By Dr. Adnan Bouzan

What is happening in Syria is no longer a mysterious tragedy, nor a complex conflict as it is often portrayed, but rather a direct result of the denial of rights and the absence of political courage. A state governed for decades with a mentality of exclusion collapsed at the first real test, then turned into an open arena of conflict because its internal foundations were fragile from the outset.

Anyone observing what is happening in Ukraine can clearly see that the world does not deal with wars by a single standard. There, the war is described as a threat to the international order, and the doors of political, military, and media support are thrown wide open. In Syria, however, crime has been normalized, and the tragedy has been transformed into a long-term negotiating file—as if Syrians were a people fit for political consumption, or a cause indefinitely deferred.

Yet the common denominator between the two cases is clear and indisputable:
politics that ignores pluralism and rights inevitably leads to war.
In Ukraine, the neglect of historical anxieties and a complex identity constituted one of the fuels of the conflict. In Syria, the denial of national pluralism—foremost among it Kurdish existence and rights—and the rejection of any genuine democratic transition were among the structural reasons that led to the country’s explosion and the continuation of its bleeding.

From here, a clear stance becomes a necessity, not a choice:

There is no solution in Syria without explicit and comprehensive recognition of the rights of all its components, without exception or selectivity.
There can be no viable state under the mentality of a “ruling majority” or the slogan of “security first.”
And no national unity can be built through force, accusations of treason, exclusion, or political erasure.

Any political path that does not place democracy, equality, and political decentralization at the heart of the solution is merely a path toward reproducing the crisis, not ending it. The Syrian experience has proven that extreme centralization did not protect the state but contributed to its disintegration, and that repression did not safeguard sovereignty but rather opened the doors to all forms of foreign intervention.

What Syria needs today is not additional conferences or new statements of concern, but a courageous political stance that acknowledges the following truths:

• Syria is a pluralistic country and will not achieve stability without explicit constitutional recognition of this pluralism.

• Kurdish rights are not a threat to unity; they are a genuine guarantee of it.

• Transitional justice is not a political luxury, but a fundamental condition for any sustainable peace.

• Freedom is not a rhetorical slogan, but the foundation of legitimacy and any new social contract.

Between Kyiv and Damascus, there is one lesson many choose to ignore:
when politics fails to build a just social contract, war steps in to fill the vacuum.
And when free speech is suppressed, weapons become the country’s only language.

Accordingly, Syria will not be saved by force, by denial, or by postponing rights.
It will be saved only by a new politics—one that recognizes the human being before geography, rights before slogans, and partnership before domination.

Without this, talk of “stability” will amount to nothing more than a longer management of the crisis, nothing more.