Archived: Qais Fares: Bashar al-Assad — the Syrian Pinocchio

By Qais Fares, a Syrian journalist March 3, 2016 It was one of the countless times where the world has witnessed Syria’s President Bashar Assad lying. In an interview with the German TV broadcaster ARD on March 1, 2016, Assad denied the trigger behind the March 2011 anti-government uprisings in Daraa in southern Syria. The spark that lit the flame began five years ago when 15 kids – all under 17 – wrote anti-government graffiti on the walls of a school in the southern city of Daraa. The local governor and the chief of political security of Daraa, a cousin of President Assad, decided to punish them. The kids were arrested, tortured and thrown in jail. The punishment stunned the town, and the community’s outrage over the children’s arrests and mistreatment, the government’s humiliating and violent reactions to their worries, and the people’s refusal to be cowed by security forces emboldened everybody. Soon Daraa became a rallying cry across the country for what began as a rural and provincial-driven uprising. Assad said that the whole story never happened. “It was only propaganda. I mean, we heard about them, we never saw those children that have been taken to prison that time. So, it was only a fallacious narrative.” I am pretty sure that Assad has had a look on the hundreds of reports that covered the story. Why would he not? On March 3, 2013 Assad told the Sunday Times that “Contrary to popular belief, since the beginning of the crisis, hundreds of journalists from all over the world, including you, have gained visas to enter Syria and have been reporting freely from inside Syria with no interferences in their work and no barriers to fulfill their missions.” This, of course, is a blatant lie. For years, the number of international journalists reporting from Syria has been negligible because unbiased work has become very hard, considering security risks and the regime’s interference with independent reporting. Nevertheless, many of the top international media outlets including the Time and the CNN managed to report on the story. I have collected dozens of testimonies by security services defect elements that prove the incident has indeed taken place. However, I would like to refer Assad to late Lt. General Rustum Ghazaleh, a military and intelligence officer, who he sent to Daraa in the beginning of the protests to assure locals of the president’s good intentions. In a Youtube video that was uploaded online on March 27, 2011, Ghazaleh told the locals that “His Excellency [Assad] had ordered the immediate release of all detainees; the children detained in Damascus or here in Daraa. His excellency has ordered their immediate release and I think that they were released.[1]” – a reference to the teenagers who were arrested for writing anti-government graffiti. At that same day, Yusef Abu Rumiyeh, a member of parliament for Daraa, denounced security forces for opening fire on his constituents “without pity” and criticised Assad for not offering his condolences. In a leaked video that was published on April 1, 2011, from a closed parliament session that took place on 27 March 2011, Abu Rumiyeh said: ” What has happened was not a protest against Bashar al-Assad. It was a consequence of the recklessness of General Atef Najib General Atef Najib, [chief] in charge of political security in Daraa, who summoned the security forces [and brought them in] with helicopters, and ordered to open fire on the citizens of Daraa immediately. And [they] prevented ambulances from transporting the wounded to hospital while the doctors were crying through the minarets of the mosques. And I was present in Daraa and I could hear with my own ears.[2]” Riyad Nassan Agha, a former advisor to late Hafiz al-Assad and a former minister of culture of Syria, says: “The revolution started in the form of a demonstration to protest the arrest of the children of Daraa.[3]” And that the Syrian Revolution was “an explosion against the security services abuse of the [Syrian] citizens’ dignity, and the story of the children of Daraa – who were detained and their fathers were insulted – has become famous and it became the straw that broke the back of the regime.[4]” However, Assad is still in a state of denial and he believes it will save him forever. On March 3, 2013, William Hague, Britain’s foreign secretary, said commenting on Assad’s interview with the Sunday Times By saying, “This will go down as one of the most delusional interviews that any national leader has given in modern times.” This comment still applies to all Assad’s interviews. When I was a kid, I did not like the fictional character of Pinocchio at the children’s novel. The more lies Pinocchio tells, the longer his nose becomes. However, I have been stumbling with Assad’s nose for the past 16 years. It was until the moment when 15 kids wrote anti-government graffiti on the walls of a school in Daraa when I discovered that it was the nose of Syria’s Pinocchio. ————————————————————————————————————– [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpNuifnAAbE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVgt-i8fVm8 [3] http://bof-sy.com/?p=34072 [4] http://alapn.com/ar/news.php?cat=3&id=25633