A member of Syria’s Assad family will visit Portland on April 11. He’ll likely speak to the virtues of democracy, human rights and religious pluralism, and his desire to see those values take hold in the Middle East.
Ribal al-Assad, who will speak at a World Affairs Council of Maine gathering at Portland’s Cumberland Club, is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s first cousin.
But the cousins are not on speaking terms. Ribal left Syria with his family when he was 9. He bills himself as an opponent of his cousin and an international campaigner for democracy, freedom and human rights. He is founder and director of the Organisation for Democracy and Freedom in Syria.
Ribal has long had harsh words for his cousin. Today, though, after Syria’s civil war has displaced 5 million refugees and killed nearly 500,000, Ribal is hesitant to call for his cousin’s removal. ISIS’ destruction should take precedence, he has said.
“People will tell you we prefer to live under a dictatorship than under a theocracy,” Ribal told an audience late last year in New York. “Sure, we didn’t have rights or freedoms but at least we were able to survive and live together, Jews, Christians, Kurds.” He barely acknowledges the existence of moderate opposition forces who are fighting a war on two fronts — against ISIS and the Assad regime.
When the 40-year-old speaks in Portland next week, he’ll bring with him significant baggage neither he nor his family has properly addressed.
His father, Rifaat al-Assad, was commander of Syria’s defense forces in the 1970s and 1980s during the reign of Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president. “Few in the region have more innocent blood on their hands” than Ribal’s father, Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, wrote in The Guardian in 2011.
In June 1980, according to Human Rights Watch, those defense forces, loyal to Rifaat al-Assad, killed 1,000 unarmed inmates at a military prison following a failed assassination attempt on Hafez. In February 1982, the Syrian defense forces carried out what’s become known as the Hama Massacre. Over 27 days, they quelled a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama and, in the process, laid siege to the city and carried out mass executions. The final casualty count was between 20,000 and 40,000.
But according to Ribal, his father had nothing to do with it, even though the defense forces were under his command. And the casualty count was merely 2,000, he told the BBC in 2013, citing a declassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report from 1982. Independent observers have since confirmed the higher casualty numbers, and “Ribal and Rifaat’s entourage are about the only living souls claiming his father is innocent,” Doyle wrote in The Guardian.
According to Ribal, his father was advocating for democracy at that time. As early as 1967, “my father was trying to promote democracies in the Middle East, not just in Syria,” Ribal said in December on MSNBC.
In 1984, Rifaat al-Assad tried to oust his brother from power. The coup failed, and then-President Hafez exiled his brother, who has since lived in luxury in the U.K., France and Spain. On MSNBC, Ribal described the incident as “an argument between my father and my late uncle.”
The World Affairs Council of Maine members who listen to Ribal speak April 11 should be on alert for his interpretation of history and ask questions.
Amy Holland, the council’s executive director, said Assad is speaking in Portland as part of a tour that involves speeches at other World Affairs Council chapters. “I know it could stir up some feelings, and it could be difficult to have a member of the Assad family there,” she said. “We want to open a dialogue.”
In 2010, Human Rights Watch assembled a report on Bashar al-Assad’s first 10 years in power. It noted that Assad “inherited a country with a legacy of abusive practices, but to date he has not taken any concrete steps to acknowledge and address these abuses.”
Ribal al-Assad isn’t Syria’s ruler, but if he wants to be a credible player in its future, he has an obligation to renounce those abuses and his family’s complicity.
