Amman: The most senior politician to defect from the Bashar Al Assad regime has revealed that the president repeatedly rejected calls by his own government for a political compromise, in favour of all-out war.
Riad Hijab, the former prime minister, said that he and other senior regime figures pleaded with Al Assad to negotiate with the Syrian opposition.
One week before his defection, Hijab, the vice-president, the parliamentary speaker and the deputy head of the Baath party together held a private meeting with Al Assad. “We told Bashar he needed to find a political solution to the crisis,” he said. “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.”
Hijab referred to the war waged against the Muslim Brotherhood by Al Assad’s father, Hafez, which led to the deaths of up to 10,000 people in an assault on the city of Hama. “Bashar really thinks that he can settle this militarily,” he said. “He is trying to replicate his father’s fight in the 1980s.” Hijab was speaking as key anti-regime figures gathered in the Qatari capital Doha to replace the fractured opposition Syrian National Council with a new government-in-exile. Once formed, the new council would seek to gain formal international recognition, and better weapons.
Hijab said the lack of serious action by the West had consolidated President Al Assad’s confidence. “Bashar used to be scared of the international community — he was really worried that they would impose a no-fly zone over Syria,” he said. “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.” Al Assad’s acceptance of ceasefire proposals by the United Nations envoys Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi was “just a manoeuvre to buy time for more killings”, he said.
In a speech to his cabinet Al Assad extolled only the dictums of warfare, Hijab said. It was as he watched his leader speak — coldly and gripped by the conviction that only military force would crush his enemies, he said that Hijab knew he had no choice but to break away. “My brief was to lead a national reconciliation government,” Hijab said. “But in our first meeting Bashar made it clear that this was a cover.”
The explosion at the Damascus national security building that killed the country’s defence minister and the president’s brother-in-law marked a turning point, Hijab said. “The new minister of defence sent out a communique telling all heads in the military that they should do ‘whatever is necessary’ to win,” he said.
In recent months the government has become redundant, Hijab said. Real power is concentrated in the hands of a clique comprising Al Assad, his security chiefs, relatives and friends. Certain he had lost all influence, and watching the smoke rising from his home town of Deir Al Zour near the Iraqi-Syrian border after another wave of air strikes, Hijab plotted his escape: “A brother spoke with one of the Free Syrian Army brigades in Damascus,” he said.
Since then, the violence has worsened and new fronts have opened across the country.
On Sunday a bomb exploded in the centre of Damascus, wounding 11 civilians, state television and activists reported. Rebels also claimed to have seized an oilfield near Deir AZour, while fighting continued around army and air force bases west of Aleppo which the regime have used to strike rebel-held areas. Hijab said the violence would continue and the regime would stay in power for as long as Russia and Iran continued to provide support. But even if they cut their allegiance, he said Al Assad would probably still refuse to quit. “I am shocked to see Bashar do what he has doing,” he said. “He used to seem like a good human being, but he is worse than his father. “Hafez is a criminal for what he did in Hama, but Bashar is a criminal for what he is doing everywhere.”
