True to his cunning nature, the wanted bandit likely fled at night.
Bashar al-Assad, reportedly with his wife and three adult children in tow, made a hasty escape to avoid the stiff comeuppance he so richly deserves.
It was, of course, the predictable coda of a coward who, having caused so much grief, loss, and suffering for so many decades, sought refuge in a place far away from the scene of his long list of horrific and lethal crimes against decency and humanity.
So, al-Assad now calls Russia, not Syria, home. He is a guest of his welcoming patron, Russian President Vladimir Putin – fittingly, another fugitive from justice accused of war crimes.
Syria’s odious man on the run brought along, no doubt, a healthy sum of looted money or gold to finance the comfortable life that he and his complicit partner, Asma, are accustomed to.
The pair of outlaws in designer outfits will, I suspect, remain holed up in a sprawling “safe house” somewhere in Russia’s vast expanse for the remainder of their wretched lives.
Meanwhile, exhausted Syrians – who, for the moment, are celebrating a dictator’s sudden demise – will try, as best they can, to recover and rebuild in the wake of a grinding civil war that disfigured their beloved homeland year after debilitating year.
But, I suspect, the al-Assads’ new life in a “foreign” land – beyond just geography – will always be shadowed by fear and the gnawing sense of uncertainty that often accompanies gangsters on the lam.
There, Bashar and Asma will rot – if they possess even a speck of what might charitably be described as a conscience – steeped in the knowledge of the appalling scope of misery that they are responsible for.
They will never escape that indelible stain.
Despite the revisionism now on obscene display in Western capitals and newsrooms, Bashar and Asma had many – turns out fair-weather – friends in those same Western capitals and newsrooms who claim, unconvincingly, that, all the while, they hoped that the “butcher” in Damascus would face the kind of punishment he meted out without hesitation or remorse.
It is the familiar rhetorical pantomime that Western capitals and newsrooms are practiced at performing on reliable cue whenever yet one more of their once-feted stable of “good guy” autocrats conveniently mutates into a “bad guy” pariah.
Bashar’s pop, Hafez, was considered a “good guy” autocrat by many Western leaders and establishment media in spite of a sordid history of brutality that his obedient son promptly adopted when he took over as Syria’s despot-in-permanent-residence in 2000.
In 1990, Hafez al-Assad – a sociopath in a well-tailored suit who ordered the military to annihilate 20,000 Syrian “rebels” during a three-week siege in 1982 – was rehabilitated by then US President George Bush senior. At the time, the caked-in-blood tyrant was viewed as a useful regional ally who could blunt Iraq’s influence.
Relations between Washington and Damascus largely remained cozy for the remainder of the 20th century and well into Bashar’s tenure as president in the fresh millennium.
From the start, Bashar – with the eager help of Asma, a telegenic, London-educated former banker – camouflaged his ruthlessness behind an agreeable, PR-crafted “narrative” that the couple were symbols of a progressive, secular Syria that Western prime ministers and presidents and a host of easily duped reporters apparently found so beguiling.
Bashar was an authoritarian with an ingratiating smile.
All of it, every contrived aspect of their staged act, was a lie meant to convince the gullible that Bashar had broken from his father’s ugly modus operandi and to stymie any Western “intervention” that might infringe on the new president’s ability to exercise absolute power.
Trade and tourism flourished. European parliamentarians made regular visits to al-Assad’s palace under the flimsy guise that, according to one French senator, it was “better to speak with Bashar than with Daesh [ISIS/ISIL]” and extolled his role as the defender of “Eastern Christians”.
In 2001, that paragon of the international rules-based order, pretend “socialist” British Prime Minister Tony Blair, made a pilgrimage to meet Bashar – a fellow charlatan he could clearly, to borrow a phrase, do business with.
A flock of British journalists followed suit to pen pieces brimming with praise and platitudes about Syria’s philanthropic first family bent on “modernising” the country in enlightened ways before – surprise, surprise – Bashar became an unrepentant mass murderer who killed scores of Syrian children, women, and men with chemical weapons and Scud missiles.
The nadir of the embarrassing sentimentality appeared in Vogue, a US-based magazine that pays groveling homage to pretty celebrities, including Asma al-Assad.
In a notorious bit of hagiography published in 2010, Vogue described Asma as “the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies” – proving that beauty, when combined with a polished, articulate persona, can be leveraged even by the most pedestrian swindlers to hide the truth.
Vogue compounded its injury on journalism and fact by affixing the following headline to a fawning profile of Bashar’s ever-faithful right-hand woman: “A Rose in the Desert”.
I, for one, sincerely hope that that “rose” wilts in Russia’s harsh and wintery climes.
Only a year later, Syrians, inspired by the possibilities of the Arab Spring, took en masse to the streets in anti-government protests.
Bashar’s fraudulent mask slipped, revealing a killer who would, in due and deliberate course, outdo his repellant dad on the atrocities scale to cling to position, power, and privilege as civil war loomed.
The smitten Western leaders and journalists put on a feeble show of supposed solidarity with Bashar’s millions of victims – imprisoned, tortured, raped, condemned, or forced to flee as refugees in neighouring states.
Earlier this year, the European Union (EU) was happy to forgive and forget the carnage and agony that Bashar al-Assad had wrought.
Italy restored diplomatic relations with Assad’s regime in July. And, in November, Michael Ohnmacht, the charge d’affaires of the EU delegation to Syria, posted a short video on Instagram and X to commemorate his return to the sunny capital.
Ohnmacht offered besieged and traumatised Syrians his greetings and explained that his presence amounted to tangible evidence of the EU’s resolve to “support the Syrian people for a better, more prosperous and peaceful future”.
The grinning diplomat ended his introduction this way: “I am looking forward to our common endeavours in the coming years.”
Impeccable timing.
The EU was poised, it appears, to extend al-Assad an inviting, but qualified, embrace.
Alas, he has disappeared to save himself, leaving amnesiac European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen without a dance partner she has belatedly rebuked as “cruel”.
Hypocrisy, meet your shameless author.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
