Hanin Ghaddar

Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, everyone has been looking for an alternative for to the Assad regime. Will it be a democratic group, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Islamists who might, God forbid, express animosity toward the West? Everyone is searching for the party behind the protest movement.

But the Syrians have surprised everyone. Now, more than five months since the uprising began, it looks like there is no individual or group behind the movement. It was the people as a whole: the secular intellectuals, the old communists, the Muslim Brothers, various tribes and non-affiliated individuals.

Foreign leaders do not feel reassured that Assad’s replacement is not readily identifiable. They want to know who is running the opposition so that they can communicate with them and begin planning the post-Assad phase. They want a ready-made alternative. They started blaming the Syrian protesters for not creating a unified opposition body to communicate with them.

Now politicians and pundits are making statements like, “The opposition is not unified enough to offer a realistic alternative to the Assad regime” and “The absence of a clear alternative causes fears among the Syrians and their neighbors.”
The pressure started to weigh on opposition members, who thought they had to present an alternative to Assad in order to be taken seriously.

So they organized conferences in Turkey and Qatar, held meetings in the US capital and in Europe and created opposition councils here and there in order to present the world with anything that sounded like a plan. And then the opposition started disagreeing before even toppling their dictator.

How pleased Assad would be to know that the opposition only has unified slogans but not a unified vision. Fortunately, these disagreements are still insignificant, and the opposition’s main goal is still to topple the regime and install a democratic government.
We all forgot that the opposition’s inability to come up with a clear and viable alternative to Assad is not its fault; it is the result of the regime’s bloody and ruthless crackdown on dissenters.

For 40 years, Bashar al-Assad and his father did everything they could to thwart civil society and squeeze the public sphere. Forty years of political and intellectual vacuum cannot be erased in a matter of months. The Syrians cannot be expected to come up with a substantial political plan when they are still trying to learn how to do politics.

Nevertheless, the Syrian people have shown great ability to overstep years of humiliation and suppression by using the strongest weapon they have: peaceful dissent. Their non-violent methods show huge self-restraint against the lure of revenge. They don’t want to take the easy way out. They want to do it right. They want a better future.

The Syrians are a very diverse society and cannot be summarized with one party or another. Wouldn’t it be better to trust that the Syrian people will eventually appoint with their own leader at their own pace?
This might involve a certain degree of chaos and disagreements among all factions. But that’s how they will be able to reach common goals and set up a democratic system.

Syria is not trying to get rid of one dictator just to let another one in. Whoever comes to power after Assad cannot do it with the same iron-fisted force. Otherwise the people will make sure he doesn’t last. There is no place for dictators in Syria now. The people have broken down the wall of fear once and for all. The least we can do is to not rush them to present a quick alternative, and maybe, for once, admit that this time it is their call.

Hanin Ghaddar is managing editor of NOW Lebanon