Replicating His Father
"Bashar used to be scared of the international community - he was really worried that they would impose a no-fly zone over Syria. But then he tested the waters, and pushed and pushed and nothing happened. Now he can run air strikes and drop cluster bombs on his own population.Mr. Hijab as vice-president of Syria, had been present along with the parliamentary speaker and the deputy head of the Ba'ath party who all saw the writing on the wall back in the summer and held a private meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Weren't they fortunate it didn't end up like the meeting of the Syrian security elite, bombed to smithereens?
We told Bashar he needed to find a political solution to the crisis. We said, 'These are our people that we are killing.
"We suggested that we work with the Friends of Syria group, but he refused to stop the operations or to negotiate."
Riyad Hijab, former Syrian prime minister
These three elite Syrian politicians did their utmost to persuade their president that to prevent further bloodshed it seemed an imperative to make a serious attempt to reach a solution to the political impasse they were marooned within. But they were soon disabused of the quaint notion that Bashar al-Assad would lower himself to parley with his regime's militant opposition.
"Bashar really thinks that he can settle this militarily. He is trying to replicate his father's fight in the 1980s", explained Mr. Hijab,making reference to the previous president's determination to destroy the opposition to his Alawite reign mounted by the Sunni Muslim Brotherood faction within Syria. In which conflict ten thousand Syrians are said to have been killed.
Clearly, Bashar al-Assad has managed to outdistance his father's record. It is claimed by various sources that between 30,000 and 35,000 people have been killed thus far in the year-and-a-half uprising of majority Sunni Syrians who had begun their protest peacefully, asking for consideration for equality with the minority-ruling Shia.
As for his former president's pledges to the two UN envoys, Kofi Annan and his successor Lakhdar Brahimi, he played them for time. Not for nothing is Syria a close ally of Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran has perfected the strategic ploy of playing for time, in dealing with the UN International Atomic Energy Agency and the EU's Catherine Ashton's attempted interventions on the country's nuclear file.
Bashar al-Assad's former prime minister (a largely ceremonial position, as a sop to a Sunni majority) realized finally that the president had no intention of formalizing and recognizing his pledge to honour ceasefire proposals, that they were "just a manoeuvre to buy time for more killings".
"My brief was to lead a national reconciliation government. But in our first meeting Bashar made it clear that this was a cover", revealed former prime minister Riyad Hijab. And that realization prompted him to finally abandon the regime and flee for safety with his family to Jordan. That was away back in August.
He still has to live with the reality that he, as a token Sunni Syrian, gave the regime some measure of credibility and legitimacy within the majority Sunni Syrian population which lived in reluctant civil inequality thrall to the Ba'ath regime of the Alawite Shia minority.
Labels: Chaos, Conflict, Corruption, Crime, Middle East, Political Realities, Societal Failures, Syria
posted by Pieface @ Monday, November 05, 2012
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