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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Their husbands have run some of the most brutal regimes of the Arab world.
But who are the women who stand by the dictators?
In December 2010, the French first lady Carla Bruni sat down to lunch under
the gold chandeliers of the Elysée palace with Asma al-Assad, wife of the
Syrian leader Bashar. As they sat demurely with their husbands around a
butterfly-print tablecloth dominated by a pastel flower-arrangement, a
photographer was ushered in to grab a picture for French celebrity magazines
. After all, this was a communion of fashion's high priestesses: a former
Italian supermodel turned folk-singer entertaining a Chanel-loving, London-
raised, former banker and conveniently westernised Middle Eastern first lady
. French Elle had recently voted Asma "the most stylish woman in world
politics", Paris Match called her "an eastern Diana", a "ray of light in a
country full of shadow zones".
Only days after the lunch, a desperate Tunisian vegetable seller would set
himself alight, sparking the first revolution of the Arab spring. Already,
as the Sarkozys' butlers served the Assads crystal glasses of freshly
squeezed juice from silver platters, there was unease among certain
diplomats about the French president schmoozing the ruler of an oppressive
dictatorship known for torture, brutality and political prisoners. But
Nicolas Sarkozy, an expert on the importance of photogenic wives in politics
, saw Asma as his insurance policy. "When we explained that this was the
worst kind of tyrant, Sarkozy would say: 'Bashar protects Christians, and
with a wife as modern as his, he can't be completely bad,'" the former
French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner later confided to journalists.
Now, after 11 months of bloody repression of the pro-democracy uprising in
Syria, with thousands dead and tens of thousands of refugees spilled over
Syria's borders, Asma's careful public-relations strategy as the gentle
British-born face of the regime has crumbled. When she appeared smiling and
immaculately dressed on Sunday alongside her husband to vote in a referendum
on a new constitution, it only deepened opposition accusations that she has
become a modern-day Marie-Antoinette. The row over a shockingly fawning,
lengthy puff-piece in American Vogue last year depicting Asma's Louboutin
shoes and charity work, as well as a recent appearance at a rally hugging
her children in support of her husband and an email to the Times explaining
her backing of him, has reopened the debate about the role of dictators'
wives in the Arab spring.
"Every revolution has its Lady Macbeth," sighed one Middle East expert in
Paris. The dictators' wives are all very different, united by the varying
degrees of hatred they inspired, eye-watering fortunes, expensive wardrobes
and often a state-sanctioned so-called "feminism" or, like Asma al-Assad,
charity work as a public distraction against the brutal realities of the
regime.
Leila Trabelsi, the politically ambitious wife of Tunisia's Zine El-Abidine
Ben Ali, was easily the most detested, a monstrous symbol of nepotism and
corruption, whose embezzlement of state wealth made Imelda Marcos's nearly 3
,000 pair of shoes seem trifling. Trabelsi sparked the sense of injustice
that flamed the revolution, keeping a mafia-style hold of the nation's
economy, siphoning off riches to her and her husband's family, who were
thought to control 30-40% of the economy, running everything from customs to
car-dealers, supermarket chains and banana importations. She and her
relatives are accused of ordering people from their homes if they wanted
their land, confiscating their businesses if they thought they could profit
from them. Trabelsi took archaeological artefacts to decorate her palace
rooms while her daughter and son in law flew in ice-cream from St-Tropez for
dinner parties.
Described as the woman who sparked the Arab spring, Trabelsi, who liked to
be called "Madame La Présidente", inspires dread in the public imagination.
A book by her butler recently described how she would ritually sacrifice
chameleons to supposedly cast spells over her husband and how she punished
one cook by plunging their hands into boiling oil. From exile in Saudi
Arabia with her husband Ben Ali, the couple are seeking to appeal their
sentencing in absentia last year to 35 years in jail accused of theft and
unlawful possession of large sums of foreign currency, jewellery,
archaeological artefacts, drugs and weapons – the first of several cases
against them. After they fled, $27m (£17m) in cash and jewels, guns and
2kg of drugs were found at one of their lavish palaces outside Tunis.
Suzanne and Hosni Mubarak, 2004 Suzanne and Hosni Mubarak in 2004, when the
latter was still president of Egypt. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
Meanwhile, Suzanne, the half-Welsh wife of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, benefited
from a fortune of billions in a country where around 40% of the population
lives on less than £1.20 per day. She is now being investigated
alongside her husband on allegations of crimes against the state and has
relinquished disputed assets worth nearly £2.5m. Before the Egyptian
revolution, whole newspaper pages were "allocated" to cover Suzanne's "
charitable engagements" and "actions" for women. But like Trabelsi, this was
a facade. The Tunisian first lady headed several official women's rights
bodies, awarding herself prizes for feminism, while grassroots feminist
democracy campaigners saw their members regularly beaten in the street by
the regime's police and political prisoners were raped in torture cells.
Similarly, Suzanne Mubarak would jet off to meet Arab leaders' wives to talk
about women's issues while independent women in Egypt were being heavily
repressed.
Suzanne, 71, whose father was a doctor and mother a nurse from Pontypridd,
married Mubarak when she was 17 and he was a 30-year-old army officer. One
account described her lying weeping on the palace floor, refusing to leave
during the uprising. She influenced government appointments, and was
believed by some to have been clinging to power by pushing for her son to
take over from his father.
In Libya, Colonel Gaddafi was perhaps more famous for his Ukrainian nurse
and female bodyguards than his wife. But Safia Farkash, his second wife, a
nurse when she met him, was still vastly wealthy, a symbol of public money
siphoned off into the family's pockets. His daughter Aisha, once described
as the Claudia Schiffer of the region, a lawyer and part of Saddam Hussein's
defence team, was held up by her father as a model of modern women's rights
. Safia and Aisha fled over the Algerian border during the uprising. Mostly
low-profile, Safia Gaddafi nonetheless occasionally attempted, particularly
to the western media, to play the role of a simple wife and mother,
humanising her husband. In the 1980s, she told the US press she was someone
who was afraid of even a "dead chicken", saying of Gaddafi: "If I thought he
was a terrorist, I would not stay with him and have children with him. He
is a human being."
But the western media's apparent thirst for a new, younger generation of
glossy magazine-style, modern, educated Middle Eastern first ladies along
the line of Jordan's Queen Rania (ranked third most beautiful woman in the
world by Harpers and Queen in 2005) seemed to have been sated by the arrival
of Syria's Asma al-Assad in 2000. "Curiously, the Assads before the
revolution were seen as a modern young couple," says Karim Bitar of Paris's
Institute for International and Strategic Relations. Then a new "cold,
calculating" face emerged.
Leila Trabelsi, wife of former Tunisian president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali
Leila Trabelsi, wife of former Tunisian president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in
2010. Photograph: Hassene Dridi/AP
Asma was born in London to Syrian parents, a Harley Street surgeon and a
diplomat, and raised in a pebble-dashed semi in Acton, going to a Church of
England primary school and smart private secondary before taking a degree in
computer science at King's College London and a banking job for JP Morgan.
She was a childhood friend of the Assads, 10 years younger than Bashar, who
had come to London to study as an eye surgeon. She was also a Sunni Muslim
whose father hailed from Homs, unlike Bashar's minority Alawite clan. All
this could be used, by a skilled PR team, as the soft face of a would-be
reformist regime. "Who would choose Harvard over love?" Asma told one
interviewer when asked if she hesitated about leaving her banking career and
an MBA to become first lady of Syria. She said she would use her
professional financial experience and "a critical judgment, being able to
work under enormous pressure" in her new role running NGOs. In Damascus, she
and her husband liked to be seen dining out, driving themselves around, a
carefully constructed image of a carefree young couple who preferred the
luxury of a vast apartment to the luxury of a palace. In Paris, she became
famous for delivering a long speech on culture without notes while Christine
Lagarde, now head of the IMF, looked on admiringly. In a 2009 CNN interview
Asma condemned Israel's offensive on the Gaza strip as "barbaric" and "as a
mother and a human being" demanded its end. "This is the 21st century.
Where in the world could this happen? Unfortunately it is happening," she
said in her measured, almost mechanical voice, with its clipped London tones
. Those words have come back to haunt her.
The pinnacle of Asma's international media charm offensive was a gushing
piece in last March's American Vogue, just before the Syrian uprising began
and was met with a crackdown. The article has now mysteriously disappeared
from the magazine's website. Described as a "rose in the desert", "the
freshest and most magnetic of first ladies", Asma, dressed in jeans, heels
and a T-shirt with "Happiness" emblazoned on the back, describes how her
home, a triplex apartment, is run "on wildly democratic principles" –
seemingly far from the brutal one-party state oppression going on outside.
Looking at her three children, she says: "We all vote on what we want, and
where." Pointing to the dining room chandelier, which is constructed from
cut-out comic books, she says: "They outvoted us three to two on that."
Against a backdrop of designer bags, private jets and SUVs, Asma tells Vogue
her "central mission" is "to change the mind-set of 6 million Syrians under
18", encourage them to engage in what she calls "active citizenship".
Meanwhile pro-democracy activists were being rounded up and tortured.
In the Assad's flat, a grid is drawn on a blackboard, with ticks for each
member of the family. "We were having trouble with politeness, so we made a
chart: ticks for when they spoke as they should, and a cross if they didn't.
" There is a cross next to Asma's name. "I shouted," she confesses. "I can't
talk about empowering young people, encouraging them to be creative and
take responsibility, if I'm not like that with my own children." Her husband
was attracted to studying eye surgery "because it's very precise […] and
there is very little blood". Driving themselves around in a city seemingly
permeated by secret police, she describes the joys of not having an imposing
presence of bodyguards, delighting in how Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie,
while being driven to dinner by the Assads, marvelled at their seeming lack
of security guards.
After the Vogue interview, as the regime's bloody crackdown continued, Asma
went quiet. Out of the blue, her office emailed a statement to the Times
last month after it ran an article asking: "What does Assad's wife, an
intelligent, educated woman raised in liberal Britain and seemingly
dedicated to good works, think of the evils being perpetrated daily across
Syria […]? Is Asma Assad, 36, indifferent to the suffering being inflicted
on her fellow Sunnis by her husband's Alawite henchmen – or appalled? Has
Syria's Princess Diana become its Marie-Antoinette?" Her office's statement
said: "The president is the president of Syria, not a faction of Syrians,
and the first lady supports him in that role." It added: "The first lady's
very busy agenda is still focused on supporting the various charities she
has long been involved with and rural development as well as supporting the
president as needed. These days she is equally involved in bridging gaps and
encouraging dialogue. She listens to and comforts the families of the
victims of the violence." Just before, she had appeared grinning from ear to
ear with two of her children to support her husband as he spoke at a pro-
regime rally, but did not speak herself.
Jane Kinninmont, senior researcher on the Middle East at the Chatham House
thinktank in London, says the leaders' wives in the Arab spring were of
clear "symbolic importance", though Asma al-Assad is different to Tunisia's
Leila Trabelsi, who had been a key source of unrest. "In Syria, the
resistance is very focused on the regime," says Kinninmont. "In the past,
Bashar's wife was something of an asset for him: young, charming,
international, helpful to soften his image. Now that has fallen away. Vogue
last March was a terrible error of judgment. The timing was particularly bad
, but it was part of a wider trend for quite fluffy portraits of dictators'
wives as glamorous woman, saying 'look how good our charity work is'.
Glamorous, well-educated, well-dressed: the western media still falls for
this pseudo aristocratic clap-trap. It's all part of trying to give a pretty
face to a regime."
Kinninmont says the email from Asma's office to the Times was "far too late"
and came across as ridiculous. "Saying how she spent time comforting the
families of victims of violence just seemed out of touch."
In almost all Arab countries it is illegal to directly criticise the head of
state, Kinninmont points out, adding that though sometimes people might
dislike the wives personally it can also at times be a substitute for
criticising the rulers. "In terms of what it is permissible to say, it's a
bit easier to criticise the wife," she says. Sometimes a wife could be the
focus of criticism themselves, or a softer target. But Kinninmont also
blames the western media for creating a media bubble of glamorous first lady
figures.
Asma al-Assad, at the start of her photogenic role as first lady, tried to
keep a distance. Asked by NBC in 2007 about her role as leader's wife, she
said in her icy, careful tone: "That's what I do, it's not who I am. At the
end of the day I'm the same person as I was before I married the president,
and I'll be the same person hopefully going forward." |
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