Better Than Assad Is the Minimum, Not the Dream

In the Levant there is a short proverb: "whoever has seen death is content with a fever". It is not folk wisdom about patience so much as an accurate description of a psychological mechanism that operates in every society that has come out from under coercion: once you have seen the worst, the merely less-bad registers as a blessing, and you stop measuring what you get against what you deserve and start measuring it against the worst thing that could have happened to you. The proverb describes the behaviour of one sick person. It becomes a political problem the moment a state is built on it.

There is an argument that recurs constantly in Syrian conversation today: "yes, there are problems. But things are better than they were under Assad."

The sentence is true in much of what it claims, and that is precisely what makes it effective. Things are moving in the right direction, there are real changes it would be dishonest to deny, and the removal of the Assad regime, with everything it represented in repression, tyranny and fear, was in itself an enormous change in the lives of millions of people. I am not writing about the people who repeat the sentence in bad faith. I am writing about the ones who say it sincerely, because they are exhausted, because they are afraid that what has been built will collapse, and because relief after forty years is a completely understandable feeling.

The problem begins the moment the sentence stops describing reality and starts answering every question. Because the question is not only whether Syria today is better than Assad's Syria. The question is also where we are going. The first asks about the distance we have covered, the second asks about the direction, and an answer to the first excuses nobody from answering the second.

The ceiling the regime left standing

Syrians spent decades learning that merely staying alive counted as a victory, and that is not a detail in the story: it is what forty years does to the way an entire people thinks. Torture became part of our definition of what a state can do to a citizen. Arbitrary detention became something to expect. Fear of the security services became part of daily life, like the cut electricity and the dug-up road.

Out of that, a strange standard emerged: if we were not tortured, things are excellent; if we were not killed, things are good; if we did not spend ten years in prison, thank God. But to demand a state that does not beat us in the first place, that does not detain us arbitrarily, that holds to account whoever kills us, and that protects our rights: that, for some, has become a kind of indulgence.

The important thing to remember is that we did not build this standard. The regime installed it in us, then fell and left it running. The most dangerous thing tyranny bequeaths is not wrecked institutions or a ruined economy. It is the low ceiling of expectations it plants in people's heads, which spares any incoming authority the work of persuading them that a little is a lot. That ceiling was built over four decades, and it sits so low that it is now beneath the floor any state ought to be starting from.

So Syrians get slapped and want a hospital. Get killed and want an investigation. Get beaten and want human rights. Have their rights violated and want a court. And then somebody turns up and asks: what is it you want, exactly? Have you forgotten Assad's days?

No. They have not forgotten.

And that is exactly where the problem lies. Because they remember Assad's days, they must not accept Syria returning to any form of state that treats a human life and its dignity as secondary. Memory is not a reason for silence. It is precisely the reason not to be silent.

What we are calling softness is not softness at all, but normal behaviour returning after a long absence. Asking for a hospital after being beaten, for an investigation after a relative is killed, and for a fair trial before being imprisoned is not asking for a privilege. That is the definition of a citizen. Under Assad, Syrians were not citizens but subjects, and where subjects are grateful for what they receive, citizens ask about what they are owed. So if the person asking looks spoiled to us today, it means we have not completed the transition, and the transition still missing is not the one in the institutions of the state but the one in our heads.

Rights that need capacity, rights that need a decision

There is a serious version of the sentence, and it deserves a serious answer rather than mockery. It runs roughly like this: the state is being built from below zero, the institutions were dismantled, the treasury is empty, the security forces are being assembled out of scattered components, and the alternative to a fragile authority is a vacuum rather than a better authority. So bear with it a little, and get the priorities in order.

That argument is right on one important point: capacity really is limited, and the priorities are real. But its flaw does not lie in how it estimates the limits of capacity. It lies in its assumption that rights are all one kind.

Some rights need capacity. An independent and qualified judiciary, trained police, prisons open to inspection, a reliable register of the missing, transitional justice institutions, services and hospitals and schools. These need years, money and expertise, and demanding all of them by tomorrow morning is not realistic; admitting as much is not a concession.

Other rights need no capacity at all, only abstention. Do not torture. Do not disappear people. Do not detain without a warrant or a charge. Do not shoot demonstrators. Do not imprison somebody over a post. These require no budget, no institutions and no time. They require a decision, a clear order coming down from the top, and accountability for whoever breaks it.

So "we are in a building phase" is a completely acceptable argument about the first kind and never an acceptable argument about the second. Anyone using it to defend the second is not explaining the weakness of the state. They are asking for a mandate.

What happens after the violation

In every country in the world a security officer oversteps, and armed men abuse their authority. The difference between a state of law and a state of force is not that violations do not occur in the first. The difference is what happens after the violation. Is there a known body that receives the complaint? Is the name of the perpetrator or their unit established? Are they suspended during the investigation? Is the result published, even when the result is "we did not identify the perpetrator"? Does the victim's family know where its file has got to without needing a connection? Or does everything dissolve into the phrase "individual cases" and stop there?

"An individual case" is an acceptable description once. An individual case with no investigation after it, which then recurs, and again has no investigation after it, is not an individual case. It is a silent policy.

This test is not aimed at the government alone, but applies to everyone who carries a weapon and exercises real authority over people anywhere in Syria, under any name, banner or pretext. Whoever imposes authority carries responsibility for it.

The new authority's record, not its predecessor's

In the first weeks after a regime falls, comparison with what came before is an understandable argument. People need a horizon to hold on to, and the state is being built while it operates. But every month that passes makes the argument a little weaker, because any authority begins, over time, to accumulate a record of its own. The regime fell in December 2024, and more than twenty months on, the authority is no longer measured by what its predecessor did but by what it does.

The irony is that measuring the new authority with Assad's ruler is not fair to it. It is an insult to it. Anyone who says "compare us to Assad" is asking to be measured against the worst thing our recent history produced, and that is a modest request to a worrying degree. An authority that wants real legitimacy asks to be measured against something else: against the law, against what it declares about itself, and against what it promised people.

The sentence is not a Syrian invention either. Many peoples who came out from under harsh systems have heard it, and been told that what they are living through is milder than what they lived through before. Some of those experiences ended in a state of law. Others ended with a new authority that drew its permanent legitimacy from having ended the old one, so the past became a credit balance to be drawn down whenever the present got difficult. The difference between the two paths was not the scale of the destruction they inherited. It was the moment people stopped accepting the comparison as an answer.

How one sentence silences an argument

The sentence, once it becomes the answer to every criticism, turns from a historical fact into an instrument for silencing any demand for reform. It does that in three small movements.

First, it shifts the burden of proof. Instead of the authority explaining what happened, the injured party is asked to explain why they are speaking at all.

Second, it converts a demand for a right into a question of loyalty. The critic is not engaged on what they said. They are asked about their intentions, and about whose interests their words serve.

Third, it converts memory into a debt. Anyone who says "have you forgotten Assad's days?" is asking you, in essence, to pay for your deliverance from the past with silence about the present.

But you can reject Assad, reject the return of tyranny, and at the same time refuse to let any new violation become acceptable. You can be grateful for having come out of the past without being grateful for everything happening in the present, and you can support the state while it is being built and criticise it when it gets things wrong. Perhaps that is precisely what Syria needs: a state that does not have to be like Assad before we are allowed to criticise it.

If the institutions improve, good; if security improves, good; if the state becomes more open, good; if the economy or the services or the foreign relations improve, good. All of it deserves acknowledgement, and deserves to be said out loud, because playing down real progress is also a mistake, and it wrongs the people who are genuinely doing the building. But acknowledging an achievement is one thing, and turning every achievement into a final victory is another.

So what exactly do you want?

When the critic is asked that question, there needs to be an answer. Not a wish list. A set of demands that needs no budget, no new constitution and no ten years.

That every place of detention in Syria is known, declared, and open to visits by an independent body, because there is not one legitimate reason for a secret detention site to exist. That every violation committed by somebody carrying a weapon or an official title has a known investigative track and a published outcome. That the file of the detained and the missing has a single body with a name, an address and a timetable, rather than bodies that refer people to one another. That it is stated in plain text that criticising an official is not a crime, and that an opinion is not put on trial.

These are not maximal demands. They are a floor. A state that accepts them does not weaken itself; it gains the one thing that cannot be bought or imported, which is the trust of its people.

The questions that have to stay open are well known. Are Syrians safer, freer, more dignified? Is the law stronger than the gun? Is the judiciary able to protect a human being rather than protect whoever holds power? Can a victim's family demand justice without being afraid? Can an opponent speak without turning into an enemy of the state? And has the life and dignity of a Syrian become the starting point rather than the ceiling of what may be asked for?

If the answer is "not yet", that does not mean everything has failed. It means the project is not finished, and that people have the right, and perhaps the duty, to go on asking.

The goal is not for Syria to become "better than Assad". That is the minimum, not the dream. The goal is for Syria to become a country where nobody has to remind the authorities that their life has value, where citizens do not fear the state and the state does not need to frighten citizens in order to hold on to power, and where human rights are the baseline and not a reward for good behaviour. Frankly, after everything Syrians have lived through, I do not think that is an excessive request.

Syrians have not gone soft because they no longer accept being beaten, killed and humiliated. The real problem is that we have raised the threshold of endurance so far that somebody demanding their rights looks spoiled to us. The ceiling the regime built is still standing over our heads, and we mistake it for the sky. What has to change is not the Syrian. It is our definition of what a Syrian deserves.