She could have done so much good; she 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 shaky at best, non-existent at worst.
But Asma al-Assad chose a different path. While her husband’s henchmen skinned their victims alive in the torture chambers of the infamous Sednaya prison, she dressed herself in designer labels. While Bashar was killing his citizens with chemical weapons, she was buying expensive fripperies at Harrods. Because the children of those considered “enemies” of the regime remained orphaned, the three of them lacked nothing.
Now she and her family are believed to be safe and sound in Moscow, enjoying the fruits of their tyranny, isolated by their embezzled millions (some of which comes from stolen humanitarian aid siphoned off by Asma through her fake charities) and protected by their dictator friend Vladimir Putin. They are joined by her parents, Fawaz and Sahar Akhras, who until recently lived in Acton, west London.
I wonder: Are Bash and Vlad comparing notes over their champagne and oysters on the relative merits of sarin gas and cluster bombs? Do Asma and Alina Kabaeva, Putin’s alleged gymnast girlfriend who is 30 years his junior, do Pilates together? Does Fawaz, once a respected cardiologist, feel sorry for his son-in-law over his recent misfortunes?
After World War II, witnessing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the leading executors of the Holocaust, Jewish writer and thinker Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe its disturbing ordinariness. She was struck by Eichmann’s lack of charisma, intelligence or purpose. He was living proof that evil is more common, more commonplace than we think, and that the most unlikely people can commit the most terrible acts without thinking about it.
We expect evil to look and sound nefarious, like in the movies: a menacing swagger, a menacing word, an ugly fit of rage. But very often it is none of those things. It comes without warning, when you least expect it, in the least likely places.
Asma al-Assad could have done so much good; she could have improved the lives of millions of Syrians, writes SARAH VINE
Asma and Bashar al-Assad meet the queen in 2002. Later, when Asma’s husband’s henchmen skinned their victims alive, she dressed herself in designer labels.
Dominique Pelicot, the man currently on trial in France for drugging his wife Gisele and then inviting countless strangers to rape her while he filmed it, is a classic case. Just a regular guy, getting together with a bunch of other regular guys to commit unspeakable crimes. It is the everyday lives of the suspects – a soldier, a nurse, a truck driver – that make this case so shocking.
Asma al-Assad falls into the same category, as does her husband. Bashar has never had the kind of face you normally associate with a violent strong man: he has a weak, receding chin, a lanky, puny body. He seems more suited to his original career choice, ophthalmologist, than to the role of despot.
He certainly managed to fool some people. The BBC’s John Simpson has described him as ‘weak rather than evil’, adding that ‘I personally found him meek and eager to please – the opposite of the traditional dictator’. Like Eichmann, Bashar never seemed to have it in him. But he did: thirteen years of brutal conflict, almost 600,000 deaths. Hardly the definition of ‘meek’ that most people use.
Murder and torture were Bashar’s birthright; he was born into a ruthless dynasty, with his father Hafez already infamous for the 1982 Hama massacre and countless other crimes. But Asma is different. She followed her own path. She could have lived any life she wanted; instead she chose this.
That’s what makes her particularly repulsive, perhaps even more so than her chinless dictator husband. Here is a woman who grew up in an ordinary English suburb, went to private school and university in London, worked in finance in New York and the city. Her parents were middle-class professionals, her house was a terraced house with bay windows.
She could hardly have had a more civilized beginning. Every opportunity, every advantage for a young woman living in a liberal democracy. And yet she chose to marry a despot and support him in running his murderous regime.
If Bashar was really as weak as everyone claimed, “so eager to please” as Simpson so naively believed, then she could have used her influence to steer him down a different path. Instead, she appears to have done the opposite: she relished the status and power and even boasted, in emails leaked in 2012, that she was “the real dictator” in their household.
That to me is the worst kind of evil. Someone not born of pain, misfortune or misunderstanding, not driven by ideology, ambition or revenge – but just a simple, petty kind of selfishness, evil for evil’s sake. That’s the kind the Devil enjoys most. I hope he keeps a seat warm for her in hell.