Lessons from Colombia to Reckon with the Syrian Civil War
What Came Before
In March of 2011, the Syrian Civil War began. Bashar al-Assad’s government responded to anti-regime protests with a campaign of cruelty, razing the city of Deraa and torturing dissidents. Defectors from Assad’s forces mounted the Free Syrian Army (FSA) while jihadist groups capitalized on the chaos, establishing authority over a swath of eastern Syria. Foreign powers, including Russia and the United States, backed armed groups aligned with their interests.
To date, the war has killed at least 300,000 civilians, and forced 6.2 million Syrians to flee the country.
Exiled, Syrian refugees speak of suffering beyond summary. They recall the terror and numbness of war, of hurried burials and escalating violence: tear gas swapped for bullets, bullets for bombs. They remember friends killed in government facilities, family members who disappeared. These refugees risked their lives to escape on rickety boats, some drowning in the Mediterranean Sea while European governments looked on.
Addressing Harms
In December of 2024, the Assad regime in Syria collapsed. Citizen demands for accountability and justice for crimes perpetrated by the regime have emerged. The interim government has begun to mount a system of transitional justice—the process of addressing and repairing harms perpetrated during periods of mass human rights violations. One of the core goals of transitional justice is to ensure lasting peace, to fulfill the promise of ‘never again.’ Recent revenge-based killings against Alawite civilians, a religious minority to which Assad belonged, illustrate the importance of transitional justice. Without an adequate process of accounting, of reckoning with the past, the country risks further violence.
But transitional justice systems have often neglected to adequately include the voices of refugees and displaced people. To fully reckon with Assad’s legacy, Syria will need to acknowledge and atone for harms committed against those who fled. Colombia, with nearly a decade of peace with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) under its belt, provides lessons in ensuring that exiled voices are heard when accounting for Assad’s crimes.
Looking to Colombia
The FARC, a leftist guerilla group, took up arms against the Colombian government in the mid-1960s. Paramilitary groups sprung up in response, paid by private landholders to defend their holdings from the FARC. Fighting between guerrilla and paramilitary factions over profitable coca fields drove intense levels of violence, concentrated in the poorest regions of the country. With soaring demand for cocaine in the United States, drug cartels entered the fold, contributing to a surge of violence in Colombia’s cities. Over the course of its civil war, more than one million Colombians were exiled, with more than eight million internally displaced.
The Colombian government reached a highly controversial peace deal with paramilitary forces in the early 2000s. In exchange for laying down their weapons and confessing to their crimes, paramilitary forces faced no substantive criminal punishment for severe human rights abuses. In response to widespread backlash against what the public saw as codified impunity, the government repackaged the deal as the 2005 Justice and Peace Law, calling it ‘transitional justice’ in an effort to nullify victims’ outcry.
As armed groups are reluctant to sign peace deals that include extensive criminal sentencing, transitional justice systems often established criminal tribunals offering perpetrators lower sentences in exchange for a full confession of their crimes. The truth is valuable to help conflict victims heal. Testimony that reveals the location of the disappeared can allow families to commemorate and mourn their lost. But too extensive a sacrifice of justice in the name of peace leaves victims feeling abandoned, damaging long-term efforts at reconciliation. As refugees and internally displaced people comprise most of Colombia’s conflict victims, the government’s refusal to account for human rights abuses committed by paramilitaries left many of them feeling erased and excluded.
The 2016 peace accords between the Colombian government and the FARC made a notable effort to remedy many of the mistakes made during the peace process with the paramilitaries, including the recognition of refugees. Extensive advocacy by the Colombian diaspora ensured that the final agreement built a victim-centered system of transitional justice that reckons with the pain of exile and forced displacement. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP, for its acronym in Spanish) and the Truth Commission are two formal systems of justice that arose from the peace process.
The JEP is a tribunal charged with investigating serious crimes committed during the conflict between the government and the FARC. While the JEP does pardon certain types of crimes in exchange for complete, truthful testimony, serious international crimes, such as genocide, are not eligible. Under its framework, forced displacement is a prosecutable crime.
The Truth Commission is a non-judicial body tasked with gathering testimony to establish a factual and holistic account of harms perpetrated during the armed conflict. The final report, There is a Future if There is Truth, dedicates a chapter to exile.
The Truth Commission’s chapter on exile is exemplar of Colombia’s renowned transformative approach to transitional justice, which seeks to prevent a resurgence in violence by addressing the root causes of the armed conflict. The report acknowledges that human rights violations like forced displacement do not occur in a vacuum—they prey on existing vulnerabilities. Sexual violence was a key driver of displacement for women and girls in Colombia, while the FARC’s targeted recruitment of Indigenous children drove their parents to have to seek refuge away from their ancestral lands. Armed groups often targeted LGBTQI+ people as a means to legitimize territorial control with local populations, capitalizing upon the “shared idea that LBGT people are not desirable.” Preventing the reoccurrence of these violations requires Colombia to address not just the crime itself, but a long history of state failure to prevent forced displacement.
While Colombia’s transitional justice system has made important steps in acknowledging the pain felt by refugees and displaced people, its work of ensuring that these harms are not repeated is ongoing. The National Liberation Army and Clan del Golfo, amongst other armed groups, remain at war with the government. Members of the FARC have rearmed, displacing thousands of Afro-Colombian and Awá Indigenous peoples.
Recommendations
While the work of peace in Colombia remains incomplete, there are still lessons to be learned from its approach. Syria’s interim government should consider three things when forming a victim-centered transitional justice system that includes the perspective of displaced people and refugees:
- Too great a sacrifice of justice for peace damages long term-efforts at reconciliation. When transitional justice systems neglect to hold perpetrators accountable for serious human rights violations, such as displacement, conflict victims are left feeling unheard and unacknowledged. While some amnesty provisions might be necessary, Syria should follow the example set by Colombia’s agreement with the FARC in exempting serious international crimes from pardon.
- Refugees face a particular harm, distinct from forced internal displacement. Forced internal displacement is a human rights violation, uprooting communities from the land that they called home. Internally displaced people often live in conditions of deep poverty, unable to afford the costs associated with emigrating. But refugees suffer a distinct burden, their relationship to their home country ruptured by alienation. In gathering testimony that speaks to the full extent of Assad’s crimes, Syria’s interim government will need to collect testimony from both internally displaced people and refugees.
- Non-repetition requires addressing the root causes of displacement. To prevent further displacement, Syria’s interim government should examine the underlying factors that drove the civil war, ranging from the political persecution of Kurdish peoples to the marginalization of the Yadizi. Recent revenge-driven killings against the Alawite religious minority, to which Assad belongs, crystalize the importance of a transformative approach to transitional justice and reconciliation.
Photo: Doris Salcedo, “Untitled” (1999), roses, Bogotá, 1999 (image property of Alexander and Bonin, New York).
