BEIRUT: President Bashar Assad allowed his exiled uncle back into Syria to avoid serving a four-year prison term in France, where has spent more than 30 years, a pro-government newspaper reported late Friday.
Rifaat Assad, 83, was sentenced last year for illegally using Syrian state funds to build a French real estate empire. He was tried in absentia for medical reasons and his lawyer had appealed the decision.
There was no immediate comment from France. Only Al-Watan, a pro-Syrian government newspaper, reported the return of Assad, who fled Syria in 1984 after a failed coup attempt against his brother, late President Hafez Assad.
Al-Watan said President Bashar Assad has forgiven his uncle. It offered no further details.
It was a dramatic falling out between the brothers. Rifaat Assad had served as a vice president and a top commander in the Syrian army.
He was nicknamed “the Butcher of Hama” after human rights groups alleged he supervised an assault that crushed a 1982 uprising in the west-central Syrian province of Hama. Rifaat Assad has denied any role in what came to be known as the Hama massacre. He has also been linked to the 1980 killings of hundreds of prisoners and Syrian army abuses in Lebanon in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Al-Watan said Rifaat Assad returned on Thursday, adding that it learned from unnamed sources that he was allowed to return to prevent him from serving prison time and after his properties in Europe were confiscated.
Transparency International and French anti-corruption group Sherpa filed a complaint in 2013 accusing Rifaat Assad of using shell companies in tax havens to launder public funds from Syria into France. His French holdings, which include several dozen apartments and two luxury townhouses in Paris, have been valued at 90 million euros ($99.5 million). The watchdog groups say the sum is well beyond what he could have earned as a Syrian vice president and military commander.
Assad, who was convicted of money laundering and diversion of public funds, denied wrongdoing. He said the funds that allowed him to buy his French real estate came from generous gifts from his 16 children and Saudi royals.
Rifaat is also being investigated in Switzerland for war crimes related to the 1982 Hama massacre.
Late President Hafez Assad allowed his younger brother to return briefly to Syria in the 1990s to attend his mother’s funeral. But Rifaat Assad was quickly declared a persona non-grata and forced to leave as he was considered a danger to the succession plan from father to son.
Rifaat Assad questioned the constitutionality of Bashar Assad’s rise to power in 2000 and organized opposition to his government from abroad. But he is not believed to have any political weight among the opposition, which had a deep mistrust for the ambitious former military commander.
Syria’s Assad allows exiled uncle to return to avoid prison
https://arab.news/z6fzc
Syria’s Assad allows exiled uncle to return to avoid prison
- Rifaat Assad, 83, was sentenced last year for illegally using Syrian state funds to build a French real estate empire
Fledgling radio station aims to be ‘voice of the people’ in Gaza
- The electricity crisis is one of the most serious and difficult problems in the Gaza Strip, says Shereen Khalifa Broadcaster
DEIR EL-BALAH: From a small studio in the central city of Deir El-Balah, Sylvia Hassan’s voice echoes across the Gaza Strip, broadcast on one of the Palestinian territory’s first radio stations to hit the airwaves after two years of war.
Hassan, a radio host on fledgling station “Here Gaza,” delivers her broadcast from a well-lit room, as members of the technical team check levels and mix backing tracks on a sound deck. “This radio station was a dream we worked to achieve for many long months and sometimes without sleep,” Hassan said.
“It was a challenge for us, and a story of resilience.”
Hassan said the station would focus on social issues and the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which remains grave in the territory despite a US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas since October.
“The radio station’s goal is to be the voice of the people in the Gaza Strip and to express their problems and suffering, especially after the war,” said Shereen Khalifa, part of the broadcasting team.
“There are many issues that people need to voice.” Most of Gaza’s population of more than 2 million people were displaced at least once during the gruelling war.
Many still live in tents with little or no sanitation.
The war also decimated Gaza’s telecommunications and electricity infrastructure, compounding the challenges in reviving the territory’s local media landscape. “The electricity problem is one of the most serious and difficult problems in the Gaza Strip,” said Khalifa.
“We have solar power, but sometimes it doesn’t work well, so we have to rely on an external generator,” she added.
The station’s launch is funded by the EU and overseen by Filastiniyat, an organization that supports Palestinian women journalists, and the media center at the An-Najah National University in Nablus, in the occupied West Bank.
The station plans to broadcast for two hours per day from Gaza and for longer from Nablus. It is available on FM and online.
Khalifa said that stable internet access had been one of the biggest obstacles in setting up the station, but that it was now broadcasting uninterrupted audio.
The Gaza Strip, a tiny territory surrounded by Israel, Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea, has been under Israeli blockade even before the attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which sparked the war. Despite the ceasefire, Israel continues to strictly control the entry of all goods and people to the territory.
“Under the siege, it is natural that modern equipment necessary for radio broadcasting cannot enter, so we have made the most of what is available,” she said.
