BBC versus President Bashar al Assad of Syria: an example of grace and restraint under pressure and prejudice

BBC News Interview with President Bashar al Assad (9 February 2015)

For an example of grace under pressure, I think few people can acquit themselves as diplomatically and skilfully as the President of Syria, Bashar al Assad, did while being grilled by a relentlessly prejudiced interviewer. BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen perhaps thought that by deploying an attack-dog approach and pounding Assad with deliberately loaded questions about his conduct of the civil war in Syria from 2011 onwards, he would force the president onto the defensive and have the pleasure of seeing his interviewee contradict himself, become flustered and eventually cut off the interview in mid-stream. Bowen would then be able to crow about how he faced down an otherwise implacable dictator and made his façade crack to reveal the man’s weaknesses and duplicitous nature. To his credit though, the softly spoken Assad deftly parried the interviewer’s questions about Syria’s supposed use of barrel bombs or chlorine gas against civilians without raising his voice in anger; instead it’s Bowen who becomes irritated and who rudely interrupts the president with a line of questioning that betrays the BBC narrative of always blaming Syria for various atrocities such as the August 2013 chemical gas attacks against Syrian civilians in Ghouta. (For an analysis of the attacks and where the rockets carrying sarin gas that exploded in that part of Damascus most likely came from, the blog Who Attacked Ghouta? is the best source of information.) Bowen does not come out of the session very well for his conduct of the interview and Assad more or less seems quite relaxed.

Right from the first question, viewers who are neither for nor against the Syrian government nor the BBC can see the slanted nature of the interview questions pushed at Assad. Remarkably Bowen was allowed to ask Assad any question he wanted and straight away he started banging on about Assad’s capabilities in directing his government’s response to the Free Syrian Army and other jihadi groups (including ISIS) in the country, with the constant insinuation that the Syrian army was deliberately killing or torturing Syrian civilians indiscriminately. One question in which Bowen quotes a defector from the Syrian Army saying that he could not bear to see his family being killed by “our Syrian hands”, and flat out twists that man’s words to imply that the Syrian Army was killing his relatives, is shocking in its brazenness.

Viewers quickly see that interviewer and interviewee are operating on two very different yet parallel mental planes, with Assad sticking to what he knows is the truth – that the so-called “moderate Syrian rebels” have morphed into the extremist organisation ISIS, that the Syrian military did not drop barrel bombs or released sarin gas among civilians – and Bowen ploughing ahead with questions based on an acceptance of assumptions about Syrian government policies. Whether Bowen genuinely believes in assumptions about the Syrian government deliberately harassing its people or does not and cynically uses those assumptions to reinforce by repetition stereotypes about the nature of Assad’s government and persuade the British public to support a US-led war on Syria to eject Assad, I do not really know: during the interview, Bowen did look and speak as if he wholeheartedly accepts the propaganda his employer dishes out.

In some of the later questions during the interview, Assad cleverly counters the line of interrogation by pointing out inconsistencies in what Bowen claims to be occurring in some parts of Damascus and northern Syria: that the Syrian government is preventing food and medical supplies from reaching civilians in rebel-held areas while at the same time the rebels in those areas are able to obtain weapons somehow to fight the government! Assad patiently points out that there is a huge propaganda project that has been targeting his government and Syria since 2010 yet Bowen seems completely oblivious to what Assad says and fails to challenge his statement.

That Assad granted an interview with the BBC might say something about his belief that the BBC would allow him to present his point of view to the global public – a belief that has been sorely dashed by the behaviour and aggressive questioning by Bowen. In a region where political and social chaos has reigned since the US invaded Iraq in 2003, and is drawing in fighters from around the world to enlist with and fight for an extremist Islamic regime whose ideology eerily resembles that of Saudi Arabia and other conservative Gulf oil states in a brutally one-dimensional form, the BBC’s apparent snub against the last remaining secular Arab socialist country in the Middle East (and tacit support for the more dysfunctional and psychotic regimes nearby) is very sinister indeed.

The interview can be seen at this Youtube link and a transcript of it can be viewed at the Syrian Arab News Agency website.