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NY Times Op-Ed, July 8 2017
What Assad Has Won
By KAMEL DAOUD
ORAN, Algeria — The Arab springs are nearly all out of season;
everywhere except in Tunisia, they are aging poorly.
In the beginning, after a popular uprising, it was the dictator who
fled, by airplane, as did president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia
in early 2011. Now it’s the opposite that is happening: It’s the people
who are fleeing, for instance from Syria, by sea and land.
This reversal raises an essential question, both simple and tragic: Can
one still call for democracy after the victory of President Bashar
al-Assad of Syria, even if that victory turns out to be temporary, as
some predict? What does it mean for the peoples of the Maghreb and the
Middle East?
For many, the first lesson to be drawn from the Syrian case is obvious:
One can’t always win the revolution, or at least not as fast as one
would like. So far Assad has come out of the conflict alive, even
strengthened — at the cost of the slaughter of half his people. His
longevity goes to show that being wrong and facing fierce opposition
from dissidents, an army and a large swath of the international
community aren’t enough to unseat a dictator.
Assad, by killing so many Syrians, has also killed the dream of
democracy for many other Syrians, as well as for plenty of people
elsewhere in the Arab world. They can see that a revolutionary often
ends up a martyr, a tortured prisoner, a militiaman in the pay of
foreign forces or an unwelcome refugee. And neither his children nor his
people are the better for it. That’s enough to sow doubt in even the
most democratic of minds and the most fervent of revolutionaries.
And so here is the first Assad effect: The perception that democracy is
costly — perhaps too costly.
Another consequence of Assad’s political survival is the notion that
revolution invites predation from abroad. The political elites in the
postcolonial Arab world, be they conservative or of the left, are still
allergic to foreign support endorsing local calls for democracy: The
memory of colonization taints any, or almost any, form of international
assistance with suspicion.
For example, the Algerian government — very conservative, a police state
and a quiet ally of Islamists — plays on the history of French
colonialism to give credence to its claim that “a foreign hand” is only
promoting freedom for the people the better to destabilize the leaders.
For President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, the Arab springs were
“devastating conspiracies.” According to a private Egyptian television
channel, even ‘‘The Simpsons’’ contained proof of untoward foreign
designs in Syria. The political chaos in Libya has fanned distrust as well.
The foreign-intervention theory is used as a weapon against local
dissenters. In 2016 Bouteflika, ailing and immobilized, announced that
he would seek yet another term, after having the Constitution amended so
that he could stay in office for the rest of his life. When his
opponents countered his proposals by invoking democratic values,
government media accused them of being traitors, Western agents or Zionists.
The case of Syria — subject to alliances with Iran or Russia and playing
against Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the United States — gives weight to such
propaganda. It seems to demonstrate that any demand for democracy
eventually translates into chaos, and chaos invites the return of
colonialism. The same goes for Libya. Better then to submit to one’s
dictators than compromise oneself with foreigners.
Curiously, the elites who reject intervention from the West close their
eyes to an obvious fact: the threat of intervention from elsewhere. It’s
a typical pitfall of the intellectual left in the Arab world to think
that colonization is always Western, never Russian or Iranian. When
Moscow or Tehran is involved, one prefers to speak instead of support or
assistance. President Vladimir Putin is anti-Western, therefore he must
be something of a liberator, or at least an ally, the wishful thinking goes.
Hence the second conclusion that’s being drawn from Syria’s experience:
Democracy is the Trojan horse of Western neocolonialism.
Finally, there’s one more lesson, which has already taken root in the
so-called Arab street: Better a dictator than a caliph. In newspaper
editorials and on social media, Western interventions are often blamed
for the monstrosity of the Islamic State: They destroyed the barrier
that local governments formed against extremist sects.
Destabilizing the Syrian government opened the way for the Islamic
State. But Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s leader, is worse than
Assad, so dictatorship is preferable to a caliphate.
Assad has managed to sell, not only to Westerners but also to local
elites and the public, the notion that dictatorship is a rampart against
radicalism and a guardian against horror. The scenario in Syria is an
extreme illustration of this, but the idea is also at work, if less
intensely, in Egypt and Yemen, and even in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.
The Bouteflika government, for example, doesn’t tire of bringing up
Algeria’s “experience” in the fight against terrorism — a small reminder
to the West that it must choose between supporting a dictatorship or
suffering chaos.
And here, six years after Ben Ali fled Tunisia, is a third Assad effect:
the idea that if democracy leads not to liberty but to Islamism, one
might as well hold on to the stability of a repressive regime.
But is any of this true?
Of course not. It is dictators who, through repression, produce
Islamists and jihadists, who threaten stability, which justifies
authoritarian rule. Dictatorship creates a self-serving vicious circle.
Momentarily, that is. For the process can only escalate: In order to
stay in power, authoritarian regimes become more and more repressive,
disgruntling more and more people, who can then be co-opted by Islamists.
Assad has won, but he has only won time.
On the other hand, when he does finally fall, he will leave Syria with
no alternative. The Arab springs will still have failed to resolve the
difficult choices between chaos and stability, repression and massacre,
democracy and dictatorship.
Kamel Daoud is the author of the novel “The Meursault Investigation.”
This essay was translated by John Cullen from the French.
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