Postcard from Damascus

with  Chidi Amuta

Unlike in the last 24 years of his power and crushing majesty, Bashar al-Assad had a decision quickly made for him. The choice between flying out of  Hmeimim air base  in his super luxury presidential jet and a rugged military version of the Russian SU 35 duty jet was quickly made for him in the thick of darkness. The special squad of military intelligence officers detailed by Vladimir Putin and the elite squad of his own intelligence service to ferret  him out of Damascus had no time for protocol niceties. Their task was simple: fly Assad and his family safely out of Syria and into Moscow where the grounds had been prepared for his life in exile. Roughly three hours of flight into uncertainty.

With his evacuation from the Presidential fortress in Damascus, Assad’s two and half decades of tyranny over Syria was over, thus ending over fifty years draconian dominion of the Assad dynasty over Syria.  This was an exile long and well prepared for. In spite of the elaborate arrangements laid out by Putin  for his unexpected guests, the Assad family had made serious arrangements for this eventuality.

With an estimated loot of over $2 billion tucked away in Russian and other banks, the Assad family owns a series of super luxury apartments worth over $40 million located in Moscow’s eight tallest apartment block. It is of course unlikely that the Assad clan would quarter in these luxury abodes in the immediate. For security and diplomatic reasons, they are more likely  to be housed in specially provided dachas made available by their ubiquitous host with all VIP security protection arrangements.

Russia’s pretension as an honest broke had collapsed. It has sustained its patronage of Assad under the guise that it could get Assad to give up its chemical weapons arsenal and neutralize elements of ISIS in Syria. All that did not happen. In the wake of the Assad overthrow, Russia has played up a narrative that it encouraged Assad to surrender to a peaceful transfer of power. That, too, is a bogus lie concocted in case Syria becomes ungovernable, necessitating an Assad return.

Back in Damascus, a virtual street carnival  and mob sight-seeing has gone on for over a week and half. The mob is out on a tour of the places that up until last week were hallowed ground of a despicable   and dreaded tyrant. Fear is gone with the tyrant and left in  its place the dread of uncertain freedom. Common folk have gone sight-seeing and treasure- hunting in Assad’s palace. Common people are looting treasured art pieces, venturing into presidential bedrooms, savoring the remnant aroma from what used to be the presidential cuisine with alluring menus on wall display. On the streets, irate mobs have torn down huge posters and billboards of the fallen dictator.  Poor people and plain street urchins are trampling on Assad posters and even urinating on them!

More tellingly, the Assad prison cells have been thrown open. People who have been in detention for decades are being released for the first time. Some can hardly remember their own names or their precise identity. Even their relations can hardly recognize them. Taken together, the Damascus postcards are quite familiar in all places where history overturns the bastions of autocracy and power absolutism.

The images and footages are familiar. Images of tumbling statues and opened up palaces: The Caecescus in Romania. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcus in the Philippines,  Haille Mengistu Mariam in Ethiopia, Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The postcards from the palaces of fleeing tyrants and triumphant street mobs carry a uniform imprint.

With the coordinated and mass supported rebel overrun of Damascus and the sacking of the Assad regime, the long drawn  Syrian revolutionary flourish that gathered momentum following the Arab Spring of 2011 has made land fall. The Arab Spring was a spontaneous street based revolt against authoritarian rulers in most of the Arab world. The revolt brought about varying degrees of political change and even regime changes in countries as diverse as Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain. In Syria, the revolt was beaten down with maximum ferocity by Bashar al-Assad following in the footsteps of his late father. Multiple faction rebellion followed and a bloody civil war ensued.

Dissidents and rebels were hunted down, rounded up and killed, jailed, tortured or chased into exile. Those who survived organized into factional rebel groups parading diverse ideologies and waging mostly religious fundamentalist crusades.  But they all had one enemy- Assad and his autocratic regime.  He in turn dug in  and entrenched his dictatorship.  He reinforced his military strength,  tightened the levers of repression, and reduced the democratic freedoms of Syrians.

He reached out to Iran, Russia and Turkey as well as extremist terrorist groups in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories  adjoining Israel. Assad alienated moderate Arab countries like Jordan which was presided over by his childhood palace friend, now King Abdallah, son of the late King Hussein.

Of course, Syria was a fertile ground for all manner of fringe religious  fundamentalist terrorists. All manner of international interests were aligned with the various rebel factions. ISIS found a safe haven in parts of Syria. The over 13 rebel groups opposed to Assad were supported by powerful local and international  power interests: The US was poised against ISIS remnants. Turkey was pitched to the north in support of separatist Kurds seeking  autonomy to the north of Syria. Iran, Saudi Arabia were digging for support and foothold in a regional power bazaar.  Israel has remained fixated on the Golasn Heights. A multi pronged civil war erupted and  raged since the Arab Spring.

Syria’s economy which had before  the revolt boasted one of the highest GDP per capita in the region was plunger into chaos and crisis. Poverty and mismanagement followed. The only feature of the Syrian  state alive was the Assad presidency and its supporting military infrastructure.

What has united the rebel groups that have finally toppled and sacked the Assad regime is a simplistic hunger for a civil, inclusive, sovereign and peaceful Syria. From their pronouncements so far, this hunger is above their sectarian differences. They have to fight to restore Syria, to ensure the return of normal social services and to mend the broken heart of a nation that was once a promising destination in the Middle East.

Of all the rebel groups, HTS is easily the most prominent from the perspective of political influence. Led by Sharaa (Al-Jolani), a known terrorist on whose head the US has placed a bounty of $10 million. In the civil war years, HTS, supported by Turkey,  was in power in the Idlib province where the imprints of his more liberal governance was in evidence.

There is evidence that he ran a more liberal version of Islamic fundamentalism. Some women were allowed not to wear hijab. Men did not have to wear overgrown beards while professional women ran social services in health and education. Leading Western powers like the US and the UK who maintained a hard posture towards HTS and its leader now have to watch and see to what extent the moderation of factional leaders like Jolani can pervade the future government of Syria.

The defeat of the Assad regime has literally reduced Syria into a carcass for the hounds of international power. In a purported chase after remnants of ISIS and other trouble makers,  the United States has not let off in its serial bombardment and strikes targeted at ISIS related rebel forces still operating in Syria. 

Israel is feverishly pursuing its own national security interests by exploiting the period of statelessness in Syria to weaken a resurgent Syria as a staging post for hostile activity against the state of Israel.  It  is targeting chemical and biological weapons sites as well as military hardware locations. Israel is exploiting this period of vacuum to destroy whatever is left of the military capability of the Syrian state. It is carrying out multiple strikes per day. The strategic objective of these strikes is to weaken Syria and make it an unattractive destination for hostile actions against Israel. These actions are also aimed at whittling down the influence of Iran in the neighborhood.

The neutralization of  a humbled Syria can only add to Israel’s depletion of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the virtual devastation of Hamas in Gaza to create a more quiet neighbourhood for Israel. Unfortunately, these developments can hardly advance the cause of Palestinian statehood. Whatever negotiations take place  now on the matter will only have the Arabs and Palestinians  negotiating from a position of  demonstrable weakness.

As a strategic influence in the region, Russia has paid a price for its war against Ukraine. Clearly, the sacking of Assad is an indirect defeat of Russian influence in the region. Russia had lost the capacity to protect Assad regime in Syria given  its exhaustion in Ukraine. With a casualty of over 350,000 dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine and the raging costs of the war on its economy with crippling sanctions, Putin had no difficulty reaching the inevitable conclusion that Syria was no longer worth the trouble. Continued Russian involvement in Syria would impress no one in particular and be of no immediate strategic or economic interest. It is better off negotiating with whoever comes to rule Syria to protect whatever is left of Russian military hardware in Syria.

In every place where power places itself above responsible governance and the pursuit of the common good, the collapse of the Assad dynasty holds lessons. It is at once the lesson of absolutism as a temptation of power. It is also the lesson of the narrow pursuit of self -interest over and above the common interest and the collective good.

The transience of power is the most obvious lesson that has since been learnt by even the most pedestrian Banana Republic autocrat. They know power is transient  hence they spend their days in office preparing for the decades they will spend after office. They know the things they  are likely to miss out of office hence they spirit those things away to their retirement hideouts. 

Above everything and relevant to every clime, the destruction of Syria and the eventual collapse of the Assad dynasty shows how the prospects and promise of a nation can be destroyed by the limitless power appetite of one family and one man.

For the Nigerian state in its present state of creaking disrepair, the fall of Assad’s tenuous autocracy demonstrates how easily a state besieged by multiple threats can eventually fall apart. For those in doubt, the threats that confront and could fell the Nigerian state are not far too different from the ones that afflicted Syria and led to the recent collapse.

These include: spiraling insecurity,  random and casual violations of human and citizen rights, unchecked sectarian divisions, unbridled corruption among political leaders and increasing regionalism of political discourse and contest.

The Syrian postcard is specific. But its images are universal and apply in every  nation where power gravitates towards absolutism.