Rifaat Assad, the estranged brother of former Syrian President Hafez Assad, has hinted that he will work to overthrow a government nearly certain to be headed by the late leader’s son and chosen successor, Bashar Assad.
“There will be a new corrective movement for a new course covering all political, social and economic levels,” Rifaat said in a statement to the Syrian people read last night by an announcer on Arab News Network, a London-based satellite television station owned by Rifaat’s son, Sawmar.By referring to the “corrective movement”, Rifaat was borrowing terminology used to refer to the late President Hafez Assad’s takeover of the government in an November 1970 bloodless coup. Assad, then defense minister, declared the coup was to correct the course of the leadership of the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party, which he said had deviated from its true objectives.Earlier, a spokesman for Rifaat said the former Syrian vice president wanted to bring about change through peaceful means.”Dr Rifaat stresses peaceful action and refraining from spilling blood, and does not want Syria to drown in blood. But he believes that legitimacy will prevail in a rightful way,” said Al-Hareth Al-Khair from his home in exile in Marbella, Spain.Rifaat’s challenge came as Bashar Assad was making his way to the top of Syria’s political hierarchy.In the statement, the 63-year-old Rifaat said his campaign was aimed at changing the way autocratic Syria has been governed for decades.”Freedom and democracy will be established in Syria. The citizen will play his role in building the nation and choosing his representatives in Syria,” he said.Once the feared and effective enforcer of President Assad’s wishes during much of his 30-year rule, Rifaat later tried to overthrow his older brother.
In more recent years, he was seen as a potential threat to 34-year-old Bashar.Rifaat has been living in exile in Europe since 1998 after Hafez Assad stripped him of the title of vice president and forced him out of the country. For years, his activities have been the subject of intrigue – and a cause for alarm.Despite the enmity between the two brothers in recent years, yesterday Rifaat praised the late president as a “father, brother and leader” and denounced the anticipated new leadership under Bashar that “deviated from your guidance”.Two days after the death of the Syrian president, the first public indication surfaced that Rifaat Assad was considered a threat to Bashar when a newspaper reported he would not be allowed to return to Syria.The pan-Arab Al Hayat daily newspaper yesterday quoted an unidentified senior Syrian official as saying orders had been issued to arrest Rifaat should he show up in Syria.The Saudi-owned newspaper, based in London and distributed throughout the Arab world, quoted the official as saying the army and the security services were granted “full powers to carry out anything to stop him from entering the country”.In Lebanon, where 30,000 Syrian troops are stationed, witnesses reported increased security checks at Beirut International Airport and at seaports. Security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Syrian agents were on the lookout for Rifaat in case he tried to sneak through the porous Lebanese border.Yesterday Rifaat decried a ban on him from returning to Syria to attend his brother’s state funeral.”They regarded me as a lurking danger and thus barred me from paying respects and praying before your body,” he said, addressing his words to his late brother.Al-Khair, Rifaat’s spokesman, said the former vice president plans to return home but for now is still in Europe.Rifaat criticised the speed of developments in Damascus in the last two days that cleared the way for Bashar’s rise.”You have left a sudden and tragic vacuum which some believed they could fill, underestimating the issue of your succession and downplaying the enormity of responsibility,” he said.Rifaat added that the current leadership used the emotional outpouring over the death of the president to “carry out measures that violated the constitution, disregarded legitimacy and ridiculed the will of the masses”.In swift steps after Assad’s death on Saturday, the Syrian Parliament lowered the age of eligibility for the presidency to match Bashar’s age, the ruling Baath Party nominated him for the presidency and the government named him commander of the armed forces.Two days earlier, Bashar, an ophthalmologist by profession, was an army colonel with no top post in the government or party.There was no official word from Syria on any measures being taken against Rifaat Assad. But Lt Gen Mustafa Tlass, the longtime defence minister and deputy armed forces chief who has led military men in pledging allegiance to Bashar, warned that the ruling Baath Party and the military backed Bashar against any potential threat.”We will always be on his side. Let no one try to drive a wedge in this united front,” he told Lebanon’s Future television station.Rifaat Assad’s first big public splash was in 1982 when he led his crack army units, the so-called Defence Brigades, in an assault that crushed an uprising by Muslim fundamentalists in the northern city of Hama. A huge swath of the city, spanning both banks of the picturesque Orontes River, was levelled.
Reports of the death toll, never officially disclosed, ranged from 10,000 to 20,000.But in 1983, as the president lay in hospital recuperating from a heart attack, Rifaat’s tanks began manoeuvering on the streets of the capital of Damascus in threatening moves that were seen as an attempted coup.Rifaat spent most of the next few years in exile, returning to Syria for their mother’s funeral in 1992, and was last seen at a public event in Syria in 1994 at the funeral of Basil Assad, the president’s eldest son, who died in a traffic crash.. The World Health Organisation yesterday issued a stark warning about the rise of drug-resistant diseases which threaten to return medicine to the dark days before the discovery of penicillin. The World Health Organisation yesterday issued a stark warning about the rise of drug-resistant diseases which threaten to return medicine to the dark days before the discovery of penicillin.
In a report on the rise of antibiotic resistance, the WHO says that the world has about a decade to act in order to ensure that our grandchildren do not face the same childhood diseases that terrorised our grandparents.The global spread of antibiotic resistance is occurring because of the overuse of anti-microbial drugs by industrialised countries and the underuse of them by the developing world, says the WHO report, called Overcoming Microbial Resistance.The “window of opportunity” to combat the threat is closing. “Before long, we may have forever missed our opportunity to control and eventually eliminate the most dangerous infectious diseases,” the report says.
“Indeed, if we fail to make rapid progress during this decade, it may become very difficult and expensive – if not impossible – to do so later. We need to make effective use of the tools we have now.”The WHO says that 60 per cent of the infections picked up while patients are in hospital are now drug-resistant. It is only a matter of time before the multiply-resistant forms of the most dangerous microbes become resistant to the last, effective antibiotic – vancomycin.Many life-saving medicines are now of little use as a result of potentially fatal microbes – from intestinal infections to tuberculosis – acquiring genes that make them immune to the most powerful drugs.”Microbial resistance to treatment could bring the world back to a pre-antibiotic age… Drug resistance is the most telling sign that we have failed to take the threat of infectious diseases seriously,” the WHO report says.In the countries of the former Soviet Union, for instance, drug-resistant TB is rife, with one in 10 patients suffering from strains that can resist treatment with two of the most effective anti-TB drugs.About 30 per cent of hepatitis-B cases in Thailand are resistant to the primary drug used in treating the infection. In India, 60 per cent of patients with leishmaniasis are drug resistant, as are 98 per cent of patients suffering gonorrhoea.. Britain is in danger of being left behind in the advancement of medical science because of its strict policy on the use ofanimals in experiments. Britain is in danger of being left behind in the advancement of medical science because of its strict policy on the use ofanimals in experiments.
A hundred scientists, including Nobel laureates and 38 Royal Society fellows, have complained to the Government of the time and effort it takes to get permission to use animals.In an open letter to the minister for Science, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, the scientists say it takes months of bureaucracy to obtain a licence for animal studies, against the weeks or days overseas competitors spend on such tasks.The letter says: “We are deeply concerned the United Kingdom may not be able to maintain its position as one of the world’s leading scientific nations in many areas of biotechnology and biomedical science because of the way bureaucracy and delays are impeding the use of animals in research.”The scientists say that with completion of the “first draft” of the human genome expected in days, progress in “postgenomic” medicine will depend even more on animal studies.They say: “At the same time, the UK’s system of regulating the use of animals in research is becoming more lengthy, complex, bureaucratic and inflexible than in other leading scientific nations.