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The charm offensive worked. Just months after Hariri’s assassination, the New York Times asked whether they represented “the essence of secular Western-Arab fusion”. “I was enchanted,” says a Syrian diplomat now in exile, who organised a European tour for the pair. “She’s lovable the moment you meet her. He’s different to other dictators in the Middle East. He looks modern and sophisticated. That’s what makes him so dangerous.” Hanson, Roger. “Elena Ceausescu - Romanian Dictator’s Wife and Fake Scientist.” Stuff.Co.Nz, 12 July 2017, https://www.stuff.co.nz/science/94679348/roger-hanson-elena-ceausescu--romanian-dictators-wife-and-fake-scientist. Over the course of Ceausescu's rule, Nicolae and Elena constructed a personality cult around themselves, which in many ways paralleled those of Mao, Stalin, and Hitler. This cult positioned Elena as the doyen of the European scientific community and as an academic powerhouse whose publications and international recognition were the result of sustained hard work. The "trial" that sealed the Ceausecus' fate was perhaps the perfect foil for the decades of falsification and fraud that defined Elena's scientific career. Behr calls the proceedings "farcical" and it is clear that the prosecutors were performing an act of restitution that the entire nation desperately needed.
Velvet gloves to iron fists: how complicit are the wives of
These prosecutors are rummaging in my closets, hoping to find skeletons. But all they will find are my beautiful clothes.” So says the fictional Marija Popa, adapting an infamous phrase from Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, as she prepares to stand trial for her late husband’s crimes.The Dictator’s Wife is published by Headline Review, and is available on Book Depository from 17 February. In 2018 Asma was diagnosed with breast cancer. The illness didn’t stop her from carefully managing her public image, or making sure that everyone knew she’d stayed in Syria for her treatment. Her struggle was documented in detail by state media and on the presidency’s social-media channels. She was even filmed being wheeled into the operating theatre. Asma’s next project was Syria itself. After the decades of central planning and import restrictions, she wanted to rejuvenate Syria. Asma blinded her husband with financial jargon and pushed for the banking sector to open up to private and foreign-run companies. “She wanted to turn Damascus into a regional Dubai, a tax-haven free from financial controls,” recalled a well-connected Syrian economist.
Dictators From Around the World - TheClever Women Who Married Dictators From Around the World - TheClever
Asma’s mergers and acquisitions continue apace. Syria’s second-biggest mobile-phone firm has also gone into receivership; last month Asma’s cronies were appointed to its board. Emmatel – the phone company with her name – now has branches countrywide (even in areas her husband doesn’t control). She isn’t a person, she’s a puppeteer. She discovers what you are, what you can and cannot bear, and uses it.’That seed was watered by a Saturday Night Live sketch, not about Melania Trump but Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka. It was a parody perfume advert for “Complicit: the fragrance for the woman who could stop all this – but won’t”. Reportedly stung by the bit, which starred Scarlett Johansson, Ivanka Trump told CBS News: “If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact then I’m complicit.” It’s hard to compute the scale of destruction in Syria over the years that followed. In 2014 Islamic State, a Sunni extremist group, took advantage of the chaos to establish a so-called caliphate straddling Syria and Iraq. Its sectarian ferocity presented a serious threat to Bashar’s forces but also weakened support for his opposition and justified Iran and Russia in propping him up. Elena began attending night-school courses in chemistry at the Bucharest Municipal Adult Education Institute. She was soon expelled because she cheated on an exam and never received a bachelor's degree. In fact, the teacher who oversaw the infamous exam "lived in fear of his life for decades afterward" (Behr 140).
The Dictator’s Wife by Freya Berry | Theresa Book Review: The Dictator’s Wife by Freya Berry | Theresa
A visit to the grand Ceausescu Palace in Bucharest conjured ghosts of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu and what was known as a “conjugal dictatorship” before their unceremoniously swift trial and execution. The end of Elena In only a matter of days, Elena transformed from one of the most prestigious scientists in Europe to a state criminal facing a firing squad. No one remembers her showing any interest in the Middle East. On visits to Damascus with her parents she’d spend her time by the pool at the Sheraton hotel. “She was very English and seemed to want to have nothing to do with Syria,” said a family friend.She seemed destined for a life among London’s monied elite. As a teenager Asma went to one of Britain’s oldest private girls’ schools, Queen’s College, a few doors down from her father’s private medical practice in Harley Street. She did a degree in computer science at King’s College London, where both friends and detractors recall her as clever and hard-working.
Freya Berry - Watson Little
Ooh lovely review, you’ve definitely persuaded me to add this one to my list! The two different perspectives sound fascinating and I love unreliable narrators too 📚❤️ X x x The mesmerised narrator wonders aloud about the impact of these women, raising issues not too detached from ones we might ask about our own, real-life dictators’ wives. Why does the media fawn over their closets and philanthropic habits? And does the fixation on the glamour help disguise the darkness of their husbands’ deeds? It is an intriguing prism through which to consider Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model who came to America married Donald Trump in 2005. With his election a decade later, she became only the second foreign-born first lady in American history – and one of the most divisive.In the first two months of 2011, the mood in the Middle East was electric. After decades of stasis and repression, demonstrations erupted from Tunisia to Libya, Algeria to Bahrain, Jordan to Yemen. Mass protests in Cairo toppled Hosni Mubarak, dictator of Egypt for nearly 30 years. The tide of revolution seemed unstoppable. Berry quit the newsroom and travelled to eastern Europe for three months of research. She began in Romania and immediately found herself in the midst of a street protest with hundreds of thousands of people calling for the government’s resignation.
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