Syrian Court Sentences Bashar Assad, Brother, and Former Official to Death
Syria Has Not Rebelled Against Its Rulers; Its Rulers Rebelled Against Syria
When a regime disappears 181,000 of its own people and turns protest into massacre, it dissolves itself as government; what remains is not order but war, and war may be answered in kind — though even just punishment must be hedged with law, not vengeance.
The image that arrests me is not the absent princes condemned to death, but the man in the cage. I read that a former security chief, accused of murder, torture, and forced disappearances during a fourteen‑year civil war, now stands behind bars in a Damascus court, while his former sovereign is sentenced to death in absentia for crimes against humanity and war crimes. I learn that more than 181,000 persons were forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily detained during that war, the great majority by the fallen regime, and that it began, in part, with teenagers seized and allegedly tortured for writing words upon a wall. One hardly needs much more to see the shape of the thing.
I have elsewhere, in what you call my Second Treatise, defined political power as the right to make laws with penalties of death and lesser pains only for the regulating and preserving of property, by which I meant lives, liberties, and estates, and all this only for the public good. Whatever goes beyond that definition must either justify itself, or stand condemned as usurpation. When magistrates employ soldiers and gaolers not to protect their people, but to extort, to torture, to kill, and to cause men to vanish without charge or trial, they have stepped outside the office of government and into a state of war with those they once pretended to rule.
For men are by nature free, equal, and independent. No one is born with a saddle on his back that another may ride him. The burden of proof always lies on the one who claims authority over another’s life and liberty. If the facts reported are true—that security forces answered peaceful protest with massacre, that agencies of state ran their own private dungeons, that more than 181,000 souls were seized without lawful process—then the rulers in question have utterly failed that burden. They have not merely committed excess in the execution of a rightful trust; they have overturned the very ends for which that trust could ever be granted.
In such a case, the law of nature, which is but reason, tells us what follows. He who sets upon another’s life, liberty, or goods without right puts himself into a state of war with his victim. If this aggression is carried on, not by a lone robber, but by those who command the instruments of the commonwealth, then the war is levied against an entire people. When I once wrote that a long train of abuses, tending the same way, dissolves government, I meant just this: when legislators and their officers invade property and reduce men to slavery under arbitrary power, they are the true rebels. The people, resisting, are but exercising the appeal to heaven that remains when earth affords no impartial judge.
Yet now I am told that there is a judge: a criminal court in Damascus, under a new authority, which has condemned the former ruler and his brother to death, and has sentenced their officer, present in the dock, for his part in murder and torment. The presiding judge is reported to have said that the former president used state agencies to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. This, if done according to evidence openly produced, with the accused able to answer, is the proper shape of a commonwealth emerging from tyranny: not private revenge, not assassination in the dark, but public judgment, under known standing rules, by a tribunal not itself party to the old oppression.
Still, a friend of liberty should be slow to rejoice merely because a hated name receives a terrible sentence. Death in absentia is a grave thing. When the person condemned is not present, cannot confront witnesses, and cannot, in his own person, submit to the court’s jurisdiction, there is always danger that a trial becomes theatre rather than judgment. I do not say that is so here; I do not know the full record. I say only that a people who have suffered secret prisons and arbitrary detentions must take especial care that their new institutions do not inherit the old contempt for the accused as a mere object of power. If the new rulers may condemn their enemies without the strictest forms of proof, who shall restrain them when the next enemy is less plainly guilty?
The dissolution of a government is not the dissolution of society. Syrians, by all that is reported, have already shown that they can replace a broken dynasty without descending wholly into chaos. To complete that work, they must bind themselves, and their rulers, under impartial laws that secure every person as the workmanship of one Maker, sent into the world about His business. To hold cruel men to account for murders, torture, and disappearances is not vengeance but justice; to do so by fixed rules, open evidence, and measured punishments is the hardest part of justice. Power broke Syria; only law can keep power from breaking it again.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Dissolution of government and the right of resistance: when legislators invade property or set up arbitrary power, they rebel against the people, not the people against them.