The February issue of Vogue carried an article about Asma al-Assad, which carried the by-line, a rose in the desert. The soft focussed hagiography has been widely ridiculed, in its attempt to paint the dictators wife as a reformer.
The bare facts of the matter; Amnesty is tonight reporting 55 confirmed dead; make shocking reading. But compared to the dire warning last weekend when a column of tanks was seen approaching the town of Dara, in southern Syria, 55 dead does not seem that bad, as a everyone was expecting a repeat of the massacre of Hama, in which at least 10,000 were killed in 1982.
The government has responded with both the carrot and the stick; and with statements that are straight out of the Arab Dictators Handbook. Perhaps the most bizarre example was the statement of ex-foreign minister, Farouk al-Sharaa, “We are not opposed to the Islamic currents that are rational and broad-minded which understand their true roots, but as for Al Qaeda and the Taliban which take their instructions from America, and pretend that they are against it, they are condemnable.”
The carrots offered take the form of pay rises for civil servants, and promises to review media laws. But with regard to the state of emergency, which has been in force since 1963, the government has offered only the vaguest nod towards considering its repeal.
And as the unrest spreads, the stick remains the preferred political tool, and thus the death toll rises and more and more Syrian towns get pulled into the unrest.
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