By Dr. Adnan Bouzan

With the arrival of a new Gregorian year, we do not write greetings; we write an indictment.
A direct indictment of an era of backward, authoritarian Eastern thought that has been deliberately squandered, and of peoples whose dreams have been buried beneath the rubble of blind nationalism, militarized religion, and the security state.

We enter a new year while the same regimes continue to reproduce failure, market devastation as stability, and demand that the victim applaud the executioner. What is happening in this region is neither fate nor a historical curse; it is the direct political consequence of denying rights, criminalizing diversity, and transforming the state from an inclusive framework for justice into an organized instrument of repression.

In this region, power fears democracy more than it fears secession, and it fights awareness more fiercely than it fights terrorism. Hence, every emancipatory experiment is distorted, every alternative idea is besieged, and every democratic project is branded a conspiracy against the “unity of the state,” while the truth is that what is actually being targeted is the monopoly of power and its privileges.

The new year brings no automatic salvation, but it exposes the moral and political bankruptcy of those who still wager on repression as a tool of governance. The future will not belong to those who possess weapons, but to those who possess the courage to acknowledge
that this region does not need new guardians, but a new social contract;
and that it does not need more slogans, but real rights that are neither negotiable nor postponable.

Every new year that passes without genuine, substantive change is merely another year added to the record of historical condemnation, not to the ledger of hope.