‘The mullahs are moody,’ said Aisha, a female university student, explaining her daily nail varnish run in with the aging female crones who guard the entrance to Tehran’s University of Arts.
All female students had to pass through a daily ‘modesty’ check to reach their classes. But the line on what was acceptable – nail varnish colour, make-up, a tuft of exposed hair peaking beyond the compulsory scarf and hijab – varied daily on the whim of the mullahs fighting for power in Iran’s closed theocracy. Some days red nail varnish was okay and other days the same colour was forbidden and Aisha was barred from attending her classes.
The only thing worse than tyranny is chaos, not one Assad, but a hundred mini-Assads
There was no order or logic to the petty harassment, just an ever-shifting line of tolerance. The elderly female guards, conscripted from the poor of Tehran’s southern slums, blindly carried out their latest orders for the equivalent of $20 a month. Aisha, before she even left her house in the morning, was already thinking about something as trivial as the colour of her nail varnish. The tyrant’s will was already inside her mind.
In Syria, the mind shackles of the Assad family were just as strong as in Iran – and will be just as hard to throw off.
When Hafez al-Assad, the family patriarch, took power in 1974 the Syrian population was seven million. Today it is 25 million. The Assad family tyranny has shaped and determined almost every aspect of every Syrian life for half a century.
Even to be a Damascus taxi driver required an affirmation of blind loyalty to the Assads. Once on a filming trip in Damascus for a Channel 4 series on suicide bombing, I asked the translator to ask the taxi driver why his taxi, along with all others in the city, had transparent stick-on posters of Bashir and Basil al-Assad, the dictator’s sons, across the back window. The driver’s reply was that this was the stupidest question he had ever been asked in his life. Perhaps he was already afraid that the unknown translator was a police informer. Or just that this foreigner asking awkward questions would land him in trouble.
A few hundred yards later as we passed the notorious aviation ministry, whose entranceway was openly festooned with old jet fighters. The same translator refused to speak in English to identify the building out of fear that our taxi driver might understand him. It was a common belief, probably justified, that every taxi driver was a police spy and reported to the mukhabarat, the pervasive secret police.
Such a level of tyrannical fear is built into your psyche. Every childhood classroom featured a picture of the latest ruling Assad. Every news programme was filled with his praises. You could be forced to join the state Ba’ath party just to get your first job as a primary school teacher. You willingly signed up for the annual Evacuation Day celebrations in Umayyad Square, commemorating the end of French colonial rule – waving the Syrian flag in praise of the Great Leader because you were worried about your promotion prospects and could use the $10 food voucher bribe.
‘You learn to negotiate. There are red lines – things that you cannot say or do like criticising the regime. But there is also the daily drip of surveillance and harassment. You never know if you are going to be harassed. You do not know who to trust. You can’t easily overcome this trauma,’ says Chatham House Middle East Programme Director Dr Sanam Vakil, an Iranian born expert on authoritarian regimes.
The Assads were a particularly bloody regime, with 600,000 killed in the civil war, but all tyrannies fundamentally rely on passive acquiescence by the majority for the regime’s rule.
For every person the regime murders or imprisons, thousands of others are recruited for dead end jobs in bloated ministries shuffling papers from tray to tray or silenced with bribes, as in oil-rich Libya under Gaddafi, with promises of foreign university stipends and fees.
If you are an Alawite, part of the same small religious sect from which the Assads spring, then of course you would sign on from a steady safe job in the intelligence agencies oppressing your fellow citizens just like your uncle. Or you secretly denounce your neighbour to the mukhabarat before they denounce you after a fight between your sons.
The big dictator spawns little dictators in every minor office of state, demanding bribes for electric hook ups, driver’s licences and building permits in compensation for their derisory state wages. Every business, every project, every restaurant, is already paying 15-20 per cent to the ruling family for permission to exist.
All that the tyrant really offers in return is stability and a law and order of a kind. Before the civil war, you could always safely walk the streets of Damascus at night.
Like most of us, you don’t choose to be a hero or a dead martyr. You follow orders and do what you are told for a steady pittance to pay the family bills. And then, when the only way to get ahead is somehow to ingratiate yourself with the regime’s loyalists, the factory foreman or the department head, you agree to become an informer on your colleagues. Or you learn not to think. Not to see when your colleague’s son is arrested.
In tyranny, no adult is entirely innocent. How many of the cheering crowds on the streets of Damascus we see on TV, stamping on Assad’s ripped up portraits, were yesterday, understandably, gladly taking a regime pay check for spying on their neighbours? There is no easy line to distinguish between acceptance, collusion, collaboration and active participation in the repression and crimes of the regime.
No tyranny is exactly the same but all share common characteristics. Whatever the ideological pretence, all power flows from the centre, the tyrant himself, and his ever-jostling court. A caste of oligarchs, businessmen and generals grow rich by looting the assets of the state on the tyrant’s behalf.
The line of tolerance of what is and is not possible is always conditional as a myriad of intelligence services spy on everyone perceived as a threat. Over time, all state institutions, the army and police, the energy ministry, the judiciary, education, media, become extensions of the ruler’s will, second guessing his whims.
Fundamentally in tyranny there is no civitas, a willing political community with shared goals and a common purpose. Nothing to underpin a sense of shared national identity. No golden model of a once democratic Syria to return too because no such state ever existed. The state is held together only by the terror of the tyrant.
But once he is overthrown, everything breaks apart in division and economic collapse. The tribe, the sect, assert themselves as all notion of a nation state falls into ruin. The only thing worse than tyranny is chaos, not one Assad, but a hundred mini-Assads, all running their newborn fiefdoms in thievery or so-called Islamist fervour.
It is impossible to see how a Syria, already broken into pieces, can ever become a unitary state again, or like Libya and Iraq, escape a further descent into division and more warlordism. Damascus has fallen and Assad the tyrant is in exile in another tyranny, but it will be decades yet before the Syrian people ever truly escape his poisonous legacy.
Kevin Toolis is the Emmy-nominated director of the Channel 4 Cult of the Suicide Bomber series.
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