Syria: Peacemaking or prosecutions?
On October 30, representatives of Syria’s government, opposition, and civil society came together in Geneva at the inaugural meeting in Geneva of the Syrian Constitution Committee (SCC), the most promising effort yet to negotiate an end to the country’s hyper-destructive civil war.
But just the day before the SCC opened, a court in Germany charged two former Syrian intelligence officers, residents of Germany, with crimes against humanity for tortures they allegedly committed in Syria some five years before.
Those prosecutions, and the possibility of other similar ones after it, raise the prospect that demands from non-Syrians for one-sided prosecutions for abuses committed during the country’s lengthy civil war could significantly block or delay the chances for ending the war.
It is true that, at various stages of Syria’s lengthy, grinding conflict, many on the government side have committed heinous acts. As, too, have many on the anti-government side, including the Al-Qaeda-linked groups of the Hai’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), ISIS, the Free Syrian Army, and others.
Civil wars are like that. I know. I lived and worked as a journalist in Lebanon for the first five years of the civil war there. In any prolonged (and often fratricidal) conflict of that nature, there may or may not be a strong imbalance of…
