When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood, wrote the Irish playwright and wit Oscar Wilde, it is hard to shake hands with it. This is an astute epigram not to mention wise advice that Syrian rebels would do well to heed in their struggle to rid their nation of Bashar Al Assad’s tyranny.

The two-minute video, that surfaced on August 1, was disturbing in the extreme. It purported to show Syrian rebel fighters publicly killing several suspected Al Assad militiamen called Shabiha, by lining them up against a wall and shooting them execution-style.

If the gory footage is for real, as it appears to be, then this is an unpardonable act unworthy of freedom fighters. You just don’t summarily kill an unarmed man already in your custody, regardless of how convinced you are of his guilt. The venue where he is judged is in a court of law, not where he is propped up against a wall.

To be sure, Shabiha are ruthless and vindictive government-sponsored gangs who are notorious for evincing little mercy when dealing with civilians who oppose the regime. Often they kill simply to silence, intimidate and terrorise; the massacre they committed in Al Houla on May 25, for example, where they slaughtered dozens of women and children in cold blood, is well-known.

Some political analysts in the Arab media have posited the notion in their commentary that Syrian rebels need not show mercy to government loyalists once captured. In short, they argued, lining up Shabiha suspects against a wall and meting out “revolutionary justice” to them is fair retribution.

I beg to differ. This is not revolutionary justice. It is rather a case of revolutionaries emulating the very excesses of the system they are trying to overthrow.

Dastardly act

Recently, rebels took hostage 48 Iranians riding a ‘tour bus’ in Damascus, whom the Iranian embassy initially identified as ‘pilgrims’. Later in the week, Iran’s foreign minister claimed they were “retired” members of the Revolutionary Guards and employees of several government ministries. The rebel unit that seized them said they were in Syria on a military mission conducting surveillance on behalf of Damascus — and threatened to kill them.

Killing these folks would be the worst possible course of action to take. It is immoral and also a PR disaster, besmirching the name of the Syrian revolution and diminishing its support around the world.

You just do not, I say, whimsically execute a prisoner of war, regardless of how heinous his perceived crime may have been or how enraged you have become in the heat of battle.

To be sure, the violence in Syria was not started by the uprising but by the government. That’s the way it always is at the outset of most revolutions. Where violence has accompanied a rebellion, it is because the old ruling elite, fearing loss of privilege and power, resorts to brutal suppression of the forces challenging it. That’s how the national struggle for social justice and freedom, now well into its second year, started in Syria.

Ask, as a case in point, any American in touch with his or her history and they will tell you that’s exactly how it transpired for the American Revolution in the 1770’s, when Americans pleaded, at the outset peacefully, for their rights as citizens.

Those rights were denied by the Crown. As the demands by the revolutionaries persisted, and the organised strength of the movement making those demands grew, the Crown opted for forcible suppression, ordering the dispatch of 10,000 British troops to Boston and a blockade of the major seaports on the east coast.

Once the revolution turned to force as a last resort, and the 13 colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire — claiming the rule of King George tyrannical and therefore illegitimate — there was no going back. And it was clear who was going to prevail.

An uprising against injustice will not prevail, however, when it resorts to exacting summary vengeance on its enemies. It does not just lose its lustre, but much of its precision and vitality as well. When the Syrian revolution, in other words, resorts to wanton acts of violence, such as eliminating prisoners in its custody, execution-style, that is when we will — we should — worry about its future.

It’s clear that we cannot equate the violence committed by Shabiha, and the regime its militiamen serve, with the violence committed by the rebels, anymore than we can equate the violence committed by the slave-master to subdue his slave with that committed by the slave to break his chains. But wanton violence, of the kind evoked by that dreadful video of men lined up against a wall and shot in cold blood, signifies the total collapse of a freedom fighter’s governance of his own soul, his own inner history.

Compassionate feeling is a precondition of sane judgment in human affairs. Its disregard by freedom fighters is the death knell of their revolutionary movement.

 

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.