Ethiopia explains why Assad couldn’t step down

Back in the heady early days of the Arab Spring, as peaceful protesters rallied against Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, US President Barack Obama famously declared that Assad must go. “The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way,” Obama wrote at the time.

Assad, of course, did not go. Nine years later, he is still there, even as half his country’s people have been displaced, millions are stranded in neighboring countries and beyond, and hundreds of thousands are dead, Syria’s GDP having fallen by 75% and most of its major cities in ruins.

But why would the man destroy his country rather than surrender power? And why did anyone support him? And what would have come to pass if only he had gone?

There is no perfect counterfactual, but a very close approximation of what might have happened had Assad stepped down is playing out in Ethiopia right now. Because the question was never whether Syria’s people would decide its future, but rather which Syrians would do so.

What is going on in Ethiopia?

Ethiopia’s government was, from 1991 until 2018, an ethnic confederation overwhelmingly dominated by a minority ethnic group called the Tigrayans, who hail from an eponymous region up in the country’s mountainous northwest and were the lead actor in overthrowing a hideous communist dictatorship known as the Derg. The Tigrayans are only six percent of the country’s population but, once in power, ensured that they were wildly disproportionately represented in the military and political leadership. They effectively ran Ethiopia as a minority dictatorship.

Unsurprisingly, Ethiopia’s dozens of other ethnic groups didn’t take kindly to this. Protest was common. Violent suppression of protest was also common. But finally, popular protest proved too much and the Tigrayan regime recognized that things needed to change. In the ensuing political shakeup, Abiy Ahmed, an ethnic Oromo (one of the larger groups) took the top job. He promised a more unitary and democratic state. He freed political prisoners. He made peace with Eritrea. He won the Nobel Peace Prize.

He also centralized power and started purging Tigrayans from key positions and arresting them. Tensions flared, finally culminating with a full-scale military invasion of Tigray in November. Tigrayans were targeted in ethnic violence. Tigrayans fled their state in huge numbers to take refuge in Sudan. Refugees on the Eritrean border were trapped. Heavy fighting broke out on the border of the neighboring (and pro-government) Amhara region, which has a longstanding territory dispute with Tigray. The Tigrayan leadership was chased out of its capital city and into the mountains but refused to surrender and will presumably seek to resume the guerrilla war it waged through the 1980s against the Derg.

Ethiopian politics are far more complicated than can be fully explained here—Alex de Waal has a nice primer—but generally they pit a vision of a more centralized regime against a more federal vision devolved to ethnic regions favored by the Tigrayans. (Ethiopia’s 1994 constitution allows for a high degree of ethnic federalism including, controversially, the right to self-determination.) This can lead to some strange alliances; Abiy, for instance, has been accused of betraying his own Oromo group in favor of ethnic Amharas who agree with his vision of a more unitary state. In the first year of Abiy’s reformist efforts, before this most recent military action, nearly three million Ethiopians were cleansed from their homes in ethnic violence. And the Tigrayans of course are hardly blameless in all of this; a youth wing of their armed forces is reportedly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people at the outset of November’s fighting.

But blame isn’t the point here. For Tigrayans, just couple of years ago they effectively ran all of Ethiopia, and in their view they delivered it from communism, famine and terror… and now their regional capital is occupied, they are compelled to flee to refugee camps in Sudan, they are purged from government positions and from UN peacekeeping missions, their federal government appears to have teamed up with their bitter foreign enemy to conquer them, their internet was cut, UN officials attempting to reach the region have been shot at by government troops, and a foreign diplomat said the situation “has the smell of Rwanda.” To put it simply, it’s a scary time to be an ethnic Tigrayan.

So what does this have to do with Syria?

Here’s the thing: this is what happens to minority regimes when they are overthrown. Generally, the majority exacts retribution, and the minority group is subjugated, expelled, or even exterminated. It happened to the Tutsis of Rwanda. It happened to the Sunni Arabs of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. It happened to the Turks of Southeastern Europe as the Ottoman Empire faltered. It happened to the pieds-noir of Algeria. It happened to the Igbo in Nigeria. It happened to ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. It happened to the Serbs in the Krajina and in Kosovo. And it’s not just the ruling group that suffers, but also other minority groups who have come to depend on the regime for protection: Armenians and Druze in Syria, Christians in Iraq, Sephardim in Algeria. They get targeted too.

In practice, when trying to reform a minority regime, it is almost impossible to square the minority group’s historic dominance and simultaneous insecurity with the majority’s demands without one side feeling, or being, oppressed, and conflict is thus almost unavoidable.

And this brings us back to Syria. Bashar al-Assad hails from the Alawites, an offshoot of Shia Islam. Like the Tigrayans, the Alawites mostly live in their country’s mountainous northwest where they were historically marginalized. Like the Tigrayans, the Alawites are a tiny percentage of their country’s population (perhaps 12% before the war). Like the Tigrayans, the Alawites grabbed and maintained power through military prowess and came to be disproportionately represented in the armed forces and political elite. And like the Tigrayans, they are deeply resented for it by the rest of the population.

Given how minorities in Syria were targeted by rebel groups during the war—most infamously but not exclusively through Daesh’s genocidal campaign—and given how Saddam’s Iraq imploded right next door when he was overthrown, there is every reason to think the Alawites, Druze, Christians, and other minority groups dependent on Assad’s regime would have suffered the same fate the Tigrayans are suffering today, or worse, had the regime fallen. The ethnic and sectarian militias who went to bat for Assad—including his regional allies Hezbollah and Iran—did so because they were convinced that the threat to them and theirs should he fall was existential. After all, the Tigrayans ultimately ceded power relatively peacefully… and today their capital is occupied. That’s why Bashar al-Assad couldn’t go. His country’s minorities depended on his regime for their aspirations, their advancement, and even their very survival. And they still do. His victory has ensured, at least for now, that they will not be the Tigrayans.

So what would have happened if Assad had listened to Obama and stepped down? Syria’s history would have been different, but it probably wouldn’t have been any better. It just would have had a different winner, and a different loser.