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Hafez al-Assad
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- Overview
- Early life
- Presidency
Bashar al-Assad (born September 11, 1965, Damascus, Syria) Syrian president from 2000. He succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria since 1971. In spite of early hopes that his presidency would usher in an era of democratic reform and economic revival, Bashar al-Assad largely continued his father’s authoritarian methods. Beginning i...
Bashar al-Assad was the third child of Hafez al-Assad, a Syrian military officer and member of the Baʿath Party who in 1971 ascended to the presidency via a coup. The Assad family belonged to Syria’s ʿAlawite minority, a Shiʿi sect that traditionally constitutes about 10 percent of the Syrian population and has played a dominant role in Syrian politics since the 1960s.
Bashar received his early education in Damascus and studied medicine at the University of Damascus, graduating as an ophthalmologist in 1988. He then served as an army doctor at a Damascus military hospital and in 1992 moved to London to continue his studies. In 1994 his older brother, Basil, who had been designated his father’s heir apparent, was killed in an automobile accident. Bashar, despite his lack of military and political experience, was called back to Syria, where he was groomed to take his brother’s place. To bolster his standing with the country’s powerful military and intelligence agencies, he trained at a military academy and eventually gained the rank of colonel in the elite Republican Guard. Hafez al-Assad also sought to engineer a positive public image for his son, who until then had lived out of the public eye. Bashar was placed at the head of a popular anticorruption campaign that resulted in the removal of several officials but ignored the dealings of senior members of the regime. His image as a modernizer was burnished by his appointment as chairman of the Syrian Computer Society.
Hafez al-Assad died on June 10, 2000. Hours after his death, the national legislature approved a constitutional amendment lowering the minimum age for the president from 40 to 34, Bashar al-Assad’s age at the time. On June 18 Assad was appointed secretary-general of the ruling Baʿath Party, and two days later the party congress nominated him as its candidate for the presidency; the national legislature approved the nomination. On July 10, running unopposed, Assad was elected to a seven-year term.
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Before They Were World Leaders: Middle East Edition
Although many Syrians objected to the transfer of power from father to son, Bashar’s ascent engendered some optimism both in Syria and abroad. His youth, education, and exposure to the West seemed to offer the possibility of a departure from what had been the status quo: an authoritarian state, policed by a network of powerful overlapping security and intelligence agencies, and a stagnant state-run economy reliant on shrinking oil reserves. In his inaugural speech, Assad affirmed his commitment to economic liberalization and vowed to carry out some political reform, but he rejected Western-style democracy as an appropriate model for Syrian politics.
Assad announced that he would not support policies that might threaten the dominance of the Baʿath Party, but he slightly loosened government restrictions on freedom of expression and the press and released several hundred political prisoners. Those early gestures contributed to a brief period of relative openness, dubbed the “Damascus Spring” by some observers, in which public political discussion forums emerged and calls for political reform were tolerated. Within months, however, Assad’s regime changed course, using threats and arrests to extinguish pro-reform activism. Afterward Assad emphasized that economic reforms would have to precede political reforms.
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Aug 28, 2013 · Bashar al-Assad's political career — A member of the Free Syrian Army holds a burning portrait of al-Assad near the flashpoint city Homs on January 25, 2012. Alessio Romenzi/AFP/Getty Images
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