The Middle East's first ladies of oppression

Who are the women who stand by the Arab world’s most oppressive leaders? The UK's The Guardian website has written a profile of some of them, highlighting contradictions and peculiarities. Asma Al-Assad, the London-raised wife of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, has been in the spotlight for a while, until the outbreak of the Syrian revolution last March. The Syrian first lady started her “charm offensive” with a very famous interview with US Vogue last March, just a few days before the revolution. The article – which has now mysteriously disappeared from the website – described Asma as a “rose in the desert” and "the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies". In December 2010, Asma was photographed while sitting at a table for an official dinner with her husband, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his former supermodel wife Carla Bruni. After the dinner, Sarkozy was quoted by the former French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner as saying: “Bashar protects Christians, and with a wife as modern as his, he can't be completely bad." Asma was born in London to Syrian parents, a Harley Street surgeon and a diplomat, and raised in Acton, going to a Church of England primary school andprivate secondary before taking a degree in computer science at King's College London and a banking job for JP Morgan. “All this could be used, by a skilled PR team, as the soft face of a would-be reformist regime,” The Guardian’s article pointed out. After 11 months of bloody repression of the pro-democracy uprising in Syria, with thousands dead and tens of thousands of refugees spilled over Syria's borders, Asma's image of the gentle British-born face of the regime has miserably crumbled. Last Sunday, when she appeared coldly smiling alongside her husband to vote for the referendum, the international audience addressed her as a modern Marie-Antoinette and a new Lady Macbeth, as a Middle East expert in Paris said, according to The Guardian. Other former Arab leaders’ wives enjoy less international acclaim.  Leila Trabelsi, the politically ambitious wife of ousted Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, was the most detested, a monstrous symbol of nepotism and corruption. Trabelsi sparked the sense of injustice that flamed the revolution, keeping a mafia-style hold of the nation's economy, siphoning off riches to her and her husband's family, who were thought to control 30-40 per cent of the economy, running everything from customs to car-dealers, supermarket chains and banana imports. Described as the woman who sparked the Arab spring, Trabelsi, who liked to be called "Madame La Présidente", inspired dread in the public imagination. Suzanne Mubarak, the half-Welsh wife of Egypt’s ousted President Hosni Mubarak, benefited from a fortune of billions in a country where around 40 per cent of the population lives on less than £1.20 per day. She is now being investigated alongside her husband on allegations of crimes against the state and has relinquished disputed assets worth nearly £2.5m. Before the Egyptian revolution, whole newspaper pages were "allocated" to cover Suzanne’s charitable actions and engagement on women’s issues. Of course, this was merely a facade. Suzanne Mubarak would meet Arab leaders' wives to talk about women's issues while independent women in Egypt were being heavily repressed. In Libya Colonel Gaddafi’s second wife Safia Farkash, a nurse when she met him, was still vastly wealthy, a symbol of public money siphoned off into the family's pockets. His daughter Aisha, once described as the Claudia Schiffer of the region, a lawyer and part of Saddam Hussein's defence team, was held up by her father as a model of modern women's rights. Safia and Aisha fled in Algeria during the uprising. The western media’s attention was also attracted by Jordan’s Queen Rania, ranked third most beautiful woman in the world by Harpers and Queen in 2005.