The dictator in absentia by Fahad Kline

There is a somewhat almost theatrically appropriate about Bashar al-Assad being sentenced to death in a courtroom he did not have the courage to enter. The dictator who spent years insisting that Syria was too complicated to be governed by anyone but him has discovered the simplest political lesson of all, regimes end, palaces empty, statues fall and eventually the paperwork catches up. A Damascus court has now convicted Assad of murder, torture, arbitrary detention and crimes against humanity, imposing the death penalty in absentia. He remains safely in Moscow, where Russia has given him the kind of sanctuary that dictators have historically mistaken for immortality.

The comparison with Nuremberg is tempting, though it should be handled carefully. Nuremberg was not merely punishment. It was an attempt to establish a principle: that sovereignty is not a licence to murder one's citizens, and that “I was only following orders” is not a sufficient moral defence when the orders themselves are criminal. Syria needs something similar—not because Assad is uniquely monstrous, but because the machinery that sustained him was extraordinarily ordinary. Ministries signed papers. Officers followed commands. Prison guards turned keys. Propagandists explained away the dead. Bureaucrats learned to make atrocity look administrative.

That is the real significance of the verdict. Assad's greatest achievement was not that he remained in power for twenty-four years. It was that he transformed brutality into routine. The Assad system did not depend upon one man personally torturing every prisoner or ordering every killing. It depended upon thousands of people understanding what was expected of them and discovering that obedience was safer than conscience.

A death sentence, therefore, is emotionally satisfying but politically incomplete. Indeed, the awkward irony is that Assad's punishment may never actually occur. He is in Russia. Moscow has little reason to hand over a former client whose survival remains useful as a symbol of its influence and as a reminder of what happens to those who challenge authoritarian power. The Syrian court can sentence Assad; it cannot presently reach him.

But justice is not entirely measured in handcuffs. A verdict creates a record. It gives names to crimes and responsibility to perpetrators. It tells survivors that what happened to them was not merely the unfortunate turbulence of a civil war, not an inevitable consequence of sectarian hatred, and not the unfortunate collateral damage of a government defending itself. It says, instead, that a state crossed a line and that somebody was responsible.

That distinction matters enormously. Yet Syria's new rulers should resist the intoxicating temptation to turn justice into revenge. A country emerging from dictatorship does not become democratic merely because yesterday's prisoners become today's judges. Nor does justice become more legitimate because its verdict is popular. The new Syria will be judged not only by how firmly it condemns Assad, but by whether it can construct institutions capable of judging everyone, including its own allies.

That is the difficult part. Nuremberg mattered because it attempted to establish law above political convenience. Syria now faces the same test. If the court becomes merely an instrument for settling the accounts of one victorious faction, the Assad verdict will eventually look less like the birth of justice than the opening act of another political cycle.

The dead deserve better than that. For years Assad behaved as though Syria belonged to him. His final humiliation is that Syria has now put his name into a court record as a defendant rather than a president. He may remain in Moscow. His regime does not. And history, at last, has started taking attendance.