The End of the Assad Era

BEIRUT -- President Bashar Assad of Syria has painted himself into a corner from which he has options to determine only one thing: How does he leave office and start a democratic transition in the country? The past week saw simultaneous and heightened American, Turkish, Arab and U.N. pressure on him to stop using military force against his demonstrating citizens, who have challenged his regime across the entire country for five months. Today’s demand by leading Western powers that Assad step down immediately seals the imminent collapse of the Damascus regime that was initiated by Syrian citizens and hastened by Arab and Turkish pressure.

Having proved totally insincere in grasping the opportunity of reform for the past 10 years, and incompetent in responding to the domestic challenge he has faced since April, Assad can now only choose the manner of his departure – if he is lucky and is not forced out of office or killed trying to remain there. He might find some instructive lessons in the distinct manners in which three former Soviet allies responded when they too faced demands by their people for more rights, dignity and prosperity: the Mikhail Gorbachev model in the Soviet Union; the Wojciech Jaruzelski model in Poland; or the Nicolae Ceausescu model in Romania.

Assad can try to change the system by radically reforming it quickly from the top by his own unilateral decisions and then try to ride out the transformation, as Gorbachev did before he was voted out of office democratically (and is now largely remembered positively around the world). He can gradually negotiate a democratic transition with the opposition who have demonstrated against him for months or years, as Jaruzelski realized he had to do for years in Poland before he ultimately stepped aside in 1990 to allow Solidarity and Lech Walesa to lead the country. Or, he can use brute force to try and stay in power, only to find his regime overthrown by popular demand, and he and his colleagues subjected to severe reprisals, as happened to Ceausescu after his government was overthrown in December 1989, and he and his wife were executed following a speedy court session.

The performance of Assad to date suggests that his words and promises have very limited credibility in Syria and around the world, which is why key regional and Western powers finally lost patience with him in the past week and demanded that he change course. Assad’s telling UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Wednesday that military and police operations against demonstrators had ended was probably too little, too late. It is also probably irrelevant, and will do nothing to change the reality that Assad’s only choice now is to choose the manner of his retirement. For if he really does stop military operations, the subsequent rising tide of demonstrators will drive him from office. And if he continues applying force against his own citizens, the combination of the persistent citizen revolt and the rising regional and international pressures against him will also drive him from office.

His problem is that nobody believes him anymore, and his support base will quickly thin out and probably collapse soon, given the dramatically heightened diplomatic isolation he has experienced in the past 48 hours. Even if he stops using force and explores a political transition to a more open, democratic system, very few credible Syrians will engage him in such an exercise, because they will see him as politically discredited for having acted so viciously against his own people when they demonstrated peacefully against him. In retrospect, his chance to mobilize the significant domestic support he had and to engineer a peaceful transition of power-sharing probably ended May 24.

That was the day when the horribly mutilated body of 13-year-old Hamza Khateeb was returned to his family near Deraa in south Syria, nearly a month after he had been arrested during a protest in Saida, 10km east of Deraa. That one incident, more than any other, captured for many Syrians and others around the world the gruesome deeds that the Syrian regime was prepared to carry out against its own people, including torture of children. The demonstrations grew all across the country after that day, and people’s outrage was heightened to the point that it was greater than the fear of the retributions of the security services.

Assad’s opponents, including at home, had refrained from calling for his removal for a long time, and asked for the reforms that they thought he also wanted to implement. He and his aides proved to be totally incompetent in grasping how strong was the popular demand for real change towards a more open and humane governance system. His brutal response to the populist demonstrations was similar to the Soviet use of tanks, guns, torture chambers and prison camps in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania. So one of the few things he can do now -- after 40 years of Assad family rule -- is to study their history, and decide if he wants to go down as a Gorbachev, a Jaruzelski or a Ceausescu. Because the Assad era in Syria is at its end.

The implications of that for the entire Middle East will be enormous, almost incalculable, as the consequences of a democratic Syria wash across the parched Arab region like a mighty river in the desert.