It could have done a lot of good; could have improved the lives of millions of Syrians; she could have used her influence to transform a part of the world where women’s rights are at best shaky and at worst non-existent.
But Asma al-Assad chose a different path. While her husband’s henchmen skinned their victims alive in the torture chambers of the famous Sednaya prison, she dressed in designer clothes. While Bashar murdered his citizens with chemical weapons, she bought expensive frivolities at Harrods. As the children of those considered “enemies” of the regime were orphaned, their three did not lack anything.
She and her family are now believed to be in Moscow, safe and sound, enjoying the fruits of her tyranny, isolated by her embezzled millions (some of which come from humanitarian aid stolen and diverted by Asma through her false charities) and protected by their friends of the dictator Vladimir Putin. They were joined by their parents, Fawaz and Sahar Akhras, who until recently lived in Acton, west London.
I wonder: Are Bash and Vlad comparing notes over champagne and oysters about the relative merits of sarin gas and cluster bombs? Do Asma and Alina Kabaeva, Putin’s alleged gymnast girlfriend and 30 years his junior, do Pilates together? Does Fawaz, once a respected cardiologist, sympathize with his son-in-law over his recent setbacks?
After World War II, upon witnessing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main executors of the Holocaust, the Jewish writer and thinker Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe its disturbing everyday life. He was struck by Eichmann’s lack of charisma, intelligence or purpose. He was living proof that evil is more common, more everyday than we think, and that the most unlikely people can commit the most terrible acts without a second thought.
We expect evil to look and sound nefarious, like in the movies: a menacing arrogance, a menacing word, a nasty flash of temper. But very often it is neither of those things. It arrives without warning, when you least expect it, from the least likely places.
Asma al-Assad could have done a lot of good; could have improved the lives of millions of Syrians, writes SARAH VINE
Asma and Bashar al-Assad meet the Queen in 2002. Later, as Asma’s husband’s henchmen skinned their victims alive, she dressed in designer clothes.
Dominique Pelicot, the man currently on trial in France for drugging his wife, Gisele, and then inviting numerous strangers to rape her while he filmed, is a classic case. Just a regular guy, who gets together with a bunch of other regular guys to commit heinous crimes. It is the monotonous lives of the defendants (a soldier, a nurse, a truck driver) that makes this case so shocking.
Asma al-Assad falls into that same category, as does her husband. Bashar has never had the kind of face normally associated with a violent strongman: he has a weak, sunken chin and a lanky, puny body. He seems better suited to his original career choice, an ophthalmologist, than to the role of despot.
He certainly managed to fool some people. The BBC’s John Simpson has described him as “weaker than evil”, adding that “in person, I found him meek and eager to please: the opposite of the traditional dictator.” Like Eichmann, Bashar never seemed to have it in him. But it did: 13 years of brutal conflict, almost 600,000 dead. It’s hardly most people’s definition of “meek.”
Murder and torture were Bashar’s birthright; Born into a brutal dynasty, his father Hafez was already famous for the 1982 Hama massacre and many other crimes. But Asthma is different. She went her own way. I could have lived any life I wanted; instead, she chose this.
That’s what makes her so especially disgusting, perhaps even more so than her chinless dictator husband. Here is a woman who grew up in an ordinary English suburb, went to a private school and university in London and worked in finance in New York and the City. His parents were middle-class professionals and their house was a semi-detached house with large windows.
It could hardly have had a more civil beginning. Every opportunity, every advantage of a young woman living in a liberal democracy. And yet, she decided to marry a despot and support him in governing his murderous regime.
If Bashar really was as weak as everyone claimed, “as eager to please” as Simpson so naively believed, then she could have used her influence to guide him down a different path. Instead, she appears to have done the opposite, reveling in status and power and even boasting, in emails leaked in 2012, that she was “the real dictator” in her house.
That, to me, is the worst kind of evil. One that is not born of pain, misfortune or misunderstanding, that is not driven by ideology, ambition or revenge, but simply a simple and petty type of selfishness, evil for evil’s sake. That’s the one the Devil likes the most. I hope it keeps you a warm seat in hell.