In recent decades, most countries emerging from conflict or oppressive government have sought to put peace and stability on a foundation of justice. That often requires citizens to accept a balance between accountability and mercy.
Syrians are now wrestling with that trade-off. In recent weeks, the rebel group that toppled the Assad regime has offered a provisional amnesty agreement to those who served the former brutal security state. Those who surrender their weapons and “reconcile” with the new government may – for now at least – return to their lives.
“We want to get the benefits from these kinds of people in running the new Syria,” Abu Sariyeh al-Shami, a former fighter with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group now in control, told The Guardian Monday.
Many Syrians, scarred by decades of violent abuses under the previous regime, want justice before considering forgiveness. Yet Syria’s approach to transitional justice has the potential to be uniquely citizen-led. That’s because in the regime’s sudden collapse, it left behind a trove of documents and video evidence.
Civil society groups had already amassed more than 1 million documents showing the extent of Bashar al-Assad’s security infrastructure. Now they are scurrying to secure and digitize more records found in the regime’s network of prisons and intelligence centers. The archive had already helped international prosecutions of Syrians linked to the regime in European courts.
The idea of reconciling societies by exchanging forgiving for truth-telling gained its current form 30 years ago in South Africa. The country promised the perpetrators of violent crimes committed during the apartheid era amnesty from prosecution if they fully disclosed their actions and showed remorse.
The impact of such models of reconciliation, wrote Mai Al-Nakib, a Kuwaiti academic, rests in accounting for the past in order to move beyond it. “The Greek word for truth, aletheia, literally means ‘not forgetfulness,’” she noted in an essay in The Markaz Review last year. “The Classical Greek root of the word amnesty is amnestis, that is, ‘not remembrance.’”
“Survival demands vision, something in the shape of a half-remembered, half-forgotten dream,” she observed. “Half-remembered so as not to repeat the horrors of the past. Half-forgotten in order to make space for untested ways of caring, connecting, and being human in the present, toward the preservation of our future.”
Syria is a long way from having the institutional capacity to pursue accountability for crimes committed during the Assad regime. But by preserving the regime’s records, its citizens are laying the basis for future shaped by individual dignity unburdened by a traumatic past.
