Syrians who have fled to Britain since the start of the civil war in 2011 have said they plan to return home, as revelers gathered in Piccadilly Square in central London last weekend, celebrating the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime with chants and waving Syrian flags.
Assad's regime was notorious for its extreme cruelty, routine use of torture and state killings, as well as brutal attempts to suppress activists for democracy and freedom.
But Assad, in addition to being a tyrant, is also a doctor, which makes his callousness even harder to fathom. His father, Hafez, was also a tyrant, and the dynasty combined brutal murders similar to those at medieval courts with the ruthless sectarian hatred that is present throughout the Middle East.
Bashar al-Assad trained as an ophthalmologist and worked at the Western Eye Hospital in Marylebone. He chose to specialize in ophthalmology because it involved less contact with blood. His father Hafez reportedly chose the shy, gentle Bashar for the medical profession, while the older son, the arrogant and aggressive Basil, was the heir apparent and the younger brother Maher was frighteningly unpredictable. However, after Basil was killed in an accident, the quiet ophthalmologist was called to the throne.
The Hippocratic Oath instructs physicians to value and respect human life and to save it whenever possible. Yet Bashar al-Assad has become the latest murderous despot to train as a doctor - or "doctor".
Doctors raise the question of whether medical education actually makes it easier to commit murder. If society is regarded as a body politic, is not the physician perfectly qualified to cleanse it of the germs of opposition, rid it of the germs of treachery, and use the scalpel of government to remove tumors? Isn't a scalpel a finer instrument than a sword, mace or machine gun?
Even more striking are the heads of terrorist organizations who are also medically trained - their case is even stranger, because while doctors can pretend to be statesmen far from conflict, "doc-terrorists" are intimately involved in killing innocent women and children.
The first doctor was the American adventurer William Walker, who trained and worked as a doctor before launching a series of extraordinary expeditions that culminated in his becoming the murderous president and generalissimo of Nicaragua in 1856. He didn't last long - he was executed in 1860 when he was only 36 years old.
The most powerful African doctor was Doctor Felix Ufoue-Boanji, the Francophile despot of the Ivory Coast, who began his exceptional career as a doctor, then was a minister in the French governments in the 30s, and also worked in the presidency of the Ivory Coast for XNUMX years. His moment of megalomania was building a Catholic cathedral in the middle of the Ivory Coast jungle, which is actually bigger than St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
Doctors raise the question of whether medical education actually makes it easier to commit murder. If society is regarded as a body politic, is not the physician perfectly qualified to cleanse it of the germs of opposition, rid it of the germs of treachery, and use the scalpel of government to remove tumors? Isn't a scalpel a finer instrument than a sword, mace or machine gun
His contemporary, Dr Hastings Banda, who ran a reign of terror in Malawi for nearly 40 years, trained as a doctor in Tennessee and then at the University of Edinburgh in 1941, before practicing as a doctor in northern England and London: he was a specialist in venereal diseases of soldiers and sailors during the war. This may have inspired his brutal treatment of opposition members, who were thrown to crocodiles, as well as his puritanical moral laws that banned miniskirts, boots and blouses for women.
The old lion began to lose control in the 100s, and may have been over XNUMX years old when he died.
The third in this trio of doctors at the end of the 20th century was Dr. Francois Divalier, who turned Haiti into a hellish torture chamber, but always used his medical training and disease terminology to gain confidence and justify repression. He called himself Papa Doc, a nickname meant to convey an impression of paternal reliability, and gained popularity with a medical campaign against tropical diseases. Elected president in 1957, he consolidated power using his eerily theatrical Tonton Makut militia, combining the pleasant prestige of a caring family doctor with the deadly power of Baron Samedi, a voodoo spirit associated with death and the divine grace of Jesus Christ. The Tonton Makuta brazenly killed at least 30.000 people before handing over power to his son, Baby Dok Diwali, who soon lost power.
More recently, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Dr. Radovan Karadžić, who was convicted of crimes against humanity in ethnic cleansing and mass murders during the Balkan wars, an associate of President Milošević, became a doctor and psychiatrist. Before entering politics, he was known as the doctor of the Serbian football team.
Many of the most prominent terrorist leaders trained as doctors: Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a close associate of Osama bin Laden and mastermind of the 11/2022 attacks, who was the formal leader of Al Qaeda until his death in a US airstrike in XNUMX, was a doctor and a surgeon. He worked in Egyptian military clinics, a hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and later with the Red Crescent in Pakistan. He also occasionally served as Bin Laden's personal physician.
Terrorists like Dr. George Habash, the Palestinian leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in the 1970s, and Dr. Abdel Rantisi, the Hamas leader responsible for the suicide bombings of Israeli civilians in the 1990s, were trained and active doctors dedicated to the destruction of innocents. and random human bodies instead of healing them.
However, in the case of Bashar al-Assad, it is striking how often he used the language of medical healing and cleansing in his political discourse. Assad regularly spoke of the germs of Muslim fundamentalism. I wonder if he understands the paradox of his life the way Diwali did: "A doctor," said Papa Doc, "sometimes has to take a life to save it." Of course, there are cases when the doctor himself is the disease.
standard.co.uk
Translation: A.Š.
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