Toppled president came to power keen to show he was different from his father but proved to be as repressive. O n the face of it at least, the Bashar al-Assad of presented a starkly different figure from the brutal autocrat he would become, presiding over a fragile state founded on torture, imprisonment and industrial murder. He had been president then for just two years, succeeding his father, Hafez, whose own name was a byword for brutality.
For a while the gawky former ophthalmologist, who had studied medicine in London and later married a British-Syrian wife, Asma, an investment banker at JP Morgan, was keen to show the world that Syria , under his leadership, could follow a different path.
Reaching out to the west, he pursued a public relations campaign to show the young Assad family as somehow ordinary despite the palaces and the ever visible apparatus of repression. Suggesting some uncertainty, he was curious about how Syria was seen in the world, floating possibilities for a change, including a reset in the relationship between Damascus and Israel.
More manicured. Certainly more PR-savvy. A dictatorship all the same. Twenty-two years later Bashar is gone, swept out of power by an offshoot of al-Qaida. And with the dramatic ending of the half-century of Assad rule, a key section of the map of the Middle East has been utterly redrawn.
A dictator he would become. While Bashar released a number of political prisoners in β mainly communists β in a presidential amnesty as part of his campaign to demonstrate to the west that Syria was changing, it was always window dressing.
