Fateful Choices: Political Leadership and the Paths to and from Mass Atrocities

Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, had an important decision to make on 30 March 2011. His country had been engulfed by protests for the past two weeks, triggered by the security force’s overreaction to anti-regime graffiti scrawled on a school wall by a group of teenagers and fuelled by the tumults of the ‘Arab Spring’. Now, the President was to deliver his first televised address to the nation since the protests began. Assad had a real choice to make; his counsellors were divided. Indeed, there is some suggestion that there were even two— very different—draft speeches.4 Some, like Manaf Tlass, a close confidant to Bashar and his father Hafez al-Assad before him, and Brigadier General in Syria’s elite Republican Guard, advised restraint. The President should align himself with the protesters, sack corrupt officials and offer political and economic reform, Tlass argued. Above all, he should rein in the security forces, end the use of force against peaceful protesters and prosecute those responsible.