Terrorism & Security

Assad speech resoundingly dismissed by opposition and allies (+video)

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made a rare public speech yesterday that, outside the regime, is seen as offering nothing more than many more months of violence.

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British Foreign Secretary William Hague tweeted that it was "beyond hypocritical. Deaths, violence and oppression engulfing Syria are his own making, empty promises of reform fool no one." And German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said that the speech "contains no new insights."

Arthur Bright

Europe Editor

Arthur Bright is the Europe Editor at The Christian Science Monitor. He has worked for the Monitor in various capacities since 2004, including as the Online News Editor and a regular contributor to the Monitor's Terrorism & Security blog. He is also a licensed Massachusetts attorney.

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What Assad's speech does indicate, writes the Monitor's Dan Murphy, is that there will be no negotiated solution to the Syrian civil war. "Assad laid out a series of demands for the rebellion today guaranteed to give them no other option but to fight on."

He ruled out talks with "extremists" who know "nothing but the language of blood." Since he has defined all of those taking up arms against his government as "extremists" and terrorists, that would seem to rule out negotiations with anyone that matters on the other side of Syria's civil war. In his words, the rebels are "killers and criminals."
To be sure, anyone going into a negotiation would want to do so from a position of strength. It's possible that Assad is striking a maximalist, defiant tone in public while entertaining compromises behind the scenes. But there were no indications of even a moderation of tone towards his opponents, routinely described as "terrorists" or agents of foreign powers, which would usually be taken as a signal that some sort of overture was being made.

Joshua Landis, an expert on Syria at the University of Oklahoma, told The New York Times that Assad's stance “means we’re in for a long fight.... This is a dark, dark tunnel. There is no good ending to this. Assad believes he is winning."

And in a commentary for Al Arabiya, freelance journalist Nabila Ramdani called the speech "one of the most self-serving, cynical, and ultimately macabre speeches imaginable."

What Assad’s speech showed was that he has absolutely no intention whatsoever of compromising, and will continue to prosecute one of the most savage civil wars in Middle East history indefinitely. It did not go unnoticed that the district around the Damascus Opera House was ‘locked down’ by soldiers and police in the hours before Assad’s speech. The dictator’s affirmed enemies are no longer massing in ‘enemy’ cities like Aleppo, but flooding into the suburbs of Damascus itself.

Assad, of course, refuses to even discuss why millions of his own countrymen and women should have turned against him, and in many cases taken up arms against his rule. He will not acknowledge that the barbaric, repressive nature of his regime might be behind the desperate calls for democracy.

What the speech promised, Ms. Ramdani writes, "was a 2013 which is likely to be even more horrific for Syria than 2012."