The World

Bassel was short, bearded, athletic and rugged, a winner of equestrian tournaments, friends with King Hussein’s equestrienne daughter, an enthusiast for guns, sports cars and Lebanese girls. Trained in Russia, now commander of the Presidential Security, he was the beloved favourite of his father, Hafez al-Assad, whom he advised on Lebanon. The president portrayed him as the young Saladin, the Golden Knight, on horseback fighting Crusaders and Zionists. His companion in the car was also at the heart of the dynasty: Makhlouf’s aunt was Anisa Assad, the first lady, his brother Rami already emerging as the family’s business fixer.

Ailing with diabetes and arteriosclerosis, Assad based his dynasty on his alliance with Iran, which would protect him from his rival Saddam. But he was infuriated by the emergence of secret talks between Rabin, now Israeli prime minister, and Arafat, PLO chairman.

As successive US presidents, starting with Carter, tried to nurture peace, Israel had refused to negotiate with the terrorist organization for over twenty years. Now Rabin allowed his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to start secret negotiations. The two – laconic Rabin, visionary Peres – hated each other. Peres orchestrated secret conversations in Oslo between an Israeli academic and a Palestinian official that developed into Israeli recognition of the PLO and vice versa, establishing a Palestinian Authority, the first step towards a state, and the sharing of Jerusalem. ‘I said peace first, then the details,’ Peres recalled. ‘Peace is like love: first you have to trust.’ To Assad this was betrayal, but for King Hussein, who had managed to appease his menacing Arab neighbours Saddam and Assad while secretly meeting with Rabin for decades, it was an opportunity: Hussein joined the process. On 13 September 1993, at the White House, Rabin and Arafat, accompanied by King Hussein, hosted by Clinton, signed the peace accords. A month later Hussein and Rabin signed their own treaty.

Watching this in Damascus, Assad ordered the assassination of King Hussein. He was not the only one reaching for his pistol. On 4 November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish zealot. The killing started the disintegration of the Oslo Accords, exacerbated by Israeli nationalists and Palestinian extremists. When Rabin’s successors offered a division of Jerusalem, Arafat rejected it. The two-state solution – the only hope for peace – remained frozen. ‘We’re not ashamed, nor are we afraid,’ said Hussein at Rabin’s funeral in Jerusalem, ‘nor are we anything but determined to continue the legacy for which my friend fell, as did my grandfather in this very city when I was with him – and but a boy.’ Hussein, warned by the CIA, avoided Assad’s assassins, but secretly he was suffering from cancer. His brother Hassan was crown prince, but he started to groom his eldest son, Abdullah.

In Damascus, Bassel al-Assad was killed in that car crash, his cousin wounded. Hafez ordered mourning for the ‘Martyr of the Nation’. Three children were left: the youngest, Maher, was a stocky trigger-happy officer with anger-management issues; the second youngest Madj had mental problems; and a middle brother, Bashar, was a doctor living in London under an assumed name. Anisa favoured Maher, but Assad summoned the twenty-eight-year-old Bashar, tall, lanky, chinless with a lisp and a liking for Phil Collins music – an unlikely candidate for dictator. He had become an ophthalmic surgeon because he hated blood, yet he was about to unleash a level of butchery even his father had never contemplated.

The Communist rulers who survived were those who combined dynasty with ideology. The Castro brothers endured in Cuba. In North Korea, Kim Il-sung curated his succession. On 8 July 1994, when Kim died aged eighty-two, he was not only embalmed^* but also declared the immortal Eternal President, while his carefully laid plan for a hereditary Marxist dynasty smoothly raised his son, Kim Jong-il, to the throne. Born in Russia, named Yuri – the family called him Yura – he had been educated in China during the Korean War (sometimes holidaying secretly in Malta), while starting his rise quietly in the Party apparat, until 1980 when his father promoted him to Dear Leader and Supreme Commander.