Accountabilitys trap: How premature Justice fuel Counterrevolution. Management of Justice, Why States must start at the top. By Mohammad Nazzal

Accountability s Trap: How Premature Justice Fuels Counterrevolution
Management of Justice: Why States Must Start at the Top

By Mohammad Nazzal
Syrian Writer and Political Researcher

Translated by Aya Hussein

No one disputes the legitimacy of transitional justice. It is a just demand, born of the blood of its victims long before it becomes a political slogan. Yet the real disagreement lies not in the principle itself, but in when and how it is applied. It is precisely this question that determines whether victims ultimately win their struggle´-or-lose it.


Rushing toward sweeping accountability from the very first moment can appear to be a decisive victory for justice. In practice, however, it produces the opposite of what it intends. It drives the blocs of capital, politics, security, the military, and the media into a single trench. These very blocs are the pillars upon which every counterrevolution is built. When these forces feel the guillotine descending upon all of them at once, their separate interests merge into a common front of defense, and their sole adversary becomes the new state itself.


Dismantling the old order therefore requires two inseparable and parallel tracks. A vertical track that separates the leadership from the rank and file, so that lower-level officials are not driven to unite with those at the top out of fear that they share the same fate. And a horizontal track that separates capital, the military, and the security apparatus, preventing their interests from coalescing into a single front.


Opening the door to settlement at the right moment can disperse these alliances before they fully take shape. By contrast, pursuing every last individual at the bottom of the pyramid inadvertently creates a ready-made army by sealing off every path to safety and leaving people with no option but to fight for survival. In this way, hasty justice becomes a factory for its own enemies.


Herein lies the priority of the early years after victory: securing international legitimacy and strengthening the pillars of the state, foremost among them the military and the security apparatus as the guarantors of stability that later make the process of accountability possible without violence´-or-upheaval. What has been accomplished so far in restructuring and integrating factions, controlling weapons, and building a professional army and organized security forces is not a delay of justice but a preparation for it. Justice without a state capable of enforcing it remains little more than an aspiration.


When the time for accountability arrives, it should not extend equally to every minor participant and follower. Verbal support offered under conditions of extreme coercion is not, by itself, sufficient evidence of guilt. A person’s circumstances and the context in which they acted are essential to any fair judgment. Justice that ignores context is not justice at all, but another face of oppression disguised as fairness. Transitional justice is a project of state-building and, before that, a revolutionary project--;-- not a campaign of vengeance. Its purpose is to provide redress without inflaming society, to hold people accountable without wholesale exclusion, and to close the chapter on past injustice without opening the door to new injustice.


The remaining question is one of the hierarchy of priorities. Consider where we began: a state that emerged from almost nothing, lacking even the security institutions necessary to protect its own cities, burdened by a legacy of despotism that had produced generations of criminals. Today, fortunately, it possesses security institutions capable of pursuing offenders, bringing roughly 5,900 criminals to justice in a single year.


In light of this progress, the logical question is straightforward: should our efforts not first be --dir--ected toward the principal perpetrators, the heads of security --dir--ectorates, intelligence branches, and military formations, as well as the active cells currently preparing attacks against the country? These are the people justice should focus on, rather than exhausting time and resources pursuing every minor informant, low-level collaborator,´-or-street-level thug.


The danger posed by those at the top simply cannot be compared with that posed by a handful of followers. Protecting the state begins by dealing with those at the top, not by chasing those at the bottom. This is the approach that both delivers justice and preserves the state: a justice that knows when and where to strike, and a state that understands that its own survival is the essential precondition for rendering fair judgment.

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