The atrocities Syrians suffered did not take place in a 14-year vacuum of civil war, spurred by the anti-government uprising that started in 2011. They spanned many decades from late Ottoman and French rule, through the reign of Hafez Al Assad and under the subsequent rule of his son, Bashar Al Assad. A transitional justice process that neglects to address these deeper, pre-2011 historical legacies of injustice risks producing – and reproducing – social and sectarian divisions that have long marked the country’s history. The historical legacies of injustice in Syria that continue to play out today have thus left a colossal task of reckoning with such a complex past.
It is critical, then, that transitional justice approaches in Syria refrain from isolating periods of oppression from the broader contexts that enabled them. Historical contextualization through historical commissions, for instance, can help unpack legacies of injustice in ways that strengthen the prospects for longer-term remedy and reconciliation in Syria. Syrian and international expert historians could work together to design and implement such commissions, and the role of donors will be important in carrying them forward and sustaining them.
The Need for Historical Commissions in Syria
Historical commissions and truth commissions share similarities, but they also have key differences. While truth commissions can often focus on more recent episodes of violence, historical commissions pursue a mandate that addresses a much longer history.
One of the main goals of truth commissions is usually to establish responsibility, including criminal responsibility, for crimes of the past. Historical commissions, on the other hand, focus on uncovering, building, sharing, and documenting narratives about distant past events and their impact on societies. While both historical and truth commissions can capture intergenerational trauma through victim and survivor testimonies, historical commissions also play an important role in providing the space for interaction between history experts and those who lived and inherited that history to help navigate the complexities of such legacies and situate them within broader contexts.
As with many contexts, the legacy of atrocities in Syria extends back many decades. They include: mass killings and enforced disappearances such as those that the Hafez Al Assad government pursued in the 1982 Hama massacre; socio-economic injustices as a result of demographic engineering dating back to the 1930s and resulting in nearly a century of related land theft grievances and social tensions that persist today; and a legacy of authoritarian control over Syrian civil society, especially since the emergence of Ba’athist emergency rule in 1963.
As Fadel Abdul Ghany, a Syrian transitional justice expert told me in 2018, “preservation of history is a type of accountability.” This is especially critical in the Syrian context, where there is a pervasive legacy of politicized and polarizing history textbooks used in its primary and secondary education systems. As a result, both state and opposition groups have weaponized education at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels to serve their narratives, further exacerbating social tensions and expanding the space within which power politics enforces selective memory. As Nisreen Al Sakbani and Juline Beaujouan explain, school curricula went as far as to redefine Syria in various ways, including through redrawing national borders, reshaping Syrian students’ identity by pushing polarizing narratives that promote a “good Syria” versus “evil opposition and their supporters,” and through allowing Russian and Turkish influence in educational curricula reform in Syria.
The rehabilitation of education through a focus on reforming revisionist history textbooks is thus a fundamental part of longer-term reconciliation. Without honest discussions and dialogue about how Syria’s history has and continues to impact multiple communities in Syria, the risk of perpetuating divisions will remain high. One or more historical commissions would be uniquely well-positioned to address this, especially if they provide Syrians a safe space to share their testimonies and their lived experiences in ways that help clarify intergenerational traumas and the inextricability of the past with the present. As I explain further below, Syrian universities could eventually become spaces within which such story-telling would take place, but they will require internal reform and support to prevent them from becoming weapons of polarization.
The Long (Re)view of Historical Reckoning in Syria
Without a concerted and consistent effort to contextualize more distant historical events and their resulting injustices, transitional justice practitioners risk not seeing the forest for the trees in Syria. Intergenerational trauma would be inadequately addressed and the complexities of contemporary sectarian and socio-economic strife would be severed from their structural roots.
It is never too late to address deeper historical legacies that span generations. For instance, the hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945) continue to share testimonies and call for accountability and reparations, more than 80 years later. The United States has multiple local truth and reconciliation commissions to address legacies of slavery. A 2013 people’s tribunal revealed the role of the Iranian state in a massacre and enforced disappearances that took place in 1988 (which subsequently helped inform the trial of one of the perpetrators, Hamid Nouri, in Sweden). Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission addressed crimes committed under French colonial rule in the 1950s. In South Africa, an inquest into the death of anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol was re-opened 46 years later.
Such examples are important, as they offer a critical opportunity to address intergenerational trauma while contextualizing present experiences through visiting the past. Given the extensive historical legacies of violence and the complexities of victimization in Syria that extend far deeper than the rule of Bashar Al Assad, the establishment of historical commissions would provide an appropriate venue not only to document the broader context within which such violence occurred, but to also underscore the persistence of unaddressed pain and suffering that is carried across multiple generations. Left unaddressed, polarization – whether economic, social, racial, sectarian, or other – will mar prospects for genuine and longer-term reconciliation.
Oppressive and authoritarian rule in Syria devolved into multi-layered violence stemming from sectarian, political, and socio-economic discrimination and injustices that were also fueled by legacies of patronage networks. Transitional justice is an attempt to address these complex historical legacies, but it can also inadvertently – or intentionally, depending on the motivations of the transitional justice actors involved – exacerbate and/or create new divisions. While leaders can be removed, their cronies apprehended, and national commissions for transitional justice established, deeply embedded distrust and polarization remain and, as several events in Syria have shown, can worsen (see here, here, and here). This is in part due to a compartmentalized approach to transitional justice that prioritizes certain time periods over others, leaving vast parts of the past unaddressed and undermining present and future attempts at reconciliation and peace building.
Understandably, Syrian and international transitional justice actors have focused on the urgency of seeking justice for the atrocities committed during the 14 years since the 2011 uprising and the ensuing civil (though heavily regionalized and internationalized) war. These calls have already seen some efforts underway to address them, such as through the establishment of Syria’s National Commission for Transitional Justice and the National Commission for Missing Persons. This is already an enormous undertaking, especially given the fragile transitional period Syria is experiencing.
Much has been written about the importance of judicial and legal reform in Syria to conduct fair, transparent, and efficient prosecutions for serious international crimes such as crimes against humanity and for strengthening the current government’s approach to transitional justice more broadly (see here, here, and here, for example). Others have also pointed to the necessity of reparations and the role that international actors, such as EU member states, should play in directing funds retrieved from stolen and illicit assets to victims.
This is all important, but it is not enough. Historical commissions that prioritize the more distant periods of oppression in Syria’s history can incorporate and uncover historical archives, produce additional documentation, and provide a safe space for storytelling, whether through art or oral history. Multiple historical commissions across Syria’s governorates may make the process more manageable, but a national-level historical commission would also be important, given the thus far centralized process of transitional justice that has been led via the state. As I have argued elsewhere, live televised or radio broadcasts of the testimonies can engage a society’s diverse communities in powerful ways that prosecutions and truth commissions focused only on the recent past cannot. Syria’s long-term stability would benefit greatly from a historical commission that provides this level of access and transparency.
Donors Should Direct Funds Toward Deeper Historical Reckoning in Syria
One of the challenges, however, regarding these more historically distant episodes of atrocities is that those who drive transitional justice efforts, especially civil society and survivors, have limited resources to address them. Throughout my research interviews with Syrians, many point to the urgency of addressing more recent and ongoing atrocities, especially since documenting them has been significantly facilitated through open source investigations, citizen journalism, and other digital means. As a result, these more recent episodes are better-documented and easier to surface with fewer resources than older violations; without more resourcing, it is simply harder in many cases for Syrian civil society to undertake the complex work of going further back in time.
A related challenge is that donors focus on timebound and outcome-oriented activities as a way to demonstrate that funding generates short-term results. A reckoning with deeper pasts takes longer and is a concerted effort that is different from addressing more recent or even ongoing crimes. It requires engagement with historians of Syria, archives, oral history, the elderly and their successors. Donor programs should evolve to facilitate this.
While the final outcome of such historical commissions could emerge in different forms such as multi-volume reports that are made publicly accessible, audio-visual live testimonies, or memorialization, what remains important is the impact of such outcomes on generating society-level dialogues that unfold in safe spaces and avoid inflaming divisions further. This is much easier said than done, but one place to start is through careful selection of venues, such as Syrian universities or similar academic institutions where such dialogue is (or at least should be) encouraged and protected. Donors could then, to an extent, mitigate the fallout from having to navigate the difficult task of avoiding the politicization of funding of certain entities over others.
Historical commissions and donor involvement are not risk-free, as they can be selective and politicized. As with any other transitional justice mechanism, such as prosecutions, truth commissions, and memorialization, expectations of inclusivity must be managed in ways that acknowledge the limits of capital: resources and capacity. A fraught process of institutional reform can also present significant challenges to a meaningful reckoning with the recent and more distant past. Donors often articulate conflict mediation and resolution as key objectives. To fulfill such goals, they should prioritize longer-term investments in historical commissions as a way to help cultivate a culture of acknowledgement of multiple narratives and truths. Such a deeper historical reckoning must not be managed solely by the central authorities and instead make use of university and other academic venues as ideal spaces for learning, unlearning, and relearning how Syria’s deeper history shapes its present and future. Without this, Syria risks perpetuating societal distrust, polarization, and anger that could extend to the transitional justice process itself.
