Whenever a Syrian official is pressed about democracy, they don’t offer a roadmap. They offer a riddle. We are living through a state-sponsored renaissance of the “short story,” where ministers moonlight as philosophers to avoid uttering the one word they fear most.
Their parables arrive fully formed. A hostage, they say, doesn’t question her liberator. A child trapped in a well wants a rope, not chocolate. A starving man needs bread, not a movie ticket. It is all very lyrical, and all very convenient. Behind this curtain of folk wisdom lies a truth they refuse to articulate.
Ask them, “Will you begin a democratic transition?”
The real answer is, “Absolutely not—please don’t force us to say it.”
Fine. Let’s follow their metaphors to their logical end. A hostage has every right to question her “rescuer” if she suspects the destination is simply a newer, cleaner cell. A child pulled from a well is grateful for the rope, but gratitude assumes freedom once he reaches solid ground. And the starving man? After the bread, he may indeed want to go to the movies—or to a town hall to tell the baker what he thinks of the price of flour.
When the parables run dry, officials retreat to the old sanctuary of “cultural exceptionalism,” the final refuge of the autocrat. Democracy, they insist, cannot be imported. Syria is “different.” Our soil is too unique for such foreign seeds.
It is an argument as stale as it is hollow. Democracies vary in form from India to Japan to France, yet they share the same essential DNA: accountability, pluralism, and the peaceful transfer of power. Without those elements, you are not crafting a “local model” of democracy. You are engineering a local variant of authoritarianism.
Search the world for these “special” alternatives and you find them in the shadows of North Korea and the bleakness of Afghanistan. If this is the path we are carving, then the exceptionalism is not cultural—it is catastrophic.
We have seen this performance before. The Ba’athist regime spent decades perfecting its own linguistic acrobatics. It gave us a one-man, one-party state enforced by the boot of the Mukhabarat, and had the audacity to call that darkness “Centralized Democracy.”
Today, the faces are new and the metaphors are fresher, but the puzzle is unchanged. If the government insists on treating democracy as a luxury “chocolate” Syrians are not yet mature enough to taste, it should not be surprised when the people decide they are tired of living on a diet of nothing but bread and parables.
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.