Global community uncertain about tackling upheaval

Damascus: Now that Bashar Al Assad is crushing opposition with terrible brutality, no one in the West knows how to deal with him. The Observer's encounter with Syria's president, Bashar Al Assad, was an oddly informal one in a country deeply suspicious of the foreign media. An interview with his British-born wife, Asma, had been arranged, but as it ended, an aide to the president invited me to coffee with Al Assad himself.

Sitting somewhat awkwardly on the vast plush sofas of his reception room in the "official palace" a place, he explained, where he did not actually live he asked as many questions as he answered. In a conversational tone, Al Assad said he wanted peace with Israel, talked about reform, discussed relations with the US, and reflected on his father's harsh line on Islamists.

Image

Al Assad and his wife have continued to promote assiduously an almost modest image, most recently in an interview given by Syria's first lady to a gushing Vogue magazine, which included pictures of Al Assad playing with his sons.

It is an image that served the London-trained ophthalmologist well, securing him a state visit to London at a time when the government of Tony Blair as well as other European governments thought he was a different proposition to his father Hafez Al Assad, who gained notoriety for ordering the deaths in 1982 of up to 20,000 in the town of Hama during a revolt by the Muslim Brotherhood.

But in the last few weeks that early image has seemed sharply at odds with the acts carried out in Al Assad's name in a murderous clampdown on those demonstrating against the regime, which has so far claimed more than 400 lives as Syrian towns have been put under siege, and an entire country locked down.

What is less clear now is who Al Assad really is and what he represents. Indeed, how powerful he really is. On Friday, when a "day of rage" was called to follow Friday prayers, this time endorsed by the banned Muslim Brotherhood, Al Assad had taken a leaf out of the book of deposed President Mubarak of Egypt and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, flooding the streets with armed security forces even as his opponents demonstrated in more than 50 locations.

Blame game

As it has cracked down, so the regime has blamed the violence on a farcically broad range of culprits: armed gangs, Lebanese legislators, Saudis, Palestinian extremists all with ominous overtones of the 1980s and Al Assad's father's most infamous massacre.

To underline the message of what might happen should the regime fall, state media and newly printed posters on the streets have pushed fears of chaos, especially of a sectarian nature.

In the coastal city of Latakia, gunmen believed to belong to the shabiha, an Alawite smuggling gang drawn from the extended Al Assad clan, have shot at Christian neighbourhoods with warnings of a Sunni takeover, before going to Alawite neighbourhoods and warning of Sunni revenge. (The minority Alawite sect, to which the Al Assads belong, is generally regarded as a branch of Shiite Islam.)

But if the tactics used by the regime appear largely identical to that used by Gaddafi, the response by the international community has been markedly different. On Friday, as the US moved to apply sanctions, Al Assad was noticeably absent from the list of targets, although it named his younger brother Maher as well as his cousin Atif Najib and the Iranian Al Quds forces which the US accuses of channelling riot equipment to the regime.

Noticeably absent too has been any threat of military action against a country which unlike Libya is seen as having a very well-equipped and trained army and powerful friends, not least Iran.

Officially, the opinion offered by analysts and diplomats in the last few days to explain this difference is that Syria matters in a way that Libya does not in regional and international affairs.

It is for that reason, perhaps, that Qatar, which led the charge against Libya, on Friday quietly absented itself from the UN Human Rights Council's deliberations on Syria.

For Al Assad, the survival of the police state founded by his father is a very personal affair which he has dressed up as a national necessity to "prevent" his country from slipping into civil war. For the wider region, how events will unfold in Syria is becoming equally pressing.

Gaddafi's regime in Libya has over the decades antagonised most in the Arab region.

Humiliating retreat

Syria, however, despite its poverty and waning importance as a leader in regional affairs not least since its humiliating retreat from Lebanon in 2005 remains a presence that has to be acknowledged.

It occupies a crucial location, bordering Iraq, Israel and Lebanon. And a Syria plunged into chaos, diplomats fear, would have profound consequences for all of those countries as well as for the Middle East peace process.

Damascus hosts the political bureau of Hamas, including its political leader Khalid Mesha'al, although reports emerged yesterday denied by Hamas that it is now planning to relocate. Indeed, some have argued that Hamas's peace deal with its Palestinian rival Fatah was prompted by the fear of losing Syria as a patron.

Al Assad has also allowed weapons to pass over Syria's borders for the rearming of Hezbollah after the 2006 war between that group and Israel.

Despite western efforts to prise it apart from its alliance with Iran, Syria remains close to Tehran. And while Syria played host to a large number of Iraqis fleeing violence, it also allowed passage for foreign fighters travelling to fight the US-led coalition in Iraq.

Joshua Landis of the Middle East Centre at the University of Oklahoma told the Christian Science Monitor last week that Syria epitomised the split nature of the region, describing it as "the cockpit of the Middle East".

"It's messy," says Jane Kinninmont, researcher at the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House. "What makes it different, I think, is the particular nature of the uncertainty over what might follow Bashar Al Assad's regime in Syria.

Opinion is split

Unlike Gaddafi, Syria has split international opinion as to the nature of both the regime under Bashar Al Assad and the character of Al Assad himself, with a significant minority still believing that, despite everything, he can be manoeuvred on to the course of genuine reform that he has spoken about but never delivered.

It is this that explains the absence of Al Assad himself from the newly-announced US sanctions against his state, explained officially as targeting those directly responsible for the violence.

It is a judgment predicated on one reading of Syria's dynamics that Bashar Al Assad is less powerful than other figures around him, including his brother Maher.

Others, however, believe that, far from being the weak link, Al Assad is as powerful as his father in a regime which is no longer truly Baathist but like Hosni Mubarak's was in Egypt one bound together by close and corrupt financial interest.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd