Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect Read Free Page B

for public radio. He immediately agreed and said Bouthaina Shaban, a presidential advisor and spokesperson, would make the arrangements.
    Shaban is one of the few women in high government positions and always objected to the rampant corruption in Syria. At the time, she appeared to be a moderate in the country's ruling elite. Once the uprising began, however, she remained a public spokesperson, staunchly defending Assad's repression.
    Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in a military coup d’état in 1970 and ruled with an iron fist. Bashar was not supposed to follow in his father's footsteps. That role was set aside for Basil al-Assad, Hafez's eldest son. Bashar had become an ophthalmologist and was doing advanced studies in London when his brother died in a car crash. Bashar was called home in 1994 and groomed for the presidency.
    Bashar's familiarity with the West, high level of education, and natural charm convinced many that he would be a reformer. Western leaders also praised Assad's neoliberal economic policies. He sold off state-run enterprises and encouraged private sector, capitalist development. But none of these changes resulted in significant reform, let alone an end to Syria's highly centralized, authoritarian system.
    A few days after my initial meeting with Assad, that governmentcar with the clean seatbelt showed up at my hotel. I was driven up a long, winding road to the presidential palace. Assad normally works out of his downtown office and uses the palace only for formal events. I must have been considered a formal event. I walked through enormous red-carpeted rooms to a set of eight-foot-high double doors. The doors parted, and there stood the president.
    I unpacked my radio recorder and short, shotgun microphone. It's shaped like a very short, single-barreled shotgun barrel with a foam covering, a standard mic for radio and TV. For some reason, Assad was intimidated by it. He fidgeted uncomfortably and kept looking nervously at the mic. Perhaps it looked too much like a real shotgun.
    I had asked opposition activists all over Damascus what questions I should ask their president. So I came not just with the usual list of questions about US-Syrian relations but also with many questions about domestic issues. When would Syria have free elections for a parliament? When would opposition parties be allowed? Why hadn't 300,000 Syrian Kurds been allowed citizenship? When would Syria end the state of emergency in effect since 1963?
    Assad bobbed and weaved around these and other questions. He claimed calls for democratic change were really efforts by the United States to weaken his government. He claimed to be creating a dialogue with Syrian intellectuals to discuss domestic reform.
    â€œIt takes about a year of dialogue to define the frame” for negotiations, he told me. 6 That was in 2006. Five years later, no meaningful dialogue had taken place, let alone reform.
    In March 2011, the Arab Spring came to Syria, and people raised many of the issues I had asked about in the interview. It's not because I had a crystal ball; large numbers of Syrians had been raising those issues for decades. In a panic, Assad implemented some reforms. He lifted the state of emergency, gave citizenship to most of the disenfranchised Kurds, and opened a dialogue with moderate opposition leaders. Had he made such reforms in 2006, Assad would have been hailed as a farsighted leader.
    By 2011, it was too late. The uprising against Assad and his entireregime had begun, and there was no turning back. Syria's ruling elite became increasingly isolated, internationally and domestically. The Arab League—composed of twenty-two states from the Middle East and North Africa—voted unprecedented sanctions against Syria and later voted to recognize the Syrian opposition and eject Assad's government. The United Nations sent several observer missions and tried to broker a peace agreement. All the efforts failed.
    The