Dr. Bashar, Greetings, I knew you as a doctor before you became president. I used to address you as Dr. Bashar, and continued to do so even after the year 2000, between the Al-Rawda Palace and the Presidential Palace that overlooks Damascus. I hardly remember a year during which I did not see you at least once or twice, since 1994, when you returned to Damascus after finishing your medical studies in Britain. As I listened to your speech yesterday I was telling myself, you are the president. You are the one responsible. You are responsible if protests demanding reform and change erupted. You are the one responsible if you did not anticipate them, and responsible if you did not deal with them well. You are also the one responsible if there are ‘saboteurs'. Why did the security services not anticipate their subversion? I hear there are other actors in Syria. But none of those who wrote about you know you as much as I do. Based on this, I say that I never felt you shared power with anyone else. Every Arab ruler is a Pharaoh, whether his people rose up against him or not. Hosni Mubarak, for instance, acted exactly as I expected him to act. His opinion was that he was sacrificing by accepting to be Egypt's president, and the Egyptians must thus be grateful to him for being their president. In his last years, he was living in his own world, surrounded by bad elements, and was thus isolated from the world we know, until the events we know came to pass. I saw in you the opposite of Hosni Mubarak. You lived in the world of all the people, and worked, or could work 18 hours each day, compared to Mubarak's half-an-hour. And yet I found you acting every day as I did not expect you to act. Reforms should have preceded your speech at the Parliament and yesterday's speech. I do not understand why this did not happen. You are not like Hosni Mubarak, whether in regard to age or health issues. I have always found you to be up to date with all developments and their details, and to have a boldness that once saved Syria when the George W. Bush administration declared a policy of ‘regime change' and publicly targeted your country along with Iran. Perhaps I can find the answer to my question in your famous interview with the Wall Street Journal, published on 13/1/2011. Aside from the first question, which was a courtesy, your first words in response to the second question was about stagnant waters in the Middle East, and then your assertion that Syria is outside of what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia. But why did you presume that Syria is free of stagnant waters, or that it is different from any other Arab country when it is the “beating heart of the Arabs”? I heard this description of Syria being uttered by Dr. Nabil Arabi in a meeting I had with him a few days earlier. He spoke diplomatically, but if I were to translate what he said to what the readers can understand, it would be that the Egyptian government wants to help Syria, but that the Syrian president is not cooperating, nor facilitating the task for Egypt. Dr. Bashar had also shunned Ban-Ki moon only to talk to him afterwards. I too could not reach the Syrian officials that I know, and believed this involved me alone, until I found out that you are not talking to the majority of the world. If you only read what they are writing abroad. I, like you, never trusted President Sarkozy for a day. His stance on the developments in Syria shows his insidious intents. Then there are the American ‘liberal' newspapers; on the 15th of this month, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Syria's Ruling Alawite Sect”. On the following day, the Los Angeles Times published an article on the same subject entitled “Syrian crackdown fans sectarian flames”, and both articles spoke of Alawite dominance over the regime. And as you gave your speech yesterday, I was reading an article in the Washington Post entitled “Obama must tell Assad to go”. But I absolutely reject that any Arab president leave or stay except at the behest of his people. Are you aware that this is the first time in my life that I use the word “Alawite” in anything that I have written? You now need every single friend you have, from Egypt to people like me, and you need before this to learn to differentiate between friend and foe. What you don't need is the emergency law, the security services and the Baath Party, and I have personally seen the extent of your popularity before the recent events unfolded. Every so-called friend who supported your stances over the past two months has effectively encouraged you to walk the path of ruin, and is therefore no different than the French president, an American newspaper or Israel. Those want ruin for all of Syria, not just you alone, while we want an honorable exit from the crisis. By virtue of my age, I knew Syria before you did. I have known Syria since my childhood, and I attended the Damascus International Fair in its first year. I even slept once, when all the hotels were fully booked, in the Umayyad Mosque with some of my friends when we were students and I have hundreds of Syrian friends. Are hotels fully booked today? You, Dr. Bashar, are responsible. You can, if you wish, change direction tomorrow, and win back your people (you will never win back the outside world without them). Do not squander in two months what you built in 11 years. Your talk about looking to the future is something we all say and want. But we want for Syria a promising future and reforms like the ones demanded by their advocates, to thwart the plans of the saboteurs and extremists. I still trust your ability to chart out a path for the future that satisfies your people. [email protected]
