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Most of the Syrian rebel groups have, since 2011, demanded that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down. Assad handing over power remains non-negotiable for them, and they demand that he do so as the first step of any transition or peace agreement to end Syria’s civil war. Western backers of the Syrian rebels, from the United States and France to Turkey and Saudi Arabia, parrot the same demand regarding Assad – conceding at most that during a transition he can stay “in symbolic power for six months before leaving office.”
With Turkey, the United States, European countries and Gulf Arab states unwilling to risk the necks of their own soldiers to remove Assad, such demands come across as little more than patronizing bluster. Assad, and the minority communities in Syria that support him, has proven that he can stay in power, even if doing so requires the slaughter of hundreds of thousands.
Besides this, removing Assad from power would not, on its own, solve anything. Pro-status quo political leaders in the international community, the media, and rebels hoping to set themselves up in the shoes of the dictators they overthrow seem to always reduce things to the problem of a single arch- villain. When the United States under the Clinton administration in the 1990s sought Saddam’s overthrow, the plan was to replace him with another Sunni Arab dictator. When Nuri al-Maliki tried to subvert a democratic constitution to install himself as the new Shiite dictator, Iraq’s problems began to worsen again. President Hosni Mubarak’s replacement by Abdel al-Sisi hardly represents a solution for Egypt’s problems. Ayatolah Khomeini betrayed most Iranians who opposed the Shah when he quickly set up a new illiberal dictatorship for himself and his friends.
In Syria, a Sunni-Arab Islamist dictatorship might even prove worse than the current, vicious Alawi Ba’athist one. Alawis, most Christians, Druzes and others continue to support the Assad regime for fear of an epic massacre of their communities should the government fall. At the same time, the Sunni Arab majority in Syria feels incapable of again submitting to an Alawi-run government in Damascus, lest its thirst for vengeance and score-settling further decimate their community.
The problem in Syria and much of the Middle East, therefore, is more about liberal tolerance of others, power-sharing and good governance. For a way out of such problems, Syrians can look to two Kurdish examples: the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq (KRG) and the “democratic autonomous cantons” of the Syrian Kurds.
The KRG is by no means out of the woods yet, of course, with recent political fighting over the Barzani presidency and power sharing problems between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the Gorran Movement and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) still unsettled. We should, however, remember where the Kurdistan Region of Iraq was politically between 1994 and 1998, when civil war between the KDP and PUK threatened the fragile experiment in Kurdish self-rule. Lack of trust between the parties and disputes over power-sharing and revenues almost destroyed the people’s future in that part of Kurdistan. The Washington Peace Accord of 1998 calmed things down by allowing for the creation of two Kurdistan Regional Governments – one run by the KDP in Erbil and the other by the PUK in Suleimaniya. Instead of shooting at each other, the two administrations learned to live with the other and competed in terms of which could provide the best model of governance to its people. After a few years of such co-existence, the administrations in Erbil and Suleimaniya were able to voluntarily decide to reunite into one Kurdistan Regional Government. As with the creation of many states, external threats and the possibilities offered by the overthrow of Saddam’s government encouraged them to merge into a larger political unit.
Although their style of political discourse and ideology are very different from that of the Iraqi Kurds, the Democratic Union Party (PYD)-led project in Syria also exhibits some similarities to this experience. In the PYD “democratic autonomous cantons” approach, communities in various regions of Syria are supposed to form their own governance structures and decide what kind of system they will erect for themselves. They too in a sense compete with each other in terms of governance rather than with guns, and room exists for such communities to also direct their own self-defense forces. If with time different cantons want to voluntarily unite or alter their association with others, room exists to do so. In the interim, co-existence of the cantons allows trust and institutionalized politics room to exist and develop.
Applied across Syria, this model would see the Assad regime keep territory it presently controls. Various rebel groups who accept the model (which would preclude the likes of the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra) would likewise keep their current territory and self-defense forces, at least until some later time if and when they decide to unite with others. The different cantons would compete in terms of the quality of governance they provide their people, all the while remaining officially part of one united Syria. This kind of solution is not without precedent, as such arrangements put a stop to the grinding civil war in Bosnia via the Dayton Accords. Most importantly, such a solution addresses the structural problem of mutually distrustful communities rather than the shibboleth of “Assad is the problem.”
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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