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in 1966, a position he cleverly exploited after Syria’s defeat by Israel
in the Six-Day War of 1967, after which it was alleged that the
regime had had secret dealings with the Jewish state. A “palace coup”
inside the leadership brought Assad to power as president in 1970.
Thereafter the power of the state was firmly concentrated in Alawi
hands. Of the officers commanding the 47th Syrian Tank Brigade,
which was responsible for suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood’s
rebellion in the city of Hama in 1982 at a cost of some 20,000 lives,
70 percent are reported to have been Alawis. When Hafez al-Assad
died in June 2000, the constitutional niceties were rapidly dispensed
with to ensure the succession of his son Bashar, who had studied
ophthalmology in England. Fearful that Hafez’s exiled younger
brother Rifaat al-Assad, who had commanded the Hama operation,
would try to take over, a hastily convened session of the People’s
Assembly voted to lower the minimum age for a president from forty
to thirty-four, the exact age of Bashar al-Assad.
In the welter of violence now accompanying the regime’s determined
efforts to suppress the demonstrations, its achievements should not be
forgotten or ignored. While its massacre in Hama was horrendous and
it has an abysmal record on human rights, engaging in torture and
severe political repression, it had a good, even excellent one when it
came to protecting the pluralism of the religious culture that is one of
Syria’s most enduring and attractive qualities. Some of these virtues
are captured in Brooke Allen’s engaging account of her travels in
Syria, The Other Side of the Mirror, where she meets ordinary people
from different backgrounds and rejoices in the natural friendliness of
Syria’s people and the extraordinary richness of its past. Instead of
the Soviet-style grayness she expected to find from accounts in the
US media, she discovers a sophisticated cosmopolitan society where
life is being lived in many different styles and varieties, “totally
unselfconsciously, just as it has been for thousands of years.”
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