How Soon Forgotten! Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

The regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has committed crimes against humanity and war crimes by subjecting cities to unlawful sieges that gave civilians no choice but to give up or die.

"[The] ICC has not opened an investigation in relation to Syria."

"Syria is not a state party to the Rome Statute and has not accepted the ICC [International Criminal Court] jurisdiction."

"Thus, crimes committed by its citizens on its own territories do not fall under the ICC jurisdiction, unless the [United Nations Security Council] would refer the situation to the ICC, which has not happened to date."

ICC spokesperson, Fadi el-Abdallah 

"The most heinous of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law perpetrated against the civilian population in Syria since March 2011."

"Such acts are likely to constitute crimes against humanity, war crimes and other international crimes, including genocide."

Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic report

"This matter has not been referred to the ICC, despite the several calls by the commission of inquiry, and numerous recommendations by the Human Rights council for the UN Security council to do so."

"[The Commission is exploring other] areas of criminal justice] to address the matter of Syrian war crimes]."

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

"There were rivers of blood and maggots [exuding from the bodies], once, I couldn’t eat anything for days."

"[Some corpses were totally rotten and their faces] unrecognizable [as if they had been deliberately disfigured with a chemical. It is the stench of the rotting corpses that most disturbed him and continues to date.] The smell stayed in my nose, even after I showered at home."

Syrian undertaker,witness Z 30/07/19

 

"Someone gives evidence that mass graves were still being dug until at least 2017. This is the kind of government, the kind of regime, that you don’t establish relations with."

"[The revelations made in such testimonies and the evidence laid out] will facilitate future trials against regime officials if they were caught traveling to Europe."

"The individual acts of torture only constitute a crime against humanity if they are being committed within a specific context, that being a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population. Z’s testimony establishes the crimes were systematic."

Patrick Kroker, senior legal advisor on Syria, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights

Millions of Syrians have been displaced in a decade of fighting    Getty Images

Syrian war planes strafing civilian Sunni Syrians in bread lines, hospitals and medical clinics bombed, barrel bombs targeting Sunni Syrian neighbourhoods, Syrian towns suffering the agonies of prohibited gas attacks. Children arrested, tortured, murdered. Women raped, imprisoned, murdered. Syrian citizens disappeared, never to be seen again alive or dead. Millions of Syrians internally displaced, fleeing bombardment. Millions more becoming  refugees, flooding neighbouring countries for haven, migrating desperately toward Europe.

Most leaders of countries conceive of legacy projects through which their administrations and their names will be respected and held in gratitude by their public. But not necessarily those in the Middle East, and certainly not the Assad family dynasty with their Alawite tribal affiliations and deadly sectarian hatred; a regime well known to have committed atrocities against its own people in the past and committed to carrying on that tradition. Syria and Iraq, both politically Baathist from opposite ends of the spectrum, both preying on their majority population, Sunni and Shia respectively.

The world watched, transfixed with revulsion at television screens, seeing children in agony from chlorine gas bombs hitting their night-time villages courtesy of their president, Bashar al-Assad, whose military was dispatched to clear Syria of the presence of Sunni Muslim 'terrorists', Syrian civilians who had agitated for equal status and treatment with their Alawite Syrian counterparts. They were rewarded by barrel bombs that wrenched their limbs from their torsos; a regime solution for terrorist activity.

Blood covers the hands of an injured boy following airstrikes believed to have been carried out by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, February 2015.   (Mohammed Badra/REUTERS)

An estimated 350,000 to 500,000 Syrian civilians were slaughtered by their own government, innocent civilians whom their president characterized as terrorists to justify his lethal responses to their pleas for equality as Syrian citizens. The bloody war against Sunni Muslim Syrians created 11 million refugees. A few years in to the civil war that proceeded, the regime battling Syrian Sunni militias attempting to overthrow the government that had systematically destroyed their human rights; the instability attracting actual terrorist groups seeing opportunities to advance their own agendas, among them the notorious Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

ISIL terrorists brought horror to the minds of those looking in at the Middle East, with their expanding capture of territory in Iraq and Syria, and their delight in torturing and murdering captured Europeans and Americans alongside their preoccupation with terrorizing and murdering and enslaving Yazidis, and their threats against Christians. Yet despite the terror they inspired in persuading those loyal to ISIL living abroad to launch attacks against Westerners in Europe and the United States, Islamic State could never match the kill rate of an established government that excelled in war crimes against civilians.

When "60 Minutes" documented the extent of the Assad regime's war crimes, activist Mouar Moustafa was the featured personality, a man who was determined to bring the full extent of the blighted criminality of al-Assad to public view through revealing his cache of documents signed by Assad authorizing depraved mass murder alongside thousands of photographs of civilians tortured to death in an accountability mission against his former president.

With the help of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the participation of Iran's proxy terror group Hezbollah and an assortment of Iran-controlled Shi'ite militias, augmented by the aerial bombardments of Russian warplanes, al-Assad finally had the upper hand, and with the dissolution of the Islamic State 'caliphate' the Syrian regime was enabled to restore its territory, mopping up the remainder of the Syrian resistance. The dreadful crimes committed by the Assad regime against its own people cries out for justice. Logically that should come with a trial against Assad himself and his advisers and military commanders.

But the International Criminal Court is disinterested in opening an investigation of Syria, just as the United Nations General Assembly has little interest in holding Syria to account for its paroxysms of mass murder, and the Security Council was never able to launch a condemnation of the regime with two of its permanent members, China and Russia, refusing to give assent. Finally, an accounting of sorts has arisen with a court in Germany having prosecuted and convicted a former Syrian regime officer for crimes against humanity.

 

A court in the German city of Koblenz sentenced former intelligence officer Eyad al-Gharib, 44, to four-and-a-half years in prison for aiding crimes against humanity. Convicted of accompanying 30 detained demonstrators being transported to prison, while fully aware of the systematic torture that awaited them in the prison. al-Gharib, a junior officer, had been arrested in 2019 along with senior regime officer Col.Anwar Raslan, under the principle of universal jurisdiction whereby a national court jurisdiction is given authority in issues of grave crimes against international law, irrespective of where the crimes take place.

Presiding judge Anne Kerber stands before pronouncing her verdict in the court in Koblenz, Germany, on February 24.

While it's a start on seeking justice, much, much more must be accomplished. Justice will only be served when Bashar al-Assad faces the full extent of international law and faces a penalty commensurate with his unspeakable crimes, and along with him, other members of his administration and the Syrian military which destroyed so many lives. President Vladimir Putin also has much to answer for in establishing support for the Syrian regime enabling it with that support to regain Syria while helping to slaughter Syrian civilians in the process.

There is no question the world is weary of these totalitarian governments persecuting innocent people, destroying countless lives, producing innumerable refugees and displaced populations facing miserable living conditions in lives of  traumatized horror. It is just so much easier to feel the horror, dread the outcomes, wish it would all go away, and turn away from it all, if only to maintain one's own sanity, sense of proportion and comfort in living normal lives in countries that sustain the rule of law and security and equality for all.

"This is a historic verdict. Not only because it is the first to convict a Syrian regime official for crimes against humanity, but also because it recognizes his crimes were part of a widespread and systematic attack orchestrated by the highest bodies of Assad's regime."

"This is only the first of many other trials and investigations we are supporting. It is almost ten years since the crimes Eyad A. [al-Gharib] was convicted for were committed in those early days of the uprising as the regime cracked down on bare-armed protesters." 

Nerma Jelacic, director, Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA)