In Africa, no one intervened. In April 1994, Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda launched a carefully planned slaughter of their Tutsi neighbours, aiming to annihilate them completely. The colonial powers, Germany and Belgium, had long favoured the Tutsi, stirring Hutu resentment that led to massacres just before the country became independent. But France, always keen to promote Françafrique, adopted Rwanda as a sort of colonial foster child, backing the Hutu leadership and training its militias. When the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by a gangly general named Paul Kagame, rebelled, France regarded this as a British-backed challenge to Françafrique. Although Paris did not abet the coming slaughter, it had certainly done nothing to restrain it. When the Rwandan president was shot down by the RPF, Hutus embarked on genocide, killing, often with machetes, over 500,000 Tutsi in a few days. France intervened only partially and very late before the RPF invaded from the Uganda–Congo borderlands and installed Kagame as dictator. The ambitions of Rwanda and Uganda now blew back to support Congo’s own warlords and elite in a continental blood bath, Congo’s Great African War an atrocious struggle for minerals and power.* Neither European powers nor western intelligentsia showed much interest as the catastrophe killed around 5.4 million.
Back in Moscow, Yeltsin was challenged by a new breed of authoritarian ultra-nationalists in the Russian Supreme Soviet, who defied him from a fortified White House and criticized his pro-American free-market liberalism that had sent the economy into freefall – GDP dropped by 50 per cent; law and order collapsed, with Mafiosi openly assassinating their enemies and infiltrating business. As the White House voted to depose Yeltsin, its forces occupied the TV station at Ostankino and built barricades in the streets; Moscow emptied. Yeltsin’s security chief Korzhakov advised sending in the tanks. ‘Fascist–Communist armed rebellion in Moscow,’ warned Yeltsin, ‘will be suppressed.’ On 3 October 1993, his commandos seized the TV station; the fighting raged all night. Yeltsin’s tanks fired on the White House (watched in person by this author), as it was stormed by his commandos. The autocratic Yeltsin won out: ‘Russia needs order.’
Yeltsin was determined to hold together the Russian Federation,* itself a honeycomb of ethnic republics. Its most contumacious people were the Islamic Chechens, deported to Siberia by Stalin in 1944. Now, led by an ex-Soviet air force general, this warrior people, controlled by clans and warlords, claimed a messy independence. Yeltsin surrounded Grozny, a feverish city where this author watched posses of militiamen cavort in surreal uniforms, some wearing spangled holsters, as they waited for the Russian assault. In December 1994, Yeltsin ordered the killing of the Chechen leaders by a car bomb to be followed by the storming of Grozny; his defence minister, Grachev, promised to take it in ‘two hours with one airborne regiment’. Instead Russian troops were savaged by the Chechens, who ultimately retook the city. In 1996, Yeltsin was humiliatingly forced to withdraw.
By June that year, Yeltsin, drinking and sick with arteriosclerosis, was facing an election that the resurgent Communists were likely to win. General Korzhakov, who boasted that he had ‘governed the country for three years’, advised cancelling the elections. But Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana, a thirty-six-year-old engineer who had worked in the Soviet space industry, took control, calling in the oligarchs. These were led by a Jewish mathematician and engineer, Boris Berezovsky, who had made billions taking over AvtoVAZ car factories and Siberian oil companies. He had won the family’s trust organizing the publication of Yeltsin’s memoirs. Now he became Yeltsin’s ‘grey cardinal’, nicknamed Rasputin. ‘In history many times,’ he told this author, ‘financiers influenced states: aren’t we like the Medici?’ Even more trusted – and discreet – was Berezovsky’s quiet young protégé, Roman Abramovich. Tatiana had left her husband for Yeltsin’s ghostwriter, Valentin Yumachev, whom she later married. He was soon promoted to Yeltsin’s chief of staff, forming this court around the president – the Familia.
It was not the only family in power. On 21 January 1994, Bassel al-Assad, heir to the presidency of Syria, accompanied by his first cousin Hafez Makhlouf, Republican Guard officer, was speeding to the airport in his Mercedes on the way to a ski holiday when he lost control.
KNIGHTS OF DAMASCUS, MARXIST MONSTER MOVIES AND KINGS OF DATA: IPHONES AND DAGGERS
Bassel was short, bearded, athletic and rugged, a winner of equestrian tournaments, friends with King Hussein’s equestrienne daughter, an enthusiast for guns, sports cars and Lebanese girls. Trained in Russia, now commander of the Presidential Security, he was the beloved favourite of his father, Hafez al-Assad, whom he advised on Lebanon. The president portrayed him as the young Saladin, the Golden Knight, on horseback fighting Crusaders and Zionists. His companion in the car was also at the heart of the dynasty: Makhlouf’s aunt was Anisa Assad, the first lady, his brother Rami already emerging as the family’s business fixer.
Ailing with diabetes and arteriosclerosis, Assad based his dynasty on his alliance with Iran, which would protect him from his rival Saddam. But he was infuriated by the emergence of secret talks between Rabin, now Israeli prime minister, and Arafat, PLO chairman.
As successive US presidents, starting with Carter, tried to nurture peace, Israel had refused to negotiate with the terrorist organization for over twenty years. Now Rabin allowed his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to start secret negotiations. The two – laconic Rabin, visionary Peres – hated each other. Peres orchestrated secret conversations in Oslo between an Israeli academic and a Palestinian official that developed into Israeli recognition of the PLO and vice versa, establishing a Palestinian Authority, the first step towards a state, and the sharing of Jerusalem. ‘I said peace first, then the details,’ Peres recalled. ‘Peace is like love: first you have to trust.’ To Assad this was betrayal, but for King Hussein, who had managed to appease his menacing Arab neighbours Saddam and Assad while secretly meeting with Rabin for decades, it was an opportunity: Hussein joined the process. On 13 September 1993, at the White House, Rabin and Arafat, accompanied by King Hussein, hosted by Clinton, signed the peace accords. A month later Hussein and Rabin signed their own treaty.
Watching this in Damascus, Assad ordered the assassination of King Hussein. He was not the only one reaching for his pistol. On 4 November 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish zealot. The killing started the disintegration of the Oslo Accords, exacerbated by Israeli nationalists and Palestinian extremists. When Rabin’s successors offered a division of Jerusalem, Arafat rejected it. The two-state solution – the only hope for peace – remained frozen. ‘We’re not ashamed, nor are we afraid,’ said Hussein at Rabin’s funeral in Jerusalem, ‘nor are we anything but determined to continue the legacy for which my friend fell, as did my grandfather in this very city when I was with him – and but a boy.’ Hussein, warned by the CIA, avoided Assad’s assassins, but secretly he was suffering from cancer. His brother Hassan was crown prince, but he started to groom his eldest son, Abdullah.
In Damascus, Bassel al-Assad was killed in that car crash, his cousin wounded. Hafez ordered mourning for the ‘Martyr of the Nation’. Three children were left: the youngest, Maher, was a stocky trigger-happy officer with anger-management issues; the second youngest Madj had mental problems; and a middle brother, Bashar, was a doctor living in London under an assumed name. Anisa favoured Maher, but Assad summoned the twenty-eight-year-old Bashar, tall, lanky, chinless with a lisp and a liking for Phil Collins music – an unlikely candidate for dictator. He had become an ophthalmic surgeon because he hated blood, yet he was about to unleash a level of butchery even his father had never contemplated.