Hafez al-Assad

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Hafez al-Assad (October 6, 1930 - June 10, 2000) was the President of Syria from 1971 to 2000.

Contents

Early life

Assad was born in Qardaha in western Syria as part of the minority Alawite community. He was the first member of his family to attend High School and finished top of his class. Because his family had no money to send him to university Assad went to the Syrian Military Academy and received a free higher education. He showed real talent, so the military sent him to be trained in the Soviet military. He joined the Ba'ath party in 1946 at the age of 16. He rose through the ranks of the military and became an important figure. Assad opposed the creation of the United Arab Republic and despite being stationed in Cairo worked with other officers to end the union between Syria and Egypt.

The union collapsed in 1961. In the chaos that followed the dissolution, a coalition of left-wing groups led by the Ba'th seized power. Assad was appointed head of the airforce in 1964. The state was officially ruled by Amin al-Hafiz, a Sunni Muslim, but through the Ba'th, it was effectively dominated by a coterie of young Alawites, a religious minority in Syria to which Assad belonged.

Rise to power

In 1966 the Ba'th lanched an coup d'etat within the regime and cleared out the other parties from government. Assad became Minister of Defence, and was considered a strongman of the new government. However, there was considerable tension between the radical wing of the Ba'th, which promoted an aggressive foreign policy and radical social reform, and a more pragmatic faction, based in the military and headed by al-Assad. After being discredited by the failure of the Syrian military in the Six-Day War in 1967, and enraged by the aborted Syrian intervention in the Jordanian-Palestinian Black September war, al-Assad launched an intra-party coup (The Corrective Revolution), purging the party and installing himself as ruler of Syria in 1970.

Assad ruled Syria through the power of the army. He did achieve some popularity because of social reforms and infrastructure projects, a vast increase in Syria's military power and Arab nationalist stances, but was mistrusted by the population for his secularism and his Alawite roots. This was dealt with by setting up a police state, that soon became the prime instrument of his rule, coupled with a state-sponsored cult of personality. A shrewd power player, al-Assad would use diplomacy, terrorism and tank armadas to the same effect: invariably, he strived to build a strong Syria under his own one-man rule.

Internal policies

The most brutal act of Assad's reign took place in 1982. The Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist movement with branches in most Muslim countries, staged a series of bomb attacks and assassinations against the government and its officials throughout 1980 and 1981, culminating in an insurrection in the town of Hama in February 1982 in which Ba'ath party members and Alawites were killed. In response Hafez sent his brother Rifaat al-Assad's special forces and Mukhabarat agents to the city. After encountering resistance, they used artillery to blast Hama into submission, and then began torturing and executing large numbers of citizens in what became known as the Hama massacre. Robert Fisk, who was in Hama shortly after the massacre, estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 citizens were killed. Much of the old city was destroyed, including its palaces, mosques, ancient ruins and Beit Azem museum. According to Thomas Friedman Rifaat later boasted of killing 38,000 people. After the Hama uprising, government repression in Syria hardened considerably.

In 1983, Hafez suffered a heart attack and was confined to a hospital. He named a six-man governing council to run the country in his abscence, among them long-time defense minister Mustafa Tlass. Curiously, all of the six were Sunnis, possibly because that meant they had no independent power over his Alawite-dominated government, and was thus less likely to try to keep power. Despite this, rumours spread that Hafez was dead or near death, and indeed his condition was very serious. In 1984 Hafez's brother Rifaat attempted to use internal security forces under his control to seize power. Rifaats Defence Company troops of some 50,000 men, complete with tanks and helicopters, began putting up roadblocks throughout Damascus, and tensions between Hafez loyalists and Rifaat supporters came close to all-out fighting. The stand-off was not ended until Hafez rose from his sickbed to reassume power and spoke to the nation. He then transferred command of the Defence Company to another officer, and without formally accusing him of anything, sent Rifaat on an indefinite "work visit" to France.

During the 1980s Tadmor Prison in Palmyra] held thousands of people who were arrested arbitrarily, subjected to long-term detention and summary justice in the form of military trials. Torture and execution were routine. [1]

Foreign policy

Israel

Al-Assad's foreign policy was shaped by the relation of Syria to Israel, although this conflict both preceded him and persists after his death. During his presidency, Syria played a major role in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The war is, despite heavy losses and Israeli advances, presented by the Syrian government as a victory, as Syria regained some territory that had been occupied in 1967 through peace negotiations, headed by Henry Kissinger. Since then Assad-led Syria has carefully respected the UN-monitored cease-fire line in the occupied Golan Heights, instead using non-Syrian clients such as the Hizbullah and various Palestinian extremist groups to exert pressure on Israel. Syria denied Israel any recognition, and long preferred to refer to it as a "Zionist Entity". Only in the mid-1990s did Hafez moderate his country's policy towards Israel, as he realized the loss of Soviet support meant a different regional power balance. Pressed by the USA, he engaged in negotiations on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, but these talks ultimately failed.

The Palestinians

The hostile attitude to Israel meant vocal support for the Palestinians, but that did not translate into friendly relations with their organizations. Hafez al-Assad were always wary of independent Palestinian organizations, as he aimed to bring the Palestinian issue under Syrian control in order to use it as a political tool. He soon developed an implacable animosity to Yassir Arafats Palestinian Liberation Organization, with which Syria fought bloody battles in Lebanon.

As Arafat moved the PLO in a more moderate direction, seeking compromise with Israel, al-Assad also feared regional isolation, and he resented the PLO underground's operations in Palestinian refugee camps in Syria. Arafat was depicted by Syria as a rogue madman and an American marionette, and after accusing him of supporting the Hama revolt, al-Assad backed the 1983 Abu Musa rebellion inside Arafats Fatah-movement. A number of Syrian attempts to kill Arafat were also made, but with no success. In 1999, Al-Assad had his right-hand man, the trusted defence minister Mustafa Tlass, make an on-the-record statement labelling Arafat "the son of 60,000 whores and 60,000 dogs", in addition to comparing him to a strip-tease dancer and a black cat, calling him a coward and, finally, pointing out that the Palestinian leader was getting uglier.

An effective strategy was undermining Arafat through support for radical groups both outside and inside the PLO. This way, Syria secured some influence over PLO politics, and was also able to literally blow up any attempts at negotiation with the US and Israel through pushing for terrorist attacks. The PLO's As-Sa'iqa faction was and is completely controlled by Syria, and under Hafez, groups such as the PFLP-GC and others were also turned into clients. In later years, Syria focused on supporting non-PLO Islamist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Lebanon

Syria also deployed troops, ostensibly as a peacekeeping force, to Lebanon in 1976, in another of al-Assads major foreign policy decisions. There it warred throughout the Lebanese Civil War to counter Israeli pressure in south Lebanon and secure Syrian primacy, and eventually turned into an occupation army. In 1991 the Syrians crushed the last factions resisting their rule, after having struck an under-the-table deal with the US government, in exchange for participating in the Gulf war. On US recommendations, Israel withdrew its air cover for the Lebanese military government of Michel Aoun, and after a ravaging air bombardment, Syrian forces poured into Beirut and the presidential palace. Al-Assad promptly set about writing treaties of "cooperation and friendship" with a puppet Lebanese government, which secured his Syria's indefinite domination of the country.

As a sort of provincial governor of Lebanon, al-Assad installed security strongman Ghazi Kanaan, who ruled from the Beqaa valley. From its bases in the Beqaa, Syria armed and used Palestinian and, most importantly, the Shia muslim Hizbullah guerilla as proxies in its war against Israel's occupation of south Lebanon. In 2000, Israel withdrew, and Syria then extended its control to the border, using Hizbullah. This de facto-occupation of Lebanon would not end until 2005, in the wake of the Hariri murder.

Saddam's Iraq

Despite the fact that Iraq was ruled by another branch of the Ba'th party, al-Assad's relations to to the Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein were extremely strained. Hostile rhetoric was intense, and Iraq was until Saddam's fall in 2003 listed in Syrian passports as one of the two countries no Syrian citizen could visit (the other being Israel). But with the exception of a few border guard skirmishes, and mutual support for cross-border raids by opposition groups, no heavy fighting broke out until 1991, when Syria joined the US-led United Nations coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait.

Death and succession

Assad ruled the country until his death in 2000 due to a heart attack while speaking on the telephone with Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. Hafez had originally groomed his son, Basil al-Assad as successor, but Basil died in a car accident in 1994. Hafez then called back a second son, Bashar al-Assad, and put him in intensive military and political training. Despite some concerns of unrest within the regime, the succession ultimately went smoothly, and Bashar rules Syria today. Hafez al-Assad is buried together with Basil in a mausoleum in his hometown, Qardaha.


References

  • Fisk, Robert (2001, 3rd edition). Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192801309 (pp. 181-187)
  • Friedman, Thomas (1990, British edition). From Beirut to Jerusalem. HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0006530702 (pp. 76-105)
  • Human Rights Watch (1996). Syria's Tadmor Prison. HRW Report, Vol. 8, No. 2.

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Preceded by:
Nureddin al-Atassi
Prime Minister of Syria
1970–1971
Succeeded by:
Abdul Rahman Khleifawi
Preceded by:
Ahmed Khatib
(Head of State)
President of Syria
1971–2000
Succeeded by:
Abdul-Halim Khaddam
(Acting)

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