Syrian Court Sentences Bashar Assad, Brother, and Former Official to Death
Justice After Terror: Syria’s Verdict on Its Former Rulers
When a state turns its own courts against the crimes of its past rulers, it performs not an act of vengeance but a first, halting gesture of moral self-respect — provided it remembers that justice is more than the swapping of cages.
A man in a cage in a Damascus courtroom is a very small object; the accusation that he oversaw murder, torture, and forced disappearance during a fourteen-year civil war is a very large one. We are told that a court in Syria has sentenced the former president, his brother, and a security chief to death, the president in absentia, for crimes against humanity and war crimes. A judge declares that state agencies were used for these purposes. Plaintiffs, long bereaved, speak of waiting fifteen years to reclaim even a small part of their rights. One must begin, not with the sentence, but with the system of terror that made such a spectacle possible, and in some measure necessary.
When I wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that society may subsist without beneficence but never without justice, I had precisely this kind of case in view. To seize teenagers for graffiti, to torture or disappear them, to answer protest with massacre, is not severity in government; it is the overthrow of the very rule that makes government tolerable. Justice consists, at a minimum, in abstaining from injury. A government that makes injury its daily trade does not merely err in policy; it declares war upon its own people. Commerce, agriculture, the quiet industry of the labouring poor, all depend upon a presumption that force will protect, not prey upon, the weak.
The report that more than 181,000 persons were forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily detained, the great majority by the former regime, presents not a series of unfortunate excesses, but a settled system. Detention centres run by military divisions, accusations of torture, extortion, drug trafficking: here is the division of labour applied, not to the making of pins, but to the manufacture of fear. The annual produce of the land and labour of such a country must necessarily be diminished, not only by the destruction of lives, but by the universal discouragement of honest exertion. Where one may be seized not for crime but for suspicion, men hide their talents as they hide their opinions; the wealth of the nation shrinks to the fortune of the armed faction.
In The Wealth of Nations I ascribed to the sovereign three duties: defence, the administration of justice, and certain public works and institutions. The former government in Syria, if these accounts hold, inverted this order. Defence was turned inward upon unarmed citizens; the tribunals, instead of protecting them, became instruments in their oppression; the public works most assiduously maintained were those of surveillance, prisons, and secret police. This is the vile maxim of the masters of mankind—“all for us, and nothing for other people”—translated from mercantile monopoly into political despotism. No people can be rich where such a maxim governs; still less can they be secure.
Why, then, were such crimes pursued with such obstinacy? Here I must recall that poor man’s son of whom I once spoke, who toiled day and night to climb into the ranks of the great, only to find, when he had succeeded, that the palace contained more anxiety than happiness. The former rulers of Syria appear to have been poor men’s sons in this sense, labouring not to produce, but to preserve and extend their power; sacrificing, not their own tranquillity only, but the lives and liberties of countless others, to the deceptive charms of dominion. The imagined glory of unchallenged authority bewitched them; the real fruit was a country half ruined and a name that must seek safety in foreign exile and legal fictions.
We must ask, however, what the impartial spectator within us thinks of the sentences now pronounced. Death in absentia for some, death in person for another, is a rough instrument. It may satisfy resentment; it cannot restore the dead, nor easily separate the truly guilty from those who merely served a wicked system through fear. Yet some public recognition that “crimes against humanity” were committed by the former authorities is indispensable. To do nothing would be to declare to every future governor that torture and disappearance are but ordinary tools of state. The spectacle of a former security chief in a cage is thus a kind of confession by the nation to itself: we were wronged, and we will at least call the wrong by its proper name.
Still, one must beware that this confession does not degenerate into a new form of impunity. The man of system, charmed by his own plans, might imagine that having toppled one dynasty and condemned a few of its servants, he may now arrange society on the great chess-board as he pleases. Yet every piece has a principle of motion of its own. If new elites merely inherit the old instruments—secret prisons, unaccountable armed divisions, courts that can be turned from shield to sword—the names upon the death sentences will change, but the terror will persist. The true test of this moment in Syria is whether justice becomes a standing rule for high and low alike, or remains a drama occasionally played for the consolation of the injured. A nation begins to recover not when it hangs its tyrants, but when it no longer has need of tyrants at all.
From the works cited
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Justice is the pillar whose removal crushes society; beneficence is the ornament that embellishes it — society can subsist without generosity, never without justice.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, justice, public works and institutions) and the measure of policy by the real consumption of the labouring poor.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — The deception of ambition (the poor man's son): imagined happiness of the great drives industry while rarely delivering contentment — useful to nations, costly to souls.