ABSTRACT
On June 10, 2000 Hafiz Asad died and his son Bashar became Syria’s new president. Hopes ran high. Would the next generation of the Asad dynasty prove to be more open than the terrible first? Would Bashar be as liberal as Morocco’s King Muhammad VI after the tyrant Hasan II died and left his son the throne? Hafiz Asad came to power in 1970. An Alawite from the northern mountains above Latakia, his rule represented something new in Syrian government. For centuries, the Sunnis had been the unquestioned rulers. Many Sunnis were aristocrats who despised the Alawites and did not consider them to be truly Muslim-at best, they were a distant offshoot of Shii Islam, at worst, heterodox. The Sunni Muslim Brothers would challenge Alawite governance throughout the forty years of Asad rule preceding the 2011 revolution. Upon assuming the presidency, Hafiz Asad soon put an end to the turbulence that had characterized Syria’s political scene since 1946, when the French mandatory power withdrew. Military coups had proliferated, throwing the country into turmoil. Using the war with Israel as a pretext, Asad declared a state of emergency-still in place today-to give him and his government extraordinary powers. Any hint of opposition was swiftly crushed during what Asad called his Corrective Movement. When the Muslim Brothers in the northern city of Hama became restive in the early 1980s, they were brutally suppressed and outlawed. Stories of their 1982 massacre and the razing to the ground of the old city sent shivers down the spines of all Syrians when they heard the name Hama whispered. The 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the last stage in Hafiz Asad’s rule. Would the Syrians
follow the lead of the Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and Romanians and succeed in throwing off his rule? Would he meet the same fate as his Romanian friend Nicolae Ceausescu, the despot who was spectacularly executed on Christmas Day? He made sure that he would not. So great was his fear perceived to be that people refer to this period of draconian repression as Shamsescu. Sham means Damascus, or Syria, in Arabic. The prisons filled with political opponents and all freedoms were drastically curtailed. And yet through the 1990s prison-writings emerges a picture of Syria still obscure to the rest of the world.
