Syria shows it’s no coincidence dictators are often doctors

Bashar al-Assad, right, shakes hands with late Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdel-Aziz in Damascus.

The fall of the Syrian dictator ­Bashar al-Assad has revived a question that has intrigued me for years. Why are some of the most bloodthirsty tyrants also qualified doctors?

Assad is by training an ophthalmologist. Among the godfathers of Islamist terrorism, there has been a steady stream of doctors. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s henchman, was a surgeon who practised at Egyptian army clinics, a Saudi Arabian hospital and with the Red Crescent in Pakistan.

George Habash, who founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Fathi Shaqaqi, a founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, were doctors.

Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, the Hamas leader behind the human bomb attacks against Israelis in the 1990s, studied pediatric medicine and taught parasitology and genetics. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who was found guilty of crimes against humanity in the Balkan wars, qualified as a doctor and psychiatrist.

Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the despot of Ivory Coast from the 1960s to the 1990s, started out as a doctor. His contemporary, Hastings Banda, who ruled Malawi in a reign of terror and fed opposition members to crocodiles, trained as a doctor in Tennessee and at Edinburgh University and practised medicine in England.

In Haiti in the 1960s, Francois Duvalier, a qualified doctor who won popularity through a campaign against tropical diseases, used his nickname Papa Doc to win trust and justify his repression.

The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore also wondered about this phenomenon. In an article in 2013, he noted that Assad chose to specialise in treating the eyes ­because this involved less contact with blood. Yet Assad is up to his own eyes in blood, having presided over the slaughter of some 600,000 people in Syria’s terrible civil war.

Despite their ruthless behaviour, however, such people usually don’t view themselves as killers. Assad often used the language of medical healing and cleansing.

Such individuals may see themselves as fighting injustice or doing the work of God. Indeed, they often view killing as the highest form of sanctified duty. In 1998, Zawahiri and bin Laden signed a fatwa declaring: “The judgment to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military, is an obligation for every Muslim.”

Zawahiri’s brother, Muhammad, told CNN in 2012: “Before you call me and my brother terrorists, let’s define its meaning. If it means those who are bloodthirsty merciless killers, then this is not what we are about.”

This is because jihadi killers believe they are treating a diseased organism in the form of the non-Islamic world that must be purged of spiritual poison and made healthy by the application of Islam.

Maybe the reason so many tyrants and terrorists turn out to be doctors is because the idealistic ­impulse to treat sick people translates, under the pressure of ideology or perceived injustice, into a desire to remedy the apparent sickness of the body politic. That’s why the national conversation about Islamic human bomb terrorists is always conducted entirely at cross-purposes. The West believes that such terrorism can be motivated only by despair. On the contrary, the jihadi bomber believes he is achieving the highest possible ideal of holy work.

This radical disjunction has reportedly been understood by none other than the daughter of MI5’s director-general, Ken McCallum. When he finally told his children the nature of his work, his daughter asked him: “Dad, the people that you work against, do they think they’re doing the right thing too?” As McCallum said, this was a good question. Indeed, his daughter had grasped an important point. It’s a fair bet that bad people don’t wake up in the morning and think “How many evil deeds can I perpetrate today?” They all justify to themselves the terrible things they do.

Francois Duvalier

Assad claimed he was fighting the war to protect his country against religious fanatics. Russia’s President Putin claims that, by invading neighbouring countries, he is reuniting his dismembered motherland and righting a historic wrong. The Soviet Union thought it was creating the workers’ paradise. Hitler thought he was ridding the human race of impurities. The 18th-century French revolutionaries thought that, by guillotining aristocrats during the Terror, they were saving France from a corrupted elite.

We may look at the bodies piled up and perceive, in the fanaticism that secured their fate, a monstrous abuse of power. To the perpetrators, however, the idealistic end always justifies the horrific means. Over the years, many philosophers have concluded that idealism is the road to hell. This is because ideals are a fantasy of perfection detached from reality. They set up binary choices – oppressor versus oppressed, corruption versus purity or, as activists chant, “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere”.

But life is messy. People disagree profoundly about which ­ideals to pursue. The divisions are often blurred and the choices overlap. It’s because utopia is unattainable that those pursuing ideals such as the eradication of want or prejudice end up browbeating, scapegoating or wiping out those seen to be standing in their way.

Monstrous individuals tell themselves the lie that they’re fighting the good fight. Assad told himself such a lie; those now fighting to replace him are undoubtedly men in the grip of similarly lethal illusions. Idealism can express noble emotions; but it is also a ­direct line to tyranny and worse.

The Times