictured sitting in a plane in Zintan November 19, 2011 Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was captured in southern Libya in November

Labels: Libya, Middle East, Political Realities, Syria

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, January 15, 2012