Deferred Justice

By: Tiama Kordello, Syrian activist.

June 2025

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

The room was full, a low buzz restrained by formality. A hush filled with murmurs of voices weaving memories together; eyes wandered from face to face in search of resemblance and were met only with absence.

An old woman, her body so slight it seemed hardly able to bear the burden of memory, held a worn photograph in trembling hands. The paper was frayed from being handled too often, the corners folded, yet his features were still unmistakable. A boy smiled shyly, his eyes bright with a life cut short. She whispered to her neighbour, her voice barely audible:

“Yesterday I cooked yabrak, those stuffed vine leaves my son loved most. As I rolled the leaves, I felt his fingers with mine, helping me the way he did when he was little. It was as if he were leaning over the pot, slipping one or two away before they were ready. He always said, ‘The tastiest one is the one you steal."

She gave a short laugh, then lifted her hand to wipe away a tear. “I hadn’t cooked it in more than ten years. Each time I thought of making it, my throat closed. But yesterday, though I don’t know why, I felt the time had come. As if his spirit were standing at the kitchen door, watching me, waiting for me to ladle out a plate for him, just as I always did.”

A young wife let a faded ring turn endlessly around her finger and whispered: “In two days it would have been our wedding anniversary. We used to take the children to Latakia or Tartus every year, even when we could hardly afford it. He adored the sea. He would dive and swim for hours. I was always calling out, ‘Where is he? Where has he gone?’ And then, suddenly, I would see him surface, his head breaking through the water, laughing, waving to me from a distance.”

Her voice faltered. She fixed her gaze on the ring, then said: “Even now I wait. I wait to see him return from afar, to rise out of absence as he once rose from the sea, coming closer and closer. But this time he takes too long. This time his distance feels endless.”

She stilled the ring on her finger and murmured:

“This year I even thought the children and I might go without him. But how could we? Without him the sea is nothing but a blue grave.”

In the corner, a little girl, her face strangely still, spoke suddenly: “I miss him. I dream of him every night. I wait for him to keep me safe from the darkness and nightmares. Dreams are the only place I see him. I wait for bedtime, just so I can be with him.”

It was as if speaking had become a ritual of survival, and as if confession itself kept the beloved alive, a thread stretched from the heart to the missing.

A heavy silence took hold, as the heavy rusted doors clanged open and shut. Silence fell, like time collapsing.

The judge entered. Everyone in the courtroom stood. The very walls seemed to rise in respect. His footsteps landed like blows against the floor. Everything stilled. Even grief was swallowed by the silence.

He appeared; a man unworthy of being called a defendant. He looked like others when their power was stripped away: diminished, reduced to a husk at the moment of capture. It felt unreal: one of the men who displaced, tortured, killed… these the men before whom we once trembled.

A reel of photographs of the victims and the evidence played on the screen. Then he began to recount: “This man was strongly built, massive, the sort people think cannot be broken. We tortured him for days. His skin split under the lashes, and still he clung to silence as if it were his lifeline. In the end, his heart betrayed him. It simply stopped.”

He paused, as if summoning the scene, then pointed to another photograph, of a boy barely past twenty. “This one we used to hang by the feet, head down. One day, two. On the third day he stopped screaming. He stopped moving at all. The rope around his ankles, already frayed, snapped with his weight and he fell on his head. We heard the thud as he hit the floor. We didn’t check if he was alive. We didn’t pick him up.”

His gaze moved to the photograph of a young woman, her delicate features still frozen in fear and bewilderment. His voice dropped, as though dragging something obscene into the open, words that seemed unfit for any public hearing: “I remember this one exactly. She was in her twenties; brought in untouched and died giving birth.”

Another photo. Another face. He spoke slowly: “This one I remember very well. Number 140001¹. One, four, zero, zero, zero, one. Handsome. Clean-featured. A rare sight in the damp, mouldy basement. He stirred something in me I did not understand then, and do not understand now. I was jealous of him. Jealous over him.”

A sly, filthy smile flickered across his face as he spoke, steady, without shame, almost proud: “I wanted to make him disgusting to the other guards. Burned, disfigured, repulsive… so no one would even dare lay eyes on him.”

His voice receded, blurring, fading from my mind. What remained were the cries of mothers, daughters, families weeping. Some crumpled where they stood, overcome. Others wrapped their arms around themselves, tighter and tighter, as if clinging to loved ones already lost, until all they held was the fading trace of a soul lingering in the courtroom. 

I, however, remained unmoved. Not a tear. Not even a tremor.

As the court at last passed its sentence, after over a decade of waiting, I felt myself drift into nothingness. He was sentenced to death.

I didn’t feel joy. I didn’t clap. I barely even breathed. It doesn’t bring back the missing. It doesn’t bring back the years we lost. It doesn’t still the ache inside. 

But him… he went down. He dropped to his knees, begging: ‘Forgive me, Mum. Forgive me…’ 

The butcher, the monster, with a word of justice, was stripped of everything; stripped down to nothing. I couldn’t but look at him with disdain. The stink of fear came off him before his breath did. And the tears... so many tears. How could he cry? How can he plead when he never knew mercy? No flood of tears could ever wash away the blood on his hands. 

My tears fell then, and kept spilling until my mum’s hand steadied me; her voice cracked: ‘Better days will come’.

¹ The number “140001” is no accident. Human rights reports document an estimated 140,000 people remain missing Syria through enforced disappearance. Many more have never been reported or recorded.  

The final digit - the “1” - is a reminder that behind each figure stands a person, an individual; as the count rises, the individual is lost in the mass.

When the defendant recited “one, four, zero, zero, zero, one” he was not naming a person, but rather a case number. Their crimes reduced a human being first to a file, then to a dead body. Still, the killings were one wound; the erasure of identity was the deeper scar. Those who stumbled out alive often returned hollowed, robbed of memory, of name, even of the very notion of self.

The crime did not end with the killing; it continues in every act that reduces victims to numbers.

By: Tiama Kordello, Syrian activist.