“Syria is not Tunisia,” Basher Al Assad replied when asked by The Wall Street Journal months before the Syrian revolution whether Syria would be the next, after the revolution in Tunisia.
Some people believed that Assad meant that most Syrians were satisfied with their leadership, seeing the regime as a symbol of resistance in the Arab world; therefore, there was no way people would revolt against the regime.
Today, most people say that Assad meant the opposite: that his administration was unlike the Egyptian and Tunisian regimes and would never allow a revolution to take place, and that he was ready to crush any revolution by firing live ammunition at whoever dared to take to the streets; even willing to destroy whole cities.
If we go back and analyse Assad’s speech aired a few weeks after the revolution began, we realise that he had conveyed his message clearly to The Wall Street Journal.
In this speech, he said that his regime had survived all plots against it and had always turned the tables on the plotters. In other words, from day one Assad considered the revolution to be a plot.
This means that what we are witnessing today was planned before the revolution began.
Many people naively say that the situation would not have escalated to the present disastrous stage if the Syrian president had gone to Daraa, the cradle of the revolution, and apologised to its inhabitants for his cousin, Atef Najib, Daraa’s political security chief, insulting people and torturing their children.
In other words, they think that what happened in Daraa was the fault of an individual, Atef Najib, and could have been corrected if the leadership had apologised for his actions.
But, based on recent revelations, it is clear that Atef Najib was only carrying out Assad’s orders. Najib did not torture the children and insult the city’s inhabitants on his own initiative after anti-regime slogans were written on school walls.
Najib was ordered to respond harshly to any move, whether small or big, exactly as Assad stated to The Wall Street Journal, making it very clear that his regime was unlike the Tunisian regime.
How can Syrians forget the famous statement from the presidential palace: “Assad remains, or the country will be torched!” High-level Syrian officials had already decided to crush the revolution in the same manner as the Green revolution was crushed in Iran.
Again, it became clear a month after the revolution began that the security forces’ warning, “We are ready to face the plot,” meaning to crush the revolution by any means, was contained in Assad’s statement.
Those who are calling for a political solution to the Syrian crisis are doing so now because the “crushing the revolution” project has failed miserably and they have no other alternative after tasting defeat. Whoever negotiates with Assad will be doing him a favour and giving him an opportunity to end this dilemma.
Let’s not forget that the Syrian regime and its allies wanted to crush the revolution from day one. They opted for a military solution and failed; why help them out now?
The author is a columnist and presenter on Al Jazeera TV channel
