Asharq al-Awsat has run an interview with ex-Syrian vice president Khaddam, who recently accused Assad of being involved in the Hariri assassination, and is now facing charges of treason and corruption by the Syrian government. In this interview, he counters what his detractors are saying by coming up with multi-million dollar accusations of corruption against Assad and his main men. And, most interestingly, he has a plan for reform in the country.

Q: What are you current priorities? Do you want to reform the regime, reform it, or topple it?

A: This regime cannot be reformed so there is nothing left but to oust it.

Q: But how will you oust it?

A: The Syrian people will topple the regime. There is a rapidly growing current in the country. Opposition is growing fast. I do not want to oust the regime by military coup. A coup is the most dangerous type of reform. I am working to create the right atmosphere for the Syrian people to topple the regime.

Q: Are you seeking to establish an opposition front?

A: Prior to my television interview Äwith Al ArabiyaÅ, the problem was the absence of a figure with political weight capable of facing the regime. The Syrian opposition knows my stance and I was in contact with it even when I was still living in Syria. The interview increased the opposition????????s confidence in itself and it will unite. This is what I am pursuing.

Q: In your quest to create the right atmosphere for change, have you held contacts with Arab and foreign sides?

A: I did not contact anybody because the change has to come from within.

Q: What about secondary factors?

A: These are secondary factors. If the main vector for change in external, then the interests of the country will be harmed. If foreign powers intervened, they will impose their conditions on the country and I reject this.

Newsweek has another interview.

Khaddam seems to be advocating here a colored revolution, similar to what we have seen in the Ukraine, but most importantly what the Syrians themselves have seen with the Cedar Revolution right next door in Lebanon, once their own little colony. I know people like Josh Landis are afraid of this result, as he believes that the result could be the dissolution of Syria into inner ethnic warfare. After all, the regime has spent the better part of a couple decades isolating, repressing, and pitting entire communities of people against one another. It surely is a possibility. Just as the repression of traditional identities in the former Soviet Union eventually led to the outbreak of ethnic violence in the Balkans, so too could the breakdown of enforced pan-Arabism lead to a surge in local identities.

That’s why it’s important that any opposition movement that seeks to internally change the regime would have to therefore have a distinctly nationalist overtone to it; this is exactly why the focus is on the actual change itself coming from within, and without the explicit intervention of outside powers. But outside of this reality, the benefit of this would be the united effect it has on the disparate opposition to the regime. These groups, when they come together, will need to think of themselves as Syrian citizens first before anything else. Otherwise, we probably will see some problems, whether there’s a military coup or a people power movement. Still, no matter what happens, something needs to, because action is better than not doing anything at all.