The New Yorker - ASSAD’S HAMA RULES, AGAIN
Until recently, there had been a sense, among the veteran Syria observers I have talked to, that Bashar was, if nothing else, more restrained than his father. Over the last month, though, the pace and strength of protest and crackdown has intensified. Protesters have been augmented by armed groups and more and more defecting soldiers, and the noose is tightening: gun battles on the outskirts of Aleppo; Damascus suburbs sprouting Free Syrian Army checkpoints. The capital is in eerie self-imposed lockdown: power cuts, closed schools, soldiers surrounding government buildings.
Over the past months, Bashar has seemed to nod to plans and pleas for dialogue by Turkey or the Arab League, but nothing has mitigated or abated the violence. He seems to have calculated that this is a fight for his survival. Today when I talked to Peter Harling he pointed out that the operation in Homs had been ordered not only on the anniversary of the Hama massacre but the day before the U.N. Security Council is due to vote on taking measures against Syria. “I think this just shows their frame of mind. They’re not thinking politically.” [Update: On Saturday, China and Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for Syria.]
The bands of regimist thugs, known as the Shabiha, after Alawite bandit smuggling gangs that operated in the seventies, have been drawn mostly from the Alawite population and are at the forefront of the crackdown on protests and opposition neighborhoods. It didn’t have to be this way. Plenty of Alawites were as fed up with Assad’s corrupt and oppressive regime as any other Syrian; many Alawite villages are poor and ignored. But his strategy of playing the sectarian card has, by now, and so much horror later, proved effective. He has effectively taken the Alawite population hostage to protect his family and his regime. “Something very deeply held is coming back to the surface,” Peter Harling told me.
I talked recently to Hafez’s brother Rifat al-Assad, once a right hand of the regime, who is widely blamed for overseeing the Hama massacre. Now in exile, he divides his time between a grand house on the Avenue Foch in Paris and a house in Mayfair in London. He has always denied being anywhere near Hama on February 3, 1982. I asked him, though, if he now condemned the action. Rifat looks very much like his brother, the same high trapezoid-shaped forehead and wispy hair combed over the top—although his is dyed dark brown. He demurred for a moment. “We couldn’t have succeeded without doing it,” he told me.
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