Blueprints for Justice: From Germany’s Streets to Darayya’s Ruins

By: Hanan Al-Lakkoud, a civil engineer and nonviolent activist from Darayya.

June 2025

The poster is designed by the cartoonist Amani Al-ali.

After the massacre, I left the town in body, but my heart refused to leave. I carried grief and disappointment, a fear lodged in my chest that drained my spirit, and a question that would not let go: will I ever return?

Twelve years have passed as I have walked Germany’s cold streets, weighing here against there. I walk here on my own two feet; there my heart takes flight. Each day I travel to work, three hours on public transport, granting me the small luxury of sinking into my thoughts, a space to bear homesickness while finding my feet in a new place, language and society. Despite the security and stability of German citizenship, I have never stopped dreaming of returning to Darayya.

In Germany I learned a new language, trained in up-to-date building codes, updated my CV and submitted it to several engineering firms, until an interview led to a post as a modelling engineer in the roads and bridges sector. I found a place to practise my profession with dignity, where work is judged by competence, not by gender or political loyalty. I entered an environment in which the law is upheld and rights are protected, and in which women are valued not as a quota or window-dressing for equality, but as true professionals.

The night the criminal Bashar al-Assad and his entourage fled, I stayed up until dawn, following the news from Syria on every channel. I drew on people’s hope and, after years of heaviness, could believe again that I had a future in Syria.

The exhilaration passed quickly, and troubling questions followed: Should I return? Could I be part of rebuilding my country? And would there, as a woman, be a real role for me in the coming phase of transitional justice?

I watch with deep unease as the world prepares for major events on Syria’s reconstruction; at which the true voices of Syrian women are often absent, or where their presence is reduced to representing the victims. How can any structure stand; how can it last, without its essential pillars: the women of Syria, who have endured, sacrificed and given so much, and who hold distinct visions for their country’s future? Empowering these women, especially those with proven professional and intellectual expertise, is not a marginal add-on or a passing gesture of goodwill; it is the core of genuine transitional justice and the surest guard against repeating the mistakes that brought us to this ruin. Real reconstruction does not begin with cement and steel alone; it begins by bringing those long-excluded back into decision-making and giving them their due chance to shape their country’s future, with their talents, abilities and dreams, not as tokens but load-bearing pillars.

For me, transitional justice is no longer a set of legal tracks or academic terms. I have lived it as a human need: the hope of returning to a homeland I recognise, and that recognises me; a homeland that shapes me and that I help to shape.

In enforced exile, windows opened onto vistas I could never have imagined beneath Syria’s pall of injustice. A deeper understanding of justice took root, one that reaches beyond legal texts and courtroom walls. It no longer suffices to watch the statues of tyrants fall or their portraits burn, images that for years stained my sight and burdened my spirit. I now imagine a homeland in which Syrian identity is remade: a country that recognises my existence as a woman not as a pale margin, but as a creative force helping to carve its identity anew, letter by letter; a country that acknowledges my active share in every brick it lays, from the small procedures of daily life to the most fateful decisions; a country where my opportunities equal any man’s, without discrimination, bias, labels or condescension.

My hope goes beyond repairing collapsed buildings, cracked roads and shattered bridges. What I aspire to is building structures that truly connect and help mend the social fabric; that is my aim: to nurture values in my fellow Syrians’ hearts before their minds -values that will ensure the next generations do not reproduce new forms of dictatorship or allow the tragedies of the past to recur. I want women at the core of decision-making, at every level of reconstruction, not as victims to be consoled, but as skilled experts with depth of vision and wisdom; agents of change whose hard-won experience can widen our common vision for a colourful, diverse Syria, a vision that embraces all without exception and draws strength from the variety of our voices.

What keeps me awake, day and night, is fear that Syria will lose its latent energies, its bright minds honed by bitter experience, and its women capable of profound transformation – who through years of forced silence and systematic exclusion, have grown used to absence. If that does not change, Syria will lose what is most precious: the possibility of true renewal, of taking flight on wings equal in strength.

But I will not sit with my hands tied, nor wait for an official invitation. I have already begun, despite distance and the difficulty of communication, to weave threads of hope and connect with women inside Syria, speaking with them, exchanging ideas and visions to design a small community centre, a nucleus for larger projects and a seed for a different future. To some, it may look like blueprints destined to be only ink on paper, or a dream beyond reach in today’s reality. To me it is the first brick in a new edifice of justice, built from a solid base, from people’s real needs, not from the brittle summit that keeps reproducing itself.

In this envisioned women’s community centre, I see the Syria of the future taking shape: a safe space for women to speak freely, to develop latent skills, and to take an active part in decisions that shape their lives and communities. I picture training workshops preparing them to lead in fields from innovative technology to the fine arts, from enlightened politics to a thriving economy; a living platform for dialogue on shared concerns; and a warm incubator for creative initiatives aimed at repairing society and rebuilding it anew in a spirit of cooperation and complementarity. This centre is no token space; it will be a working engine of change.

I aspire to a homeland where women’s voices are heard in planning committees as well as in school corridors; where a woman is elected not only because she is trustworthy, but because she has vision.  And I will hold to my promise to do my part to get there: to return home, not to reclaim the past, but to help build the foundations yet to be laid.

By: Hanan Al-Lakkoud, a civil engineer and nonviolent activist from Darayya.