What Follows Dictatorship? Syria Can Find Useful Clues From The Past — And Present

-OpEd-

CAIRO — On the eve of Bashar al-Assad‘s escape, I was worried about my Syrian friends. I wrote to a friend in Latakia and found him as happy as ever.

I will worry tomorrow, he replied. Today, I am celebrating that I lived until I saw Syria without Assad.

Similar phrases were repeated in responses from Damascus, Paris and Germany. One person said: “What is important is that we have left ‘the forever,’ and we will try to live within the time whatever it looks like.” He was referring to the slogan “Hafez Assad forever,” which was coined by supporters of Hafez Assad (Bashar Assad’s father) in the early 1970s. Now Syrians are calling the fall of Bashar Assad the “end of forever” in reference to the slogan.

While Bashar did not coin the slogan, he found it on his way, just as he found himself in the position of a tall flagpole for one of the most criminal dictatorships. The continued bloody aspect of the regime and its weight on lives made it difficult for any Syrian to contemplate the farcical shift of the slogan, as Bashar assumed power against his will.

In a country where sadness is deeply rooted, it was difficult to contemplate the contradiction between the strength and reliability of the slogan and the pale features of a tall idiot. At the moment of collapse, the weight of Hafez’s slogan “Assad Forever” was evident in the solidity of his statues, while “Bashar Forever” appeared fragile, and highly combustible.

But the sad irony is that the crimes of farce were more horrific and more widespread than the crimes of the serious. In other words, the crimes of the Bashar era were greater than the crimes of the Hafez era — especially the period from 2011 to Dec. 8, 2024, the day Bashar fled. That day exceeded all the atrocities of modern history from Hitler to the present day.

If the Zionist regime did not exist in Palestine, the Syrian regime would have been No. 1 among the most hideous regimes in the world today. But the fire ate itself, as is the case with every fire. Toppling the regime did not require a weapon but a broom to sweep it. So the sweepers set off from the north to the south at the speed of a motorcycle.

​Throne of crime

No one can begrudge the instinct of revenge in a person who lived all or most of his life in the shadow of madness. The only flaw is that Bashar alone inherited all the schadenfreude, according to the common mistake of summarizing tyranny in one individual. Although everyone knows that he is just a flagpole, and a person wearing a presidential suit. He was summoned from studying medicine to succeed his father when his brother was killed.

What is common is that he did not want this life. He took over in 2000, wanting to be different. In his first speeches, he launched what was known as the Damascus Spring. He was reprimanded by the regime, and the spring was undermined after several months. He committed to his role in the regime.

Assad became a refugee like the millions of victims of the regime.

These facts do not grant him a certificate of innocence. The crime, however, is the responsibility of all those who carry the throne of Assad: officers, members of the People’s Assembly, ministers, judges, prison doctors, etc., who have carried the throne of criminality over the years.

To guarantee the future, these people must be held accountable. But limits of change did not allow accountability even from Bashar himself. He became a refugee like the millions of victims of the regime. But he will not know the life of tents. He will live in palaces, just as he lived when he was in power. He only lost a position that he did not deserve in the first place.

The picture of him in his underwear may be the last punishment he will receive. It appears enough in the public’s eyes. Non-Syrians began to spread the picture widely, with a great appetite.

Syria seen from Egypt

Amid controversy over succession in Syria, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak declared during a 2000 visit to the United States that “Egypt is not Syria,” meaning that he didn’t intend to pass power on to his son, Gamal. Since then, Syria has become a model for what Egypt should not look like. “We must be satisfied and happy to eat mud so that we do not become like Syria and Iraq.”

Ironically, Syria in particular was Egypt’s second wing. And it was its first line of defense from the pharaohs until the short-lived unity state, during which the armies of both countries became a single army. Danger often comes to Egypt from Syria — more than from its other neighbors, Libya and Sudan. When Syria sneezes, Egypt catches a cold.

Just as the authorities have their dangerous illusions, the public has its own. The most dangerous is the belief that dictatorships are nothing but “one-man rule.” This is the most dangerous of political illusions because giving the individual all this importance, sanctions the rest of the regime members from punishment, and makes people closer to surrendering themselves to the first new individual.

A more accurate description of tyranny is “the rule of unrestrained instincts.”

But the truth says that it is impossible for an individual to control a state on his own unless he is a god. A more accurate description of tyranny is “the rule of unrestrained instincts,” where a group of people prevails, hijacks the decision and rules according to their greed.

Democracy is the only safe human system so far — not because it is a rational system but because it puts the instincts and desires of different people in confrontation with each other. That creates a balance between the wills of state institutions as well as the wills of the diverse governed people. Democracy appears as the rule of reason because it puts the instincts of a frenzied person like U.S. President Donald Trump under observation, and limits his influence on his country.

The case of Iraq

Iraq‘s fate was the first and most horrific of the Arab coup states. The founding moment was bloody with the execution of the royal family and its children. Then the curse of blood settled, and the end was not known until the regime eroded from within before the foreign invasion.

The comical and sad downfall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein opened the series of downfalls at the beginning of the millennium. Iraq’s tyranny was not brought down by a revolution but by the U.S-led invasion. There is no big difference, as it was ultimately the rule of instincts and their bad choices that ended in exhaustion, and tempted the United States to invade. So the regime dissipated and lice spread in the head of the feared leader, who was in the hole. Iraq then became a large hole for ambitions and interests.

Regimes in the region that had some credit and could have made reforms didn’t learn from the downfall of Saddam and the destruction of Iraq. The momentum of this absurd machine cannot be stopped; collapse was an inevitable path.

Yet Saddam’s counterparts seemed to to see Iraq as a special case, saying “I am not Saddam, I am an obedient man.” But obedient regimes had their other unified folly: betrayal of the system!

One of the constants of classical dictatorships, and the basis on which power was built in generals’ republics, is the suppression of freedoms in exchange for food, education and employment. They all abandoned these functions at the same time. The welfare state became a shop, and the masses became customers. Why would the customers rally for the life of the shopkeeper?

The region’s future

The lack of food and free speech at the same time prompted the Arab Spring in 2011. It was a strong warning and an opportunity for everyone’s salvation. Revolutions that sing, sweep the streets and paint the walls. The demands for life and freedom are legitimate. The Arab Spring’s only flaw was that too few believed it would achieve victory over the arsenals of the regimes and the money of the region.

But the absurd preferred to move toward a dark fate. So the demands of the people were met with various degrees of violence. Then those who buried these demands launched their trumpets, describing what happened as a conspiracy. They were the first to believe a lie they themselves invented. They know that they themselves launched terrorism and created the militias that will eat them and eat their countries later.

Unfortunately, what happened today has not been seriously studied. The victors are governed by instincts and do not need reason or understanding.

Arab Spring was not defeated; in reality, it was suspended.

In every country and at every moment of the past 14 years, there was an opportunity to retreat and respond to the requirements of this moment in history — instead of relying on illusions, the biggest of which is that the Arab Spring was defeated; in reality, it was suspended. And the demands are still pending at a great cost to the people.

All the countries of the Spring either plunged into a real war due to stubbornness, or suffered from the appearance of war, represented by tight security on the streets. On top of that, they suffer from the intensity of sarcasm.

Everything that shop owners find glorious, long and convincing, is burned in the comments of customers on their virtual walls on the same day. The legions of media stars and committees cannot respond to the mockery of the mockers because there is no coherent story that convinces the customer, and there is no sentence that is consistent with its sister or with itself. The reality is not consistent and priorities were arranged according to desires, not reason.

The year 20204 ended with the Assad family evaporating. Syria is exposed. We have seen what happens the day after “forever.” And now, at this sad moment at the beginning of 2025, even children have become aware that Zionism and capitalism have decided chaos as the fate of this region.

Children have become aware that the only guaranteed ally is the people. They are also aware that the cancer of desire prevents the patient from taking the treatment, and that the punishment of being seen in your underwear is not punishment.