There seem to be no limits to the dark revelations laid bare by the downfall of Syria’s 54-year Assad regime.
Prisons have emptied, exposing the instruments of torture used on peaceful protesters and others considered opponents of the government. Stacks of official documents record thousands of detainees. Morgues and mass graves hold the gaunt, broken-bodied victims, or at least some of them.
Many others have yet to be found.
For these and many other atrocities, Syrians want justice. The rebel alliance that overthrew President Bashar al-Assad last month has vowed to hunt down and prosecute senior regime figures for crimes that include murdering, wrongly imprisoning, torturing and gassing their own people.
“Most Syrians would say they can only achieve closure to bring this dark 54-year era to an end when they bring these guys to justice,” said Ayman Asfari, chairman of Madaniya, a network of Syrian human rights organizations and other civic groups.
But even assuming that the new authorities can track suspects down, accountability will be hard to achieve in a country as vulnerable, divided and battered as Syria. The experiences of other Arab countries whose despotic regimes collapsed testify to the challenges: None of those countries — not Egypt, not Iraq, not Tunisia — succeeded in securing comprehensive, lasting justice for the crimes of earlier eras.
Syria faces some distinctive hurdles. The country’s new de facto leaders come from the country’s Sunni Muslim majority, while the senior ranks of the deposed regime were dominated by Alawites, a religious minority. That means prosecutions for Assad-era abuses could risk fueling Syria’s sectarian tensions.
The justice system was for years little more than a tool for Mr. al-Assad, making it ill equipped to handle sweeping, complex human rights violations. Many thousands of Syrians could be implicated, more than can possibly be prosecuted, raising questions about how to handle lower-level officials.
And after years of war, sanctions, corruption and mismanagement, it is an enormous task just to sort through the damage while transitioning to a new government.
Nine in 10 Syrians live in poverty. Cities lie in ruins. Homes have been destroyed. Tens of thousands of people were unjustly detained for years or decades. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the fighting. Many are still missing.
Syrians will need time and many discussions to design a sound accountability process, said Nerma Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, which has been gathering evidence against Syrian regime figures for years.
“These are things that take time, and they never happen overnight,” she said.
But there is enormous pressure on Syria’s new leaders to begin punishing the old, and the transitional authorities in the capital, Damascus, have promised to do so.
“We will not relent in holding accountable the criminals, murderers and security and military officers involved in torturing the Syrian people,” Ahmed al-Shara, Syria’s de facto leader, said in a post on Telegram in December. He added that they would soon publish “List No. 1” of senior officials “implicated in the torture of the Syrian people.”
Hunting down such figures will be difficult, if not impossible. Mr. al-Assad has found refuge in Russia, which is unlikely to give him up. Many of his top associates have melted away, with some reportedly in hiding in Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates.
Still, Syrian human rights groups in exile began laying the groundwork more than a decade ago, gathering evidence for prosecutions that were mounted in other countries — and someday, they hoped, in their own.
But Fernando Travesí, executive director of the International Center for Transitional Justice, which has worked with such Syrian groups, cautioned that, before beginning prosecutions in Syria, the authorities should first earn citizens’ trust by building a state that meets their needs.
Doing so would avoid the missteps of a country like Tunisia, where a lack of economic progress in the years after the 2011 Arab Spring revolution left many people embittered and disenchanted. By 2021, Tunisians had turned on their fledgling democracy, throwing their support to a president who has grown increasingly authoritarian. Efforts to bring members of the feared security services and regime cronies to justice are now functionally suspended.
“Any process of truth, justice and accountability needs to be coming from institutions that have some legitimacy and credibility with the population, otherwise it’s a waste of time,” Mr. Travesí said. Providing crucial services, he added, would encourage Syrians to view government as “not a tool for repression; it’s taking care of my needs.”
The transitional government can take basic yet vital steps such as helping refugees who left years ago obtain new identification, adjudicating what should happen to property that was stolen or occupied during the war, and providing stable electricity and running water. It will need to deliver humanitarian aid and economic improvements, though those may only be possible with the help of other countries.
And it must do all this in an evenhanded way, or Syrians might see accountability efforts as selective or politically driven. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the United States-led occupation and successive governments purged and blacklisted even junior functionaries in the former ruling party without due process, which analysts said undermined faith in the new system.
“The only way to heal the wounds with the other communities is to make sure they’re fairly represented,” Mr. Asfari said.
The Syrian authorities are signaling that they understand. They have vowed repeatedly to respect minority rights and have promised amnesty to rank-and-file soldiers who were forced to serve in Mr. al-Assad’s military. Most government employees have been allowed to stay on to keep institutions running.
Any prosecution “has to be a good process, otherwise it’ll look like score-settling,” said Stephen J. Rapp, a former international prosecutor and former U.S. ambassador for global justice who has worked on Syrian abuses for more than a decade. “And that can play a key role in reconciling a society and defusing efforts to settle scores, for instance, against the children of parents who committed these crimes.”
In an added complication, some of the documents that will be crucial to mounting any prosecutions have been damaged in the chaos following Mr. al-Assad’s downfall, with regime prisons and intelligence agency archives ransacked, looted or burned, said Ms. Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.
Because Syria remains under wartime sanctions, her group and others trying to safeguard these papers for future use in court cannot operate across much of the country, further jeopardizing their efforts.
The wartime mass graves and torture devices are only the most glaring evidence of abuses overseen by Mr. al-Assad and his father, Hafez.
Nearly every Syrian, in some sense, has been wronged by the former regime. So it is not enough to prosecute individuals for crimes committed during the civil war, say veterans of justice efforts in other countries that underwent political transitions.
Mr. Rapp called for a “larger truth-telling process” that could help “really begin to understand the system of state repression that was Syria for the last 54 years, and this machinery of murder that was Syria” since 2011.
One model could be the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which heard testimony from victims and perpetrators of rights violations, offered reparations to victims, and in some cases granted amnesties.
Ms. Jelacic said Syria would need a broader reckoning with the Assad regime’s legacy that “doesn’t contribute to the divisions, but that it contributes to healing.”
Before trials begin, experts said, Syria should overhaul its police and court systems and build a legal framework to handle rights violations, perhaps creating a special tribunal to prosecute the most serious crimes. An equally urgent priority is finding out what happened to the estimated 136,000 people who remain missing after being arrested by the Assad regime and identifying bodies uncovered in mass graves.
But Syria cannot wait too long to prosecute former regime officials. Slow-moving official justice leaves room for angry people to take matters into their own hands, which could set off cycles of violence and deepen sectarian divisions. Already, scattered revenge killings and threats against minorities who were favored by the Assad regime have been reported.
After Tunisia’s revolution, lengthy delays in bringing cases against former security officials added to citizens’ sense that their new democracy was bankrupt.
Lamia Farhani, a Tunisian lawyer who has long sought justice for her brother’s fatal shooting while he protested the previous regime in 2011, said that her country’s disillusionment had permitted the current president, Kais Saied, to dismantle its democracy.
“We had a nascent democracy that failed at the first storm,” she said. “And all this happened because there was no real reconciliation.”
