22 The Iconoclasts: How Syrian Citizens Brought a God back down to Earth The Iconoclasts: How Syrian Citizens Brought a God back down to Earth 23 and unsupported by any developed critical SANA, and uploaded onto ‘blocked’ Facebook rationality. pages that could only be accessed via proxies. The Iconoclasts: How Syrian Citizens Brought a It was this type of thing that made people gasp Exalted Totalitarianism when they caught sight of Bashar or Asma in the street, as though they were movie stars God back down to Earth For decades the Syrian regime has fashioned and not the president and his wife. Compare an entirely separate world for itself. The this to the famous phrase uttered by the late Dima Wannous world in which Bashar al-Assad and his wife Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish after one Asma al-Akhras live is conceivably even more of his performances in Damascus. As usual he detached than was the world of his father Hafez had received rapturous applause, but after the al-Assad and his mother Anisa Makhlouf. This is show he grumpily confided to a friend: ’I don’t despite cosmetic attempts to give the opposite like all that. What am I, Ragheb Alama (a famous impression. No one knows where the family Lebanese singer), or something?’ and those around them live. The security that By contrast, Bashar and his wife became surrounds their existence is absolute and even obsessed with being seen as the most beautiful, overdone, given that they lived in a peaceful the cleverest, the chicest. Their media machine nation without any political life to speak of: even managed to convince Vogue to publish no independent parties, no autonomous ‘Was Maher al-Assad1 present in the great al-Assad as an ’acceptable‘ Alawite leader. He institutions, no genuine opposition, and no hall? Did he listen to the swearing-in speech? was seen as a moderate who had refused openly declared opponents with the legal, 'The bubble in which the family lived made it We didn’t see him! We didn’t notice him! And to stain his hands with the blood of Syrians constitutional and legislative tools to remove the prisoner of the portraits stuck up in car windows, Farouk al-Sharaa!2 He wasn’t there either! (especially Sunnis) and who had opposed the the al-Assad clan from power. on the walls of state agencies, in the streets, on decision to send the army into Hama in 2011, However, there was the constant They must have been purged…’ lampposts, tree trunks and wherever there was when the uprising was still centred around impression that the family was being stalked space to stick a picture of the president and his wife peaceful demonstrations. and targeted, forcing them to sneak around; This is what a number of Facebook activists These and other stories passed around by moving according to pre-laid plans with streets and kids.' were preoccupied with in the weeks following activists, opposition figures and revolutionaries, blocked, traffic stopped and curfews imposed Bashar al-Assad’s swearing-in speech delivered all point to the same thing; the Syrian regime is in the areas through which they were passing. on July 15 last year (2013). Many of these still just as present in people’s thoughts as it was False rumours were a common tactic here, people had previously been preoccupied with prior to the revolution. The regime still functions a patrol would be told that the president’s an article in early 2011 (just days before the Maher al-Assad, appearing in the company of as it has for decades; a shadow, a spectre, an entourage planned to travel along a particular outbreak of the revolution) that described Lebanese-Syrian singer George Wassouf. One abstraction, an intangible myth fenced round road, then they would select a different road Asma as ‘a rose in the desert.’ activist went so far as to doubt the authenticity with rumour and folklore. Not only has the altogether. Likewise, security branches would The bubble in which the family lived made of the images claiming that it could not have security regime not been penetrated, it has also be ringed round with cement walls topped by it the prisoner of the portraits stuck up in car been a recent photograph, because George retained its capacity to toy with the day-to-day barbed wire or electric fences, as if they were windows, on the walls of state agencies, in Wassouf was now confined to a wheelchair and course of the revolution. While tales of Maher the targets of some imminent assault. All these the streets, on lampposts, tree trunks and could only have been standing if two people preoccupy many of its opponents, the regime is measures served to heighten the regime’s wherever there was space to stick a picture had picked him up, then sat him down again free to pursue its methodical slaughter, torture, mythic status and thus aided the spread of of the president and his wife and kids. These after the photograph was taken. kidnapping and sieges. rumour: How did they live and eat? How did portraits were just a paper-thin caricature, Two years ago, many activists and even The effect of the regime’s decades-old they spend their free time? Did they sleep? The an abstraction freighted with a fantasy that some Western officials were caught up with strategy has been to transform the ruling family regime’s human face became utterly occluded, could not support the reality of the president rumours circulating around the ‘Crisis Room and its dependents into icons or almost mythic and how could it not? For it was walled in with as a person. In Syria the president is not an bombing’ in Damascus that killed Assef figures. Ordinary citizens are struck dumb cement, hidden behind the darkened glass of its individual and nor are the people individuals. Shawkat, the head of Military Intelligence, with amazement when they spot one of these car windows and the gates of its many palaces. There are no individuals or citizens, just ruler former deputy Defence Minister and husband figures in a restaurant or drive past them in a From 2000, Bashar and his wife tried, in a and ruled, president and subject, executioner of Bashar al-Assad’s sister Bushra. At the time it car, and here ‘amazement’ means something somewhat stilted fashion, to humanize the and victim, and the distance between these was claimed that Maher al-Assad had been at like actual disbelief. image of the president and his family. Their polarities is the distance between life and Dima Wannous studied French the meeting of security and military personnel The Syrian collective consciousness has a ‘spontaneous’ appearances, and those of death, a distance whose substance is the fertile literature and translation at and had been killed with the others. Then deep-rooted belief in the ‘sacredness’ of those their children became events in themselves, soil of the imagination that nourishes fear and the University of Damascus in Syria and the Sorbonne in Paris. another report emerged that a private jet had in charge, whether they be military or religious, carefully planned and devoid of any revealing panic. In Syria, the sensation of fear has been She worked as an editor and a taken off from the Mezzeh Military Airport from the president himself to the director of a details. Take, for example, the choice of the transformed over decades of oppression, denial presenter for the cultural program outside Damascus, with Maher on board, in local branch of the intelligence services. The location where they spent their Eid vacation. and marginalization into a fait accompli. People 'City Lights’ that was screened on the ‘Orient’ satellite channel, and the company of his confidantes, heading for absence of any rule of law is one aggravating The people who were chosen to visit the resort do not feel fear when something takes place, writes cultural and political articles Moscow to receive treatment. We should also cause of this abiding illusion, and is confounded where Bashar and Asma had ‘by chance’ turned they fear that it will take place. Maybe it does for a number of Lebanese and foreign newspapers. Among her not forget the rumour, which in September by a generalised inability to properly analyse up, the preparations and events at the resort, and maybe it doesn’t happen, but the fear is literary publications are:Details 2013 gained currency among Arab and Western the situation and these people’s role in it. As all of which coincided with their short stay, permanent, it has become something like a (2007) and Chair (2009). She officials that former Defence Minister Ali Habib such, the revolution on the ground has been clearly everything was thought through and hereditary disease, imprinted on the national currently oversees the cultural page of the electronic newspaper had fled to Paris to prepare for a ’transitional bedevilled by a lack of logic and a propensity to planned in advance. Pictures of their visit were DNA. 'Al-Modon.' period‘ in which he would replace Bashar make hasty judgements (and believe in them) distributed to the official Syrian news agency, Bashar al-Assad and his wife, Asma, have 24 The Iconoclasts: How Syrian Citizens Brought a God back down to Earth The Iconoclasts: How Syrian Citizens Brought a God back down to Earth 25 to the point of creating ignorance, and mutual we encounter the problem of the individual misunderstanding. Religions and sects are beset by an a priori fear. surrounded by a fog of legend and rumour.