The fall of Assad could be an opportunity – also for Germany

I looked at them again and again, of course, the pictures of happy children in the terribly luxurious dictator’s palace, of the toppled statues, of the torn pictures that showed Syria’s finally-no-longer dictator Bashar al-Assad. When dictators fall, they suddenly become very small, even if their family, like Assad’s, was in power for five decades, even if their henchmen allegedly mastered 72 methods of torture. Then you think again that these absolute rulers, with all their power, live in eternal fear that the apparent calm in their empire can be a powder keg.

And yet, despite all the joy, one feeling refused to emerge: the certainty that hope was now in the air. However, too many memories came to mind, for example of the situation in Egypt, where the Arab Spring was once so tangible. People danced in the streets, the long-term dictator Mubarak finally resigned; A college friend from the country wrote to me: “We can finally design our Egypt.” I was in Egypt just a few weeks ago, it’s still a beautiful country, with such friendly people, but you can see fear in their eyes when they meet heavily armed soldiers and police. Because of freedom. The fall of the dictator was only a short episode; today Egypt is ruled more authoritarian than ever. It is still completely unclear whether times are really getting better in battered Syria.

And a second memory came to the fore, of how early and for how long we betrayed Syria. In 2013, then US President Barack Obama wanted to draw a red line and did not want to tolerate Assad’s use of poison gas against his own people. But when Assad dared to do this, Obama preferred not to do anything about it. This also paved the way for Vladimir Putin and Co. to support Assad’s war against his own country in the most brutal way possible in the following years, for example with the perfidious tactic of first dropping a bomb on hospitals from an airplane – and then after half an hour this one Let the plane return with another bomb so that the civilian first responders also die. People fled, so many that it pushed societies in Europe to their limits, including Germany.

We, the Western world, did not dare to stop Assad from murdering back then, and in recent years we have mostly preferred to forget the situation in Syria. Assad did not fall because we took such a decisive stand against him. But because the villains who supported the villain for so long are distracted: Iran and Hezbollah from the fight with Israel, the Russians from their war of aggression in Ukraine. It is far too early to conclude from the fall of Assad that democracy is stronger than autocracy. However, a new debate about refugee policy would be conceivable, including in Germany. By that I don’t mean clumsy demands that will definitely come: either to stir up fears that many new refugees could now come to us. Or the demand that all Syrian refugees in Germany, almost a million, must now return to their homeland as quickly as possible.

And yet: level-headed voices like the renowned migration researcher Gerald Knaus see an opportunity for easing of the refugee crisis after the fall of the Assad regime. “In the medium term – if stability is established – this could be a historic turning point for the entire refugee situation, including in Europe,” says Knaus star. “Syrian refugees in neighboring countries immediately have the chance to see whether it is safe in their homeland again. If that is the case, asylum applications in Germany and other European countries will also decline.”

This could defuse our refugee debate, which threatens to poison the upcoming election campaign. That’s why stabilizing Syria must have absolute priority, says Knaus. In the form of a contact group, for example: “Jordan should be there, Turkey, Austria, Greece, Germany, the EU and the next Syrian government. This group must develop a strategy and the EU must support it.” Germany should lead the way, also out of its own interest, after all, in the past two years, 80 percent of Syrians in the European Union have sought protection in Germany (as well as in Austria). The German election campaigners should talk about this topic soon, and should also argue about it. It would only be good if it remained clear: We are not talking about numbers, but people.