A Syrian woman living in Lebanon touches a poster of President Bashar al-Assad during a pro-Syrian government protest, in front of the Syrian embassy in Beirut November 13, 2011.JAMAL SAIDI
Bashar al-Assad, Syria's President for 11 years, speaks the lines of Western liberalism but plays the part of ruthless dictator.
He's the leader who allowed Syrians to have cellphones and access to the Internet; who ushered in economic and educational reforms, but he's also the man who withdrew democratic reforms he introduced early in his presidency; who saw to it that family members were the principal beneficiaries of economic liberalization, and who presides over a bloody crackdown on civil insurrection.
To understand this contradictory man, you have to start at the family's home town of Qardaha, high in the mountains overlooking the port of Latakia. It's in hard-to-reach places such as this that the Alawites of Syria have lived for centuries.
The 1,000-year-old secretive sect, which took its name from Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, broke away from traditional Shia Muslims, incorporating pre-Islamic rites into its practices.
The group's beliefs made it the most reviled of all religious sects in Syria, even to this day.
To Sunnis, "an Alawi ruling Syria is like an untouchable becoming maharajah in India," wrote historian Daniel Pipes in his book Greater Syria – something unthinkable.
The French mandate in the 1920s liberated Alawites. Seeing them as more loyal than nationalist Sunnis, they gave them preferential treatment in the army, and created an autonomous area for them around Latakia.
When the area was later to be incorporated into Syria, Sulayman al-Assad, Bashar's grandfather, wrote to the French prime minister that the Alawites would not be treated fairly in an Islamic Syria because Islam considers them infidels. It was to no avail.
However, Sulayman's son, Air Force Commander Hafez al-Assad, had the last word, seizing power from Sunni leaders in 1970. From that moment, life for the Alawi people has never been better, and it was the turn of the once-dominant Sunnis to grumble and bide their time.
Bashar al-Assad, now a 46-year-old father of three, knows Sunnis will never fully accept the "untouchables" in power, and the precariousness of an Alawi President is considerable. With the increase in religiosity in Syria, as in the region, that became even more acute.
Yet that was the situation in which Mr. al-Assad unexpectedly found himself in the 1990s. This introverted eye doctor wasn't supposed to become president. It was supposed to be his flamboyant older brother, Basil, the dashing military officer.
But Basil was killed in the wee hours one morning in 1994 when he lost control of his Mercedes while racing on the airport road outside Damascus. And Bashar, then 28, didn't hesitate when told to give up his medical specialty studies in Britain and come home to train for the position of president. It was the last thing the reclusive young man wanted, but it was his duty – to his father, his family and to the Alawi community.
Taking office in 2000, Bashar (his name means "bringer of glad tidings") held out the hope of reforming the grey, Soviet-style country.
He made good on economic reforms but, pressured by his Alawi community and family, he took off the table the political reforms he had first put in place. He stopped releasing political prisoners, and many of the activists he encouraged in 2002 ended up in jail by 2004. The new-style President was apparently convinced that democracy would unleash the Sunni majority on the Alawites.
Change had to come slowly, he told people then. He's still telling them that.
But this is the key to Mr. al-Assad: He's a man torn between two worlds, the private and the public personae. The private side may reveal the true wishes of the man, but the public side is his duty.
Clearly he favours the private. Whereas Hafez al-Assad's image could be seen on billboards and murals on every street, blue-eyed Bashar's picture is far less evident. Like his mother, he shies away from the limelight, even as he upholds the one-man rule he inherited from his father. In the current uprising, he's retreated almost completely from public view.
Marwan Muasher, Jordan's former foreign minister, wrote that he always found Mr. al-Assad more reasonable in private. His "habit of pontificating in public was abandoned in private settings," he said. "He listened to opposing arguments … with a desire to understand other points of view."
For a while Bashar and his young wife, Asma, whom he had met in London, tried to live like a private family, dining in restaurants with the children, enjoying a normal lifestyle. That didn't last long.
Here, too, are the contradictions. While Mr. al-Assad's first duty is to his Alawi community, he married a Sunni Muslim, thereby rendering the couple's children as outcasts from his Alawi faith.
Perhaps influenced by his wife (whose family home town of Homs is being regularly shelled by her husband's army), Bashar reached out to the Sunni community, meeting with imams and supporting the construction of new mosques and religious schools. Ironically, in doing so he helped fuel the surge in religiosity that now has turned on him.
"We've been fighting the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1950s and we are still fighting with them," he told an interviewer in October. That may be, but in the early years of his presidency he wanted to try to win them over, not defeat them.
Mr. al-Assad has weathered other serious crises, most notably the accusations that he or his regime was responsible for the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. After pulling his forces from Lebanon, Mr. al-Assad went to ground and waited for the storm of protest to die down.
But this crisis is different.
Alawites truly believe they will not only lose their privileged position in an Assad Syria if they surrender power, they believe they will lose their lives.
And it is Bashar al-Assad's duty to make sure that doesn't happen.
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DEVELOPMENTS IN SYRIA
British Foreign Secretary William Hague is to hold talks with Syrian rebel leaders in London on Monday, a Foreign Office spokeswoman said. As part of the plan to step up contact, Mr. Hague had appointed Frances Guy, a former ambassador to Beirut, to handle relations with the exiled Syrian opposition.
France and Turkey kept up pressure Friday on Syria to comply with international demands to end violence against protests. Alain Juppe, the French Foreign Minister, said after talks in Turkey that the United Nations Security Council must act. The council has so far failed to pass even a resolution condemning Syria, largely because of Russian and Chinese opposition to any outside intervention.
Activists said Syrian security forces killed 11 people after weekly prayers on Friday, in the latest violence in the crackdown on protests, which the UN says has killed at least 3,500 people since March.
Wire services