AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad last week sent shock waves through the world. Much of the focus has been on how quickly the rebels took over several cities before taking the capital of Damascus in less than two weeks. But that's not really what happened. In a way, this uprising was decades in the making, going back to when Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, ran the country. We're joined now by Mazen Gharibah, a research associate at the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit at the London School of Economics. Welcome to the program.
MAZEN GHARIBAH: Thank you for having me.
RASCOE: President Assad held office for nearly 25 years, but his father, Hafez al-Assad, ran the country for 29 years before him. Tell us a bit about his father's style of leadership.
GHARIBAH: So Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970 after a military coup. Syria was governed - was ruled by a culture of fear. I remember when I was a kid in school, you cannot say Hafez al-Assad. You have to whisper that name. Syria under Hafez al-Assad was suffocating, really.
RASCOE: You know, as you're talking about this total domination - he would crack down on uprisings. There was a notable one by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in the town of Hama in 1982. How did the senior President Assad respond?
GHARIBAH: In 1979, a number of political parties - of course, including Muslims Brotherhood, which is kind of a right-wing party, but also with other kind of leftist groups - they tried to oppose the absolute rule of Hafez al-Assad. And of course, the Army and Hafez al-Assad kind of cracked down on that, and that led to the massacre of Hama in 1982. These special forces were led by Hafez al-Assad's brother, Rifaat al-Assad. They besieged the city. I think it was the Human Rights Watch who estimated something around 20,000 people were killed in the span of less than a month.
RASCOE: This is just horrific. When his son, Bashar, took over after his father's death in 2000, he was faced with this movement called the Damascus Spring. What happened with that?
GHARIBAH: So after Bashar al-Assad inherited the rule of Hafez, under pressure from the West, he started to change the regime's discursive politics, the discourse of the regime, saying, now, we are going towards liberalization of the economy, freedom of speech. We want independent media outlets. We want to see a multiparty system. These were the promises of Bashar al-Assad the first couple of years during his rule in order to gain some sort of legitimacy at the international scene and to create a facade of reform.
So during these couple of years, we started seeing political forums, demands for constitutional reforms, for electoral reforms. But all of a sudden, the old guards of the Syrian regime - including Bashar al-Assad, of course - started to feel that they are losing control. And then they decided to crack down on that Damascus Spring, and everyone who was involved in this in one way or anothe, was imprisoned. Some of them actually were imprisoned to this day. Some of them were released last week.
RASCOE: Even with this most recent uprising by this coalition of rebels - some with ties to ISIS or Al Qaeda - this comes at the tail end of nearly 14 years of fighting in the country. And then we talked about all these other crackdowns that have happened when people have tried to fight back against the Assad regime. Does it feel to you now like the revolution is finally over?
GHARIBAH: Well, I don't think the revolution is finally over, but let me just comment on your first remark, which is absolutely true. Now, some people are attributing the fall of the Assad regime to HTS, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, which is not the case. For the past 14 years, Syrian civil society organizations, activists, political activists, civil activists, woman activists, human rights activists, have been doing a lot of remarkable actions all over the country. And we have to understand that in 2011 when the uprising happened, there were absolutely no independent organizations, no independent media, no political parties, no constitution that guarantees any sort of political rights for anyone. Syrian civil society created all of that over the past 14 years. And all of these efforts played a huge part in weakening Bashar al-Assad's regime.
RASCOE: But you said you don't feel like the revolution is over, and why do you say that?
GHARIBAH: Because, of course, there is this overwhelming sense of joy and relief amongst all of us - but underneath that absolute joy, there's also this sense of uncertainty, anxiety, about what's going to happen next. That's why many Syrians, if not most, are demanding a U.N.-facilitated nonsectarian inclusive political process in line with the U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254 - which is the main framework of action for the transitional period in Syria - in order to guarantee an inclusive constitution that will give rights to every Syrian men and women - regardless of their religion, ethnicity, language - to safeguard and to steer the country towards some sort of a representative democracy. I'm afraid without that, we might see internal clashes between these different groups. That's why I'm afraid that the removal of Bashar al-Assad is not the final step.
RASCOE: That's Mazen Gharibah, research associate at the London School of Economics. Thank you so much for speaking with us today.
GHARIBAH: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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