There appear to be no limits to the darkish revelations laid naked by the downfall of Syria’s 54-year Assad regime.
Prisons have emptied, exposing the devices of torture used on peaceable protesters and others thought of opponents of the federal government. Stacks of official paperwork report 1000’s of detainees. Morgues and mass graves maintain the gaunt, broken-bodied victims, or at the very least a few of them.
Many others have but to be discovered.
For these and lots of different atrocities, Syrians need justice. The insurgent alliance that overthrew President Bashar al-Assad final month has vowed to search out and prosecute senior regime figures for crimes that embody murdering, wrongly imprisoning, torturing and gassing their very own individuals.
“Most Syrians would say they’ll solely obtain closure to carry this darkish 54-year period to an finish once they carry these guys to justice,” stated Ayman Asfari, chairman of Madaniya, a community of Syrian human rights organizations and different civic teams.
However even assuming that the brand new authorities can monitor suspects down, accountability can be laborious to realize in a rustic as weak, divided and battered as Syria. The experiences of different Arab international locations whose despotic regimes collapsed testify to the challenges: None of these international locations — not Egypt, not Iraq, not Tunisia — succeeded in securing complete, lasting justice for the crimes of earlier eras.
Syria faces some distinctive hurdles. The nation’s new de facto leaders come from the nation’s Sunni Muslim majority, whereas the senior ranks of the deposed regime had been dominated by Alawites, a spiritual minority. Meaning prosecutions for Assad-era abuses may danger fueling Syria’s sectarian tensions.
The justice system was for years little greater than a software for Mr. al-Assad, making it sick geared up to deal with sweeping, complicated human rights violations. Many 1000’s of Syrians may very well be implicated, greater than can presumably be prosecuted, elevating questions on how you can deal with lower-level officers.
And after years of struggle, sanctions, corruption and mismanagement, it is a gigantic activity simply to type by way of the harm whereas transitioning to a brand new authorities.
9 in 10 Syrians dwell in poverty. Cities lie in ruins. Properties have been destroyed. Tens of 1000’s of individuals had been unjustly detained for years or a long time. Lots of of 1000’s had been killed within the combating. Many are nonetheless lacking.
Syrians will want time and lots of discussions to design a sound accountability course of, stated Nerma Jelacic of the Fee for Worldwide Justice and Accountability, which has been gathering proof towards Syrian regime figures for years.
“These are issues that take time, they usually by no means occur in a single day,” she stated.
However there’s huge strain on Syria’s new leaders to start punishing the outdated, and the transitional authorities within the capital, Damascus, have promised to take action.
“We won’t relent in holding accountable the criminals, murderers and safety and army officers concerned in torturing the Syrian individuals,” Ahmed al-Shara, Syria’s de facto chief, stated in a put up on Telegram in December. He added that they might quickly publish “Checklist No. 1” of senior officers “implicated within the torture of the Syrian individuals.”
Looking down such figures can be troublesome, if not inconceivable. Mr. al-Assad has discovered refuge in Russia, which is unlikely to provide him up. A lot of his high associates have melted away, with some reportedly in hiding in Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates.
Nonetheless, Syrian human rights teams in exile started laying the groundwork greater than a decade in the past, gathering proof for prosecutions that had been mounted in different international locations — and sometime, they hoped, in their very own.
However Fernando Travesí, govt director of the Worldwide Heart for Transitional Justice, which has labored with such Syrian teams, cautioned that, earlier than starting prosecutions in Syria, the authorities ought to first earn residents’ belief by constructing a state that meets their wants.
Doing so would keep away from the missteps of a rustic like Tunisia, the place a scarcity of financial progress within the years after the 2011 Arab Spring revolution left many individuals embittered and disenchanted. By 2021, Tunisians had turned on their fledgling democracy, throwing their assist to a president who has grown more and more authoritarian. Efforts to carry members of the dreaded safety companies and regime cronies to justice at the moment are functionally suspended.
“Any means of reality, justice and accountability must be coming from establishments which have some legitimacy and credibility with the inhabitants, in any other case it’s a waste of time,” Mr. Travesí stated. Offering essential companies, he added, would encourage Syrians to view authorities as “not a software for repression; it’s taking good care of my wants.”
The transitional authorities can take fundamental but important steps reminiscent of serving to refugees who left years in the past receive new identification, adjudicating what ought to occur to property that was stolen or occupied in the course of the struggle, and offering steady electrical energy and working water. It might want to ship humanitarian support and financial enhancements, although these might solely be attainable with the assistance of different international locations.
And it should do all this in an evenhanded means, or Syrians may see accountability efforts as selective or politically pushed. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the United States-led occupation and successive governments purged and blacklisted even junior functionaries within the former ruling get together with out due course of, which analysts stated undermined religion within the new system.
“The one option to heal the injuries with the opposite communities is to verify they’re pretty represented,” Mr. Asfari stated.
The Syrian authorities are signaling that they perceive. They’ve vowed repeatedly to respect minority rights and have promised amnesty to rank-and-file troopers who had been pressured to serve in Mr. al-Assad’s army. Most authorities workers have been allowed to remain on to maintain establishments working.
Any prosecution “needs to be a great course of, in any other case it’ll appear like score-settling,” stated Stephen J. Rapp, a former worldwide prosecutor and former U.S. ambassador for international justice who has labored on Syrian abuses for greater than a decade. “And that may play a key function in reconciling a society and defusing efforts to settle scores, for example, towards the kids of oldsters who dedicated these crimes.”
In an added complication, a number of the paperwork that can be essential to mounting any prosecutions have been broken within the chaos following Mr. al-Assad’s downfall, with regime prisons and intelligence company archives ransacked, looted or burned, stated Ms. Jelacic of the Fee for Worldwide Justice and Accountability.
As a result of Syria stays beneath wartime sanctions, her group and others attempting to safeguard these papers for future use in court docket can not function throughout a lot of the nation, additional jeopardizing their efforts.
The wartime mass graves and torture gadgets are solely essentially the most obvious proof of abuses overseen by Mr. al-Assad and his father, Hafez.
Practically each Syrian, in some sense, has been wronged by the previous regime. So it’s not sufficient to prosecute people for crimes dedicated in the course of the civil struggle, say veterans of justice efforts in different international locations that underwent political transitions.
Mr. Rapp referred to as for a “bigger truth-telling course of” that might assist “actually start to know the system of state repression that was Syria for the final 54 years, and this equipment of homicide that was Syria” since 2011.
One mannequin may very well be the post-apartheid Fact and Reconciliation Fee in South Africa, which heard testimony from victims and perpetrators of rights violations, supplied reparations to victims, and in some circumstances granted amnesties.
Ms. Jelacic stated Syria would want a broader reckoning with the Assad regime’s legacy that “doesn’t contribute to the divisions, however that it contributes to therapeutic.”
Earlier than trials start, specialists stated, Syria ought to overhaul its police and court docket techniques and construct a authorized framework to deal with rights violations, maybe making a particular tribunal to prosecute essentially the most critical crimes. An equally pressing precedence is discovering out what occurred to the estimated 136,000 individuals who stay lacking after being arrested by the Assad regime and figuring out our bodies uncovered in mass graves.
However Syria can not wait too lengthy to prosecute former regime officers. Gradual-moving official justice leaves room for offended individuals to take issues into their very own palms, which may set off cycles of violence and deepen sectarian divisions. Already, scattered revenge killings and threats towards minorities who had been favored by the Assad regime have been reported.
After Tunisia’s revolution, prolonged delays in bringing circumstances towards former safety officers added to residents’ sense that their new democracy was bankrupt.
Lamia Farhani, a Tunisian lawyer who has lengthy sought justice for her brother’s deadly capturing whereas he protested the earlier regime in 2011, stated that her nation’s disillusionment had permitted the present president, Kais Saied, to dismantle its democracy.
“We had a nascent democracy that failed on the first storm,” she stated. “And all this occurred as a result of there was no actual reconciliation.”
