Bad blood

‘How did this mild-mannered eye doctor end up killing hundreds of thousands of people?’ someone wondered about Bashar al-Assad in BBC2’s extraordinary three-part documentary A Dangerous Dynasty: House of Assad (BBC2, Saturday). It’s a question we’ve all occasionally pondered as the Syrian body count rose — 500,000 thus far — and as six million refugees fled the country. The answer is so lurid and complex that it could have come from one of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Chinless, studious, polite Bashar was never meant to become president of Syria. His thuggish military officer father Hafez, who seized power in 1970, had earmarked the job for his dashing equestrian soldier son Bassel. But when Bassel was killed in a car crash, the reluctant Bashar (rather in the manner of Michael Corleone replacing his elder brother Sonny) was forced to take on the role that would transform him inexorably from a healer to a killer of men (women, and children…).

In tragedy there is often a key moment where the protagonist is offered the chance to avoid his fate — ‘take it!’ we all urge silently from the stalls — but where instead, inevitably, he chooses the dark side. Bashar had several of these, most notably in 2011 when he gave an address to the Syrian parliament that might have saved his reputation and spared the lives of half a million people.

The speech was in response to an unfortunate incident in the town of Deraa when one of his distant cousins, head of the local secret police, had brutally beaten up some kids for spraying anti-regime graffiti on the walls. It was the Arab Spring and every Middle Eastern leader was paranoid and jumpy. But this, Bashar’s former culture minister recalled, would have been his chance to leap on to the riderless wild horse of revolution and take charge: he could establish himself as the region’s voice of reform.