“... and the series of tyrants who do not want to read history, or even learn from its lessons, is repeated ... !”
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in april 2011, i wrote an article with the above title, in which i mentioned that the number of alawites in syria is 1.5 million, and the same number of shiites and ismaelis, and a little more of them christians, while the number of sunnis is more than 20 million, and despite this, these people have not had, for more than half a century, any role in the administration of the state.
despite the long history of the alawites and their relatively large numbers, before 15 million of them moved to become turks, they have always suffered from the mistreatment of “everyone” towards them, and their psychological and material conditions were bad throughout their history.
however, all of that changed with the arrival of hafez al-assad to power in 1971, as their conditions improved significantly, at the expense of others, and they became major businessmen and leaders of the military apparatus, and their influence extended to every sector, after they had been the lowest class in syrian society.
what terrified the baathist or alawite regime in syria and pushed it to reject any political reforms was not only its fear that any concession would ultimately lead to the loss of status and privileges and consequently power, but also the acts of revenge and torture they might be subjected to, just as they had previously taken revenge and tortured their enemies and filled prisons with innocent people.
we hope that the new leadership in damascus will follow the example of the great south african president mandela in his great deeds of brotherhood between the victim and the executioner and that the situation will not end with getting rid of one dictator and another taking his place.
this requires accelerating the implementation of comprehensive constitutional changes, abandoning polarization, and for syria to be a model for the rest of the arab countries in terms of legitimate democratic rule that preserves the rights of every party, sect and group, and keeps the specter of civil war away from everyone.
will the next leadership succeed in this? i doubt it very much, because the victors belong, whether we like it or not, to the nusra front and other armed militias.
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bashar’s arrival to power, after thirty years of his father’s rule of syria with an iron fist, was a good omen for his youth, his educated civil personality and his influence on western life, and perhaps what he had learned and heard about the fate of tyrants.
but it turned out that everyone was wrong, as he continued in his father’s path, following a policy of iron, fi re, burning and destruction. he did not release even a single individual from syria’s terrifying prisons, but rather increased their number many times over, with his increasing fears of the success of terrorist groups such as nusra, isis and others in reaching power.
his insistence on staying brought calamities to syria and caused him to lose control over huge areas of it, in addition to the millions who fled to lebanon, iraq, turkey and europe. the syrian economy lost a lot, and the state lost its independence of decision-making, due to the presence of influential external forces in its territory, in addition to the killing of hundreds of thousands of the syrian people.
john dalberg acton says: “absolute power... absolutely corrupts.”
churchill says: “democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others that have been tried.”
if assad had learned and learned from the fate of his predecessors, the history of syria would have changed. the joy that swept the cities of the levant at the fall of the assad regime reminded us of the joy that swept kuwait after its liberation from the other tyrant, saddam, who failed to learn anything from the fate that befell him, and believed that he could rule syria forever!
people wonder why some arabs in the gulf, especially in kuwait, hate us. the answer is basically ignorance on the one hand, and the prosperity, security and peace of mind that we enjoy that cannot be matched by all the wealth in the world.
that is why i wrote a few days ago that one of the pleasures of life is for a person to lay his head on the pillow at the end of the day and fall into a deep sleep within seconds. did bashar, saddam and gaddafi ever know such a pleasure?!
in conclusion, the only virtue that can be attributed to bashar, over a quarter of a century, is that he escaped a final confrontation, thus sparing a lot of blood.