Syrians hope for justice, but face long road ahead

After searching for years for his son and brothers following their arrest and disappearance by Bashar Al Assad’s forces, Syrian real estate broker Maher Al Ton hopes he may finally get justice under the new authorities.

Last week, the government announced the creation of a national commission for missing persons and another for transitional justice.

That, along with the new rulers’ arrests of alleged human rights violators linked to the ousted president’s government, have made Ton feel hopeful.

“I feel like my son might still be alive,” the 54-year-old said.

Mohammad Al Abdallah, executive director of the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, said that “there are random arrests of individuals without a plan to search for the missing or to open central investigations into the crime of enforced disappearance, or even to protect mass graves.”

Assad’s forces arrested Ton’s son Mohammed Nureddin in 2018 near Damascus when he was just 17 years old, and has not been heard from since.

“I hope justice and fairness will prevail, and that they will reclaim our rights from the Syrian Arab Army which unjustly took our sons,” he said, using the since disbanded military’s official name.

Rights groups have welcomed the establishment of the justice commissions, but criticised the limiting of their scope to crimes committed by Assad’s government.

Syria’s war erupted in 2011 with a brutal government crackdown on democracy protesters that saw tens of thousands of people accused of dissent either jailed or killed.

Over time, armed groups emerged to battle Assad’s military, including radical forces that committed atrocities.

During the war, rights groups accused the Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) group, once affiliated with Al Qaeda, of abuses including unlawful detention and torture.

HTS spearheaded the offensive that ousted Assad in December, and its leaders now form the core of the new government.

Diab Serriya, a co-founder of the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison, said that while Assad’s government was “the biggest perpetrator of human rights violations,” that does not “absolve the other parties in the conflict.”

The new body, he said, “does not meet the aspirations of victims”.

Agence France-Presse