As Bashar al-Assad is ousted as Syria’s brutal president, his wife Asma and children having fled to Russia shortly before, the scenes are too astonishing to settle. We can’t call it a finished revolution, but we can call Assad’s a finished regime and mark the end of the Syrian civil war: 13 years of heinous bloodshed; 580,000 people killed – more than 230,000 of them civilians, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which attributes about 90% of those non-combatant deaths to Assad’s forces.
He never looked the type, foreign correspondents say. Adrian Blomfield in the Telegraph calls Assad “awkward and gangly, his mannerisms unassuming”. John Simpson found him “meek and anxious to please”. And who could forget how un-bloodthirsty, how incongruous, Asma al-Assad looked? Neat and understated, like a wife in a miniseries.
When the Syrian spring erupted in 2011, Vogue magazine ran a profile of Asma al-Assad titled A Rose in the Desert. Her husband had already killed more than 5,000 civilians, including hundreds of children, when Asma was described as “the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies”. The journalist, Joan Juliet Buck, went on to note that “her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment”.
It caused uproar at the time. Vogue defended it initially, but later erased it from its archive, and for a long time the only online record of the piece was on a now defunct Assad fan site. Buck disavowed it, saying she had filed the words in January; Assad’s crackdowns, which led to global calls for his resignation, didn’t start until February. The defence was a little weak, given that Assad had been ruling Syria as a totalitarian police state since he took office in 2000, but the uproar wasn’t really about the journalist herself – who later called Asma al-Assad “the first lady of hell” – it was more a collective realisation that the carefree long 90s were over. The world had got serious, and whatever the new job of geopolitical storytelling was, postmodernism wasn’t up to it. You could no longer look at a repressive leader’s wife and note how elegantly she accessorised: “no watch, no jewellery apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green”.
Or at least, that’s what it felt like that scandal was about at first. In retrospect, the Asma al-Assad profile wasn’t just closing one chapter of history; it was also opening another. The Assad family, it later emerged, had paid an American PR firm, Brown Lloyd James, $5,000 a month to broker that article. Even if it would be another two years before Assad used chemical weapons against his own people – that was 2013, prompting yet more international outrage, to similar lack of effect – he would already have been well aware that his rule did not constitute anything the wider world would call democratic or laudable. It was basically a provocation to the global liberal establishment, as mediated through its style bible: how far are you prepared to turn a blind eye, for the right kind of access? Of course there was never any suggestion that Vogue had been paid to run the piece; rather, that proximity to the mad wealth of the Assads, being allowed to press its nose against the palace windows, was initially enough to make a magazine overlook the human rights violations and concentrate on the glamour.
Vladimir Putin was, around the same time, trying to cast himself as an action hero, releasing photos of himself on horseback, bare-chested, on a Harley, with a tiger. Who needs to have a stick up their arse about kleptocracy when it looks like so much fun? If an autocrat doesn’t look or act like one, if he looks instead like a giraffe (as people said about Bashar al-Assad), or a joker, or a clown, or a reality TV showman, maybe it won’t be such a bad life under him after all.
This impunity seems so obvious now – despots were just taunting the international democratic order with how flaky and negotiable its values were. But at the time it was bewildering.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
