As the war in Syria enters its 7th year, one wonders how this nation, so broken by almost a decade of internecine and global proxy warfare, might ever hope to emerge from the resultant chaos and destruction and become a functional society again. It is a process likely to take decades, if it is even achievable at all.
At some point, once some form of settlement is reached, the issue of justice and reconciliation among the various, warring groups must be addressed. As part of a multi-lateral, internationalist response to the atrocities committed by various actors, it is worth considering the role of international criminal justice.
At the turn of the century, the international legal order appeared to be quickly adapting to an increasingly globalised world, with a growing consensus among both individuals and states that trans-national judicial bodies might now exercise jurisdiction over an ever expanding territorial sphere. The creation of an International Criminal Court in parallel with a proliferation of ‘mixed’ judicial bodies in Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and, more recently, in Iraq, composed of both national and international judges and enforcing domestic as well as international criminal law, is demonstrative of the progress made.
However, it is the establishment of the two ad hoc Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) which provide the most relevant and empirical basis on which to assess how a post-conflict Syria might benefit from a revival of the international criminal justice framework.
The conflicts in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Syria are each separately rooted in decades, perhaps even centuries, of, at times, violent inter-ethnic and religious co-existence. While each conflict is manifestly different, broadly speaking, the establishment of the ICTY and ICTR expressed the commitment of the international community to help to establish truth and punish the perpetrators of war crimes. Both conflicts, in common with Syria, largely resulted from the deliberate incitement of ethnic and religious hatred and violence by which ruthless demagogues and warlords elevated themselves into positions of absolute power, creating a culture of impunity.
While assessing the success of either tribunal is difficult even now, against the backdrop of both the war in Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide, and the killing and mass expulsion of tens of thousands in their respective aftermath, it is clear that both the ICTY and the ICTR have each made at least a modest contribution to post-conflict peace building. Perhaps their greatest achievement has been to destroy the prevailing culture of impunity, to impede the resurrection of the former government and to enhance the political attraction of criminal justice as an alternative to violence.
These would be positive outcomes for a post-conflict Syria.
The challenges to such a settlement however are vast. Despite the adoption of numerous international instruments affirming human rights and humanitarian standards, Assad’s brutal regime, complicit in some of the most heinous war-crimes perpetrated on the Syrian people during the conflict, has been bolstered by a geo-political order unable or unwilling to tackle his worst excesses. Any settlement with Assad at the helm or any arrangement which would allow Assad’s regime to avoid punishment would likely fatally undermine efforts to bring about a peaceful reconciliation of the Syrian people.
Resolution of what is essentially a proxy war among competing foreign actors will require virtually unprecedented international cooperation and will demand that great powers, with divergent and competing interests, act together in pursuance of a just settlement for the Syrian people.
The people of Syria, camped in their bombed out cities and towns or dispersed among refugee camps throughout the region and beyond deserve more than a grudging response to its refugee crisis.
It is the moral responsibility of the international community to deliver a long-term, constructive response, one that recognizes both the far-reaching geo-political ramifications of the conflict as well as the irreparable damage caused to Syrian society.
* Ciaran McGonagle is a Liberal Democrat member originally from Derry, Northern Ireland and based in Colchester. He is a solicitor working in financial services in the City of London.
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11 Comments
……………………The challenges to such a settlement however are vast. Despite the adoption of numerous international instruments affirming human rights and humanitarian standards, Assad’s brutal regime, complicit in some of the most heinous war-crimes perpetrated on the Syrian people during the conflict, has been bolstered by a geo-political order unable or unwilling to tackle his worst excesses. Any settlement with Assad at the helm or any arrangement which would allow Assad’s regime to avoid punishment would likely fatally undermine efforts to bring about a peaceful reconciliation of the Syrian people…………………..
More one sided reporting…Assad still has the support of the majority of the Syrian population…
Putting such conditions on Assad’s regime are a reason why you, and those who hold the same views, should NEVER be allowed to try and broker any peace deal…
There have been atrocities on both sides and singling one side out for censure is counter productive…
As for any rebuilding, structural or political, by the international community, I believe that, like Libya, there will be much hand wringing and little action…
I think this interview with General Petraeus gives a realistic assessment of the most likely post-conflict reconstruction of Syria http://news.sky.com/story/war-ravaged-syria-faces-permanent-split-warns-ex-cia-chief-david-petraeus-10606788.
A country, mostly under the control of the Assad regime, with autonomous (if not independently governed) Kurdish and Sunni controlled areas.
Issues of Justice and reconciliation are far on the horizon at present. Just stopping or reducing the killing has to be achieved first.
If President Assad knows that a peace deal means that he will face a criminal trial leading to life imprisonment or the death penalty (and presumably the same fate befalling many of his friends or family) plus he knows that his family will be subject to brutal, violent revenge (as happened in Libya and Iraq) then his most sensible choice is to fight to the bitter end. He knows that he must prevail or effectively die. No doubt he saw the footage of what happened to Colonel Gadaffi….
Ciaran,
terrific, but avoid the sloppy , silly ,modern parlance of “actors “, to mean participants or culprits ,we who have trod the boards have never committed atrocities, except, rarely, if miscast !
Can’t we just send Assad and his family to Russia somehow? He won’t surrender if he’s facing prison.
The problem is who is going to go into Texas or Moscow to arrest George W. Bush or Vladimir Putin? The International Criminal Court can’t just be for the leaders of less powerful countries.
Eddie,
The International Criminal Court has to be for the leaders of the losing side. Otherwise, the logic is that Stalin, Churchill and Harry Truman (on the basis of bombing densely populated areas without a strategic military imperative) would all have been in the dock at Nuremburg alongside the Nazis.
Permanent membership of the UN security council and the veto that goes with it insulates the world’s most powerful military forces against the kind of repercussions that leaders of less powerful countries face.
I beg to differ on he claim that the conflicts in Rwanda and Yugoslavia were caused by demagogues. The key event – just like in Syria – was foreign interference. In Rwanda it was the Tutsi invasion in the north that could not have happened without foreign support. In Yugoslavia it was the Western support for Croat and Slovenian separatism – in violation of international and Yugoslav law.
It was the feeling of loss of control that resulted from those foreign manipulations that gave demagogues a chance. Their solutions were dubious but no one else offered something better.
Courts like ICTY serve mainly as victor’s justice. At the ICTY the insistence on the claim that Milosevic had a “greater Serbia” project – something that was never proven and improbable as the man mainly improvised – were symptoms of that approach. We see the same now with Syria were we hear talking about “justice” in a way that suggest that only the Syrian and Russian governments commit war crimes.
It is an illusion that you can do complete justice after a war. No matter how hard you try: many crimes will stay unpunished. But people don’t care: their primary goal is peace and they will accept that it is imperfect.
Well Joseph, that just looks like one law for some and another for others. Illiberal.
There is a very reasonable argument that the US have impeded the development of the ICC. I can write an article about this if you would like 🙂
Ciaran – a terrific article, but you are not right in saying that “[the conflict in Syria] largely resulted from the deliberate incitement of religious and ethnic hatred and violence by which ruthless demagogues and warlords elevated themselves into positions of absolute power, creating a culture of impunity.” Nor is the conflict rooted “in decades…of violent interethnic and religious co-existence.” These are common misconceptions.
Such sectarian violence has certainly been committed by Daesh/so-called Islamic state, but as I think you know the overwhelming majority of civilian casualties have been killed by the regime’s side (including by militias supporting it).
The truth is that the regime is militantly secular (Moreover, in the days when Syria was an emerging democracy – a period which was finally snuffed out in 1963- there were many prominent Christians and members of other minorities who were leading voices in parliament).
The regime’s power has been based on patronage, not sectarianism, and it is because of patronage not religious belief that there are so many Alawis in key positions. Those who felt excluded were disproportionately Sunni Muslim, which allowed a degree of religious politics at earlier stages (most notoriously, the Hama uprising in 1982).
Unpleasant religious politics only entered Syria because the regime brooked no opposition of any sort. The attempt at revolution in 2011 was also completely secular – it was only as the government used violence to crush demonstrations etc that violence appeared, and took on a sectarian tone. Syria has since become a proxy war for Saudi Arabia and Iran – but it was not initially a sectarian conflict at all.
If you want to understand Syria, you have to understand countries of the same profile. The only difference is that the Syrian crises entered into a difficult sectarian violence. Other than this, the Syrian crises have the same profile as of Afghanistan from 1985 – 2001. No warlord has ever been prosecuted, no Mujahideen commander ever presented to ICC, despite they killed millions and displaced couple of millions. Regional rivalries between Pakistan block (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the US) and Iran Block (Russia, Iran and Central Asian countries) created multifaceted interests and that led to the devastation of Afghanistan and its institutions. It further led to the creation of Taliban Project by the US and Pakistani ISI which later diplomatically supported by Saudi and UAE, until the U.S was hit back by the same project and its ally Al Qaida. The US invaded Afghanistan … isn’t Afghanistan a failed state till date?
It can be pages and books to elaborate on this in detail.
I suggest that instead of just writing misleading articles and comments about a country you have no idea, this discourse should be left to the Syrian people, they must decide what kind of governance system they want, who should be punished and who should rule.
The destruction of Syria was fueled by regional rivalries and rivalries between western so called democracies and Rusia, I have interviewed 1345 Syrian refugees from different tribes and different ethnic background …. 87.8 % of refugees said that armed groups and their allies killed more innocent people than government forces. Torture, rape, stealing money and assets, stealing even food provided by aid agencies and other types of war crimes … you name it. Syrian reconstruction is the job of Syrians not outsiders, outsiders bring corruption and more atrocities with them, not solutions to crises. We have good examples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Somali.