(since you’re a DS9 fan like I am) It was ironic that after the war, the Cardassian/Bajoran hybrids that Cardassia had neglected and cast out were instrumental in its rebuilding, and its rebirth.
Cardassia was in ruins.
It had never been in ruins. Not in all of its glorious history. Certainly, there had been wars in the pre-spaceflight days, but only individual areas ever became ruined.
An entire planet - and entire planetary empire in ruins… Just sucked the very soul out of the Cardassian people. They wandered through the rubble like ghosts. One would stop and pick up a piece of rubble, and half-heartedly add it to a pile.
This had never happened before. Nobody knew what to do.
Or at least, nobody who lived in the Cardassian empire knew what to do.
They came in bright colours and loose clothing. They came with water purifiers and soil reclamation units. They came with Pulaku and Tokta seedlings.
They came with Cardassian faces… or faces that were Cardassian enough. Despite the Bajoran earrings and the Bajoran clothing and the Bajoran accents, they were Cardassian enough for the lost souls to flock to them.
They were Cardassian enough for other Cardassians to listen to them. To follow orders. To forge a new world based on need and skill, not heritage and social standing. To give to those who needed, to make that which worked out of whatever they had to hand.
They came with Bajorans, who said things like, "We’ve been doing this for fifty years, it’s about time you learned how."
And some remembered. Before it was done unto them… they had done it first.
The Bajorans, the Bajoran-Cardassian hybrids, and the orphans they left behind had no reason at all to help Cardassia. They had every reason to leave the Cardassian Empire - or the ruins thereof - to stew and pickle in its own feculence and slide back to a more primitive standing for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Which was why the most important thing was that, though they came with some old grudges, they also came of their own free will. That they came without hate.
They came to show Cardassia what could be done without being conquerers.
And for the first time in thousands of years, Cardassia learned something new.