أسما الأسد
THE ROSE IN THE DESERT
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| A REVISTA TIROU A MATÉRIA DO SITE. UMA VERGONHA. VAI RECOLHER A EDIÇÃO IMPRESSA? |
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| FOTO DA EDIÇÃO DE MARÇO DE 2011 DA VOGUE QUE ESTAVA NO SITE DA REVISTA. (FOTOS DE JAMES NACHTWEY) |
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| REPRODUÇÃO DA REVISTA NA VERSÃO IMPRESSA |
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| CAPA DA EDIÇÃO DE MARÇO DE 2011 |
A esposa do tirano sírio Bashar al-Assad, Asma al-Assad, a “Rosa do Deserto”, como foi chamada pela Vogue americana, na edição de março de 2011, anda meio ausente do noticiário, e das revistas de moda e de famosos, como costumava acontecer com frequência.
Mesmo no Brasil petista Asma foi muito reverenciada como expressão de modernidade. A Síria é governada pelo Partido Baath, um partido nacional socialista de inspiração nazi e que chegou a fazer um convênio com o PT. Sendo Asma mulher de um nacional socialista, deve ser avançada e moderna. Mas e o regime do marido, uma ditadura? Isso é outro assunto?
Asma al-Assad, nestes 11 anos que seu marido governa a Síria com mão-de-ferro, foi capa e objeto de dezenas de reportagens, vendendo a imagem (falsa, certamente) de uma Síria moderna, civilizada, avançada, multi-religiosa.
Enquanto Alma desfilava deslumbrante pelas capitais do Ocidente, numa espécie de trabalho de Relações Públicas do governo de seu marido, os jornalistas ocidentais só queriam saber de sua jovialidade, beleza, elegância, educação, as jóias, a simpatia pelo povo pobre da Síria (onde já vi isso antes?).
Afinal uma mulher moderna num pais islâmico, uma mulher cosmopolita, inglesa, com curso superior, descendente de sírios ingleses.
A ditadura dos Assad, há mais de 40 anos (de pai para filho como todas as boas ditaduras e socialismos (Cuba, Coréia do Norte) , nem era mencionada ou questionada.
Asma al-Assad caiu como uma encomenda sob medida para o regime de seu marido ditador. De fato, enquanto ela desfilava seu charme pelo mundo Assad adiantava planos nucleares, com apoio do Irã, papagueava contra Israel, e contra o Ocidente, com seus aliados do Hamas e outros terroristas.
De qualquer modo, tudo caminhava mais ou menos em ordem no pais, até que começou a tal chamada Primavera Árabe.
Uma série de movimentos de protesto e de rebelião que começou pela Tunísia em dezembro de 2010. Diversos paises do Oriente Médio e do Norte da África foram abalados por multidões nas ruas, sendo que alguns ficaram sem seus ditadores, varridos pelas massas (mas de fasto pelos organizadores dos protestos que, como sempre, manejam cordéis nos bastidores: a irmandade muçulmana e os radicais islâmicos).
No Ocidente, de analistas idiotizados, o movimento foi visto como uma onda em busca da Democracia. Nada mais falso. Pode ser que muitos queiram um pouco mais de liberdade, eleições, diversos partidos e um estado laico. Mas os árabes nunca tiveram isso. Pelo que se observa, após as derrubadas de ditadores as coisas caminham na direção contrária à liberdade, e sim para um maior fechamento, e não abertura.
O peso das mesquitas será muito maior que o do Facebook, como imaginavam os deslumbrados pela tecnologia. O Corão, em suas interpretações radicais, ainda pesa mais que a Internet.
À medida que a rebelião se espalhou, Asma al-Assad foi ficando constrangida de circular pelo mundo cheia de glamour. Em sua última visita à Inglaterra o The Independent a questionou duramente sobre o que ela achava dos massacres promovidos pelo seu marido, com o uso de tropas militares.
Estima-se que na Síria já morreram este ano cerca de 4 mil pessoas, a maioria morta pelos militares da repressão. Claro que não sou tonto e sei que o que começou como protestos pacíficos da população civil logo foi instrumentalizado pela oposição e os civis desarmados logo começaram a dar o ar de sua graça armados com fuzis russos Ak-47. De onde saíram essas armas?
O que vemos hoje na Síria é o início de uma guerra civil, em que o governo será pressionado pela oposição (vários grupos com metas diferentes), pelos radicais religiosos, pela Liga Árabe e, talvez, pela ONU. Creio que Bashar al-Assad cairá logo, não resistirá como Muamar Kadafi, pois não é louco como o libio era.
Além disso, Assad tem a Asma, que eu, se fosse ele, mandava loguinho para Londres ou algum outro lugar, pois Damasco, logo, logo, não será mais recomendável para damas tão finas e delicadas quanto ela.
SOBRE A VOGUE.
A revista americana, seguindo a linha de outras tantas publicações, fez uma reportagem falando de Asma e do dia-a-dia da família, com fotos de Assad brincando com os filhos. Enquanto isso suas tropas já matavam civis. Isso pegou muito mal e a revista resolveu tirar a matéria do ar. Este episódio um verdadeiro absurdo. Uma edição publicada é uma edição publicada, oras. Já imaginaram se a revista resolvesse mandar recolher todas as unidades impressas. Isso, até pouco tempo, seria impensável nos Estados Unidos, mas hoje, como a America se transforma na pátria da idiotice politicamente correta já não duvido mais de nada.
A publicação foi uma escolha da revista. Se foi pega no contra-pé pelos fatos da política, azar, a revista precisa respeitar mais seus leitores. E, neste caso, respeitar é aguentar o tranco, não varrer a reportagem para debaixo do tapete.
Viram como a América está cada vez mais parecida com o Brasil?
http://cifwatch.com/2011/04/25/a-“rose-in-the-desert”-smells-like-shit/
ENGLISH TEXT FROM VOGUE
Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert
Written by vogue.com
Saturday, 19 March 2011 00:25
Asma al-Assad, Syria’s dynamic first lady, is on a mission to create a beacon of culture and secularism in a powder-keg region—and to put a modern face on her husband’s regime.
Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.” She is the first lady of Syria.
Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote. In Syria, power is hereditary. The country’s alliances are murky. How close are they to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah? There are souvenir Hezbollah ashtrays in the souk, and you can spot the Hamas leadership racing through the bar of the Four Seasons. Its number-one enmity is clear: Israel. But that might not always be the case. The United States has just posted its first ambassador there since 2005, Robert Ford.
Iraq is next door, Iran not far away. Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, is 90 minutes by car from Damascus. Jordan is south, and next to it the region that Syrian maps label Palestine. There are nearly one million refugees from Iraq in Syria, and another half-million displaced Palestinians.
“It’s a tough neighborhood,” admits Asma al-Assad.
It’s also a neighborhood intoxicatingly close to the dawn of civilization, where agriculture began some 10,000 years ago, where the wheel, writing, and musical notation were invented. Out in the desert are the magical remains of Palmyra, Apamea, and Ebla. In the National Museum you see small 4,000-year-old panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl that is echoed in the new mother-of-pearl furniture for sale in the souk. Christian Louboutin comes to buy the damask silk brocade they’ve been making here since the Middle Ages for his shoes and bags, and has incidentally purchased a small palace in Aleppo, which, like Damascus, has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years.
The first lady works out of a small white building in a hilly, modern residential neighborhood called Muhajireen, where houses and apartments are crammed together and neighbors peer and wave from balconies. The first impression of Asma al-Assad is movement—a determined swath cut through space with a flash of red soles. Dark-brown eyes, wavy chin-length brown hair, long neck, an energetic grace. No watch, no jewelry apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green. She’s breezy, conspiratorial, and fun. Her accent is English but not plummy. Despite what must be a killer IQ, she sometimes uses urban shorthand: “I was, like. . . .”
Asma Akhras was born in London in 1975, the eldest child and only daughter of a Syrian Harley Street cardiologist and his diplomat wife, both Sunni Muslims. They spoke Arabic at home. She grew up in Ealing, went to Queen’s College, and spent holidays with family in Syria. “I’ve dealt with the sense that people don’t expect Syria to be normal. I’d show my London friends my holiday snaps and they’d be—‘Where did you say you went?’ ”
She studied computer science at university, then went into banking. “It wasn’t a typical path for women,” she says, “but I had it all mapped out.” By the spring of 2000, she was closing a big biotech deal at JP Morgan in London and about to take up an MBA at Harvard. She started dating a family friend: the second son of president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar, who’d cut short his ophthalmology studies in London in 1994 and returned to Syria after his older brother, Basil, heir apparent to power, died in a car crash. They had known each other forever, but a ten-year age difference meant that nothing registered—until it did.
“I was always very serious at work, and suddenly I started to take weekends, or disappear, and people just couldn’t figure it out,” explains the first lady. “What do you say—‘I’m dating the son of a president’? You just don’t say that. Then he became president, so I tried to keep it low-key. Suddenly I was turning up in Syria every month, saying, ‘Granny, I miss you so much!’ I quit in October because by then we knew that we were going to get married at some stage. I couldn’t say why I was leaving. My boss thought I was having a nervous breakdown because nobody quits two months before bonus after closing a really big deal. He wouldn’t accept my resignation. I was, like, ‘Please, really, I just want to get out, I’ve had enough,’ and he was ‘Don’t worry, take time off, it happens to the best of us.’ ” She left without her bonus in November and married Bashar al-Assad in December.
“What I’ve been able to take away from banking was the transferable skills—the analytical thinking, understanding the business side of running a company—to run an NGO or to try and oversee a project.” She runs her office like a business, chairs meeting after meeting, starts work many days at six, never breaks for lunch, and runs home to her children at four. “It’s my time with them, and I get them fresh, unedited—I love that. I really do.” Her staff are used to eating when they can. “I have a rechargeable battery,” she says.
The 35-year-old first lady’s central mission is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls “active citizenship.” “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.”
In 2005 she founded Massar, built around a series of discovery centers where children and young adults from five to 21 engage in creative, informal approaches to civic responsibility. Massar’s mobile Green Team has touched 200,000 kids across Syria since 2005. The organization is privately funded through donations. The Syria Trust for Development, formed in 2007, oversees Massar as well as her first NGO, the rural micro-credit association FIRDOS, and SHABAB, which exists to give young people business skills they need for the future.
And then there’s her cultural mission: “People tend to see Syria as artifacts and history,” she says. “For us it’s about the accumulation of cultures, traditions, values, customs. It’s the difference between hardware and software: the artifacts are the hardware, but the software makes all the difference—the customs and the spirit of openness. We have to make sure that we don’t lose that. . . . ” Here she gives an apologetic grin. “You have to excuse me, but I’m a banker—that brand essence.”
That brand essence includes the distant past. There are 500,000 important ancient works of art hidden in storage; Asma al-Assad has brought in the Louvre to create a network of museums and cultural attractions across Syria, and asked Italian experts to help create a database of the 5,000 archaeological sites in the desert. “Culture,” she says, “is like a financial asset. We have an abundance of it, thousands of years of history, but we can’t afford to be complacent.”
In December, Asma al-Assad was in Paris to discuss her alliance with the Louvre. She dazzled a tough French audience at the International Diplomatic Institute, speaking without notes. “I’m not trying to disguise culture as anything more than it is,” she said, “and if I sound like I’m talking politics, it’s because we live in a politicized region, a politicized time, and we are affected by that.”
The French ambassador to Syria, Eric Chevallier, was there: “She managed to get people to consider the possibilities of a country that’s modernizing itself, that stands for a tolerant secularism in a powder-keg region, with extremists and radicals pushing in from all sides—and the driving force for that rests largely on the shoulders of one couple. I hope they’ll make the right choices for their country and the region. ”
Damascus evokes a dusty version of a Mediterranean hill town in an Eastern-bloc country. The courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque at night looks exactly like St. Mark’s square in Venice. When I first arrive, I’m met on the tarmac by a minder, who gives me a bouquet of white roses and lends me a Syrian cell phone; the head minder, a high-profile American PR, joins us the next day. The first lady’s office has provided drivers, so I shop and see sights in a bubble of comfort and hospitality. On the rare occasions I am out alone, a random series of men in leather jackets seems to be keeping close tabs on what I am doing and where I am headed.
“I like things I can touch. I like to get out and meet people and do things,” the first lady says as we set off for a meeting in a museum and a visit to an orphanage. “As a banker, you have to be so focused on the job at hand that you lose the experience of the world around you. My husband gave me back something I had lost.”
She slips behind the wheel of a plain SUV, a walkie-talkie and her cell thrown between the front seats and a Syrian-silk Louboutin tote on top. She does what the locals do—swerves to avoid crazy men who run across busy freeways, misses her turn, checks your seat belt, points out sights, and then can’t find a parking space. When a traffic cop pulls her over at a roundabout, she lowers the tinted window and dips her head with a playful smile. The cop’s eyes go from slits to saucers.
Her younger brother Feras, a surgeon who moved to Syria to start a private health-care group, says, “Her intelligence is both intellectual and emotional, and she’s a master at harmonizing when, and how much, to use of each one.”
Photographed by James Nachtwey
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