Despite the ongoing killings of Alawites, the gloating over the Druze, and the tendency to blame them, some continue to demand that Alawites apologize for the past. Whenever frustration with Syria’s violent history resurfaces, the discourse turns toward today’s victims, asking them to apologize for the crimes of yesterday’s perpetrators—as if entire communities alone were capable of reckoning with a past for which no political or judicial institutions have yet been established to define the crimes or assign responsibility. In this vacuum, the idea of an apology emerges in three distinct forms, despite all being described by the same word.

The Reconciliatory Form

The first form is a reconciliatory one, repeating the familiar narrative that an apology is necessary to move beyond the past, without specifying who should apologize to whom, in what capacity, or for which actions. Indeed, can the actions covered by such an apology even be clearly defined? Within this discourse, recognition and apology are often conflated.

Recognition does not mean that one community stands before another in the position of the accused. Rather, it means that each side acknowledges the other as a political subject, equal in rights, existence, and agency. It is not merely an awareness of the other’s existence, nor is it about tolerating or accepting them as an exception. Recognition requires acknowledging the other’s capacity to speak, to tell their own story, to demand their rights, and to participate in shaping the public sphere, even when their narrative emerges from a position unfamiliar to others.

For decades, Syrians were denied the practice of politics. Encouraging them to organize their interests and build a shared national narrative was one of the paths systematically avoided. Recognition, therefore, is a reciprocal relationship, not a unilateral act bestowed by a stronger group upon a weaker one, a group now subjected to various forms of hate. It is only complete when it moves beyond a moral gesture and becomes institutionalized through structures that uphold equality and preserve both the historical record and the rights of victims. Recognition requires a judiciary, an archive, and a public narrative that places power itself at the center of accountability as a structure of domination and coercion, while opening the way to a shared political space. Without institutions, recognition remains a moral stance that can easily be withdrawn or denied.

An apology, by contrast, is offered by a specific actor who assumes responsibility for a specific action or failure to act, what is often described as passive silence. It is therefore impossible to move from recognizing the existence of a sectarian structure within the regime to demanding that every person born Alawite apologize for it. Recognition reestablishes the political relationship between equal communities, whereas an apology assigns specific responsibility to specific actors. 

A Vague Historical Responsibility

The second form links Alawites to the regime through the idea of a collective historical responsibility. Yet it remains vague about what, in practical terms, it is actually asking for. Is it calling for a collective statement, a religious apology, a political acknowledgment, or individual acts of disavowal? Simply proposing an abstract idea does not make it achievable, because ideas do not easily translate into reality.

The Alawite community is not an institution with an elected leader or a body that issued orders in its name. No individual, therefore, can apologize on behalf of all Alawites in the way that a prime minister or president can apologize for crimes committed by a state institution in the name of the state. A state has legal continuity and can be represented by an authorized official. A religious community has neither that legal status nor such a mandate, and this may be the core of the problem. This is the fundamental difference between governments and sectarian communities. Even when sectarian communities display a high degree of moral or social cohesion, they cannot assume the role or legal character of states.

Apology as a Moral Gesture

The third form seeks to frame the apology in moral terms. It avoids describing the Assad regime as an Alawite regime, yet returns to the relationship it established between the Alawite community and the regime’s prison, security, and military apparatus, as well as to the sectarian patterns of selection within its institutions. Here, an apology becomes a way of distancing oneself from the regime, or of expressing remorse for remaining silent or justifying it, rather than an admission that every individual participated in its crimes. But silence under fear is not the same as justification or complicity, and justification is not the same as benefiting from the regime or participating directly in its actions.

The question therefore remains: why should an individual bear moral responsibility simply because of the community into which they were born? And where is the line between recognizing the existence of a genuine sectarian structure and turning an entire community into the accused?

What Is an Apology?

Historically, the concept of an apology did not carry the meaning we associate with it today. The Greek word apologia referred to a speech of defense, the presentation of an argument in response to an accusation or objection. Socrates’ Apology belongs to this tradition. It is neither an admission of wrongdoing nor a request for forgiveness, but a defense of his life and ideas before the court, and an explanation of why he held those views and lived as he did. An apology was an act of speech and argumentation, intended to establish the grounds of one’s position or refute an accusation, not to acknowledge harm done to another.

The Romans later developed a more precise distinction within the language of defense. They differentiated between admitting to an act while denying responsibility because it resulted from ignorance, accident, or necessity, in other words, an unintentional act, and admitting to having deliberately committed a wrongful act before asking for forgiveness. In the first case, the discourse remained one of offering excuses and mitigating responsibility. In the second, it involved acknowledging the wrongdoing, although the apology still functioned within a legal and judicial framework aimed at avoiding or reducing punishment. The classical tradition therefore distinguished between justifying an act, admitting to it, granting forgiveness, and asking for it. Yet it did not place inner moral transformation or the restoration of the relationship with the injured party at the heart of what an apology meant.

Religious traditions, particularly Christianity, introduced the concept of apology into a broader framework of repentance, confession of sin, and the seeking of forgiveness. The question was no longer how a person defended themselves before others, but how they transformed their relationship to the act they committed and returned to the community they had harmed. Verbal acknowledgment became inseparable from remorse and a change in conduct. Words alone were no longer sufficient without an inner transformation reflected in one’s actions. Even so, an apology remained distinct from repentance. Repentance is a comprehensive moral and religious transformation, whereas an apology usually concerns a specific act and the individual or community harmed by it.

Some of these elements were later incorporated into the political sphere of the modern state after being reformulated. A political apology is not a confession of sin before God, nor a personal request for forgiveness. It is a public act issued by an institution that possesses legal and political continuity. A state can apologize for the actions of previous governments because it retains the institutions and obligations that outlive individual officeholders.

In modern democracies, a political apology is linked to correcting a failure in political membership. It acknowledges that a particular community was subjected to persecution or exclusion and was not treated as equal in rights, while committing the state to changing the conditions that made such injustice possible. The value of a political apology therefore lies not only in expressing remorse, but in the transformation declared by an institution, or by an authorized representative speaking on its behalf, together with a commitment to prevent repetition and repair the harm caused.

This is where the notion of an “Alawite apology” becomes problematic. Even if such an apology were possible, despite the difficulty of determining who could apologize on behalf of whom, it could not become a founding act for a new society unless it combined acknowledgment of the harm, guarantees against its recurrence, and reform of the structures that made the crime possible, all within the framework of an institution capable of mediating between the parties. An apology is not about passing guilt down to every member of a community or demanding that individuals condemn themselves because of the group into which they were born. Rather, it is about assuming specific responsibilities for the institutions, discourses, and collective memory that may endure long after the crime itself.

The issue becomes even more complex because Syrians lived through a civil war whose very existence they were long prevented from acknowledging, while a sense of shame was cultivated around naming it as such. Calling what happened a “civil war” unsettles two positions at once. It places the new regime within the conflict as one of its parties, rather than as an authority that emerged from outside it and represents its conclusion. At the same time, it challenges a national narrative to which many writers and intellectuals remain deeply attached.

Acknowledging that Syria experienced a civil war means recognizing that the country’s divisions were not the result of a passing conspiracy imposed on an otherwise cohesive society. They became part of its social relationships, its collective memory, and the fears that communities developed toward one another. Yet the term “civil war” is often treated as a source of shame or even as an act of betrayal, when in fact it is a necessary condition for understanding what happened.

Some of the roots of that war lie in the concentration of key positions within the military and security apparatus in networks tied to the regime and staffed by Alawites, as well as in the construction of a fragile national narrative. This structure alone is not sufficient to explain Syria. Still, it formed part of a regime that endured for nearly sixty years, one that succeeded in attracting many groups that did not belong to its sectarian base, before integrating them into the broader structure of submission it had created.

The problem arises when Alawites are asked to apologize, turning the apology into a ritual of submission imposed by a victorious side that itself emerged from the civil war as one of its participants. Recognition can produce citizenship only among parties that stand as equals, and within an institution that allows victims to speak, the accused to defend themselves, and society to uncover the truth and understand how individuals became absorbed into an overarching discourse whose sectarian structure was profoundly present.

Who Apologizes to Whom?

Who has the authority to speak on behalf of an entire community? And within what institution could such an apology take place? An apology cannot be meaningfully constructed before a victorious party that behaves as though it possesses absolute innocence, particularly after a long civil war during which many Alawites came to believe they were defending their very existence against a discourse that first fueled their fears and later confronted them with violence.

Within a political imagination shaped by fear and war, many in these communities came to see the regime as protection against a Sunni jihadist conflict that had emerged in a society where the regime itself had destroyed political intermediaries, leaving religious discourse ample room to occupy the public sphere. This conflict was also shaped by organizations, expertise, and funding that came from abroad. It was not a conflict that emerged solely from within Syrian society itself.

An apology, therefore, cannot function as the confession of a guilty party before another that presents itself as possessing absolute innocence. What is needed is a transition from a relationship in which each side denies the other’s humanity to one based on mutual recognition. This does not erase the asymmetry of responsibility, but it does prevent either the victim or the victor from turning justice into a permanent claim to moral superiority. At the same time, it prevents perpetrators from hiding behind the collective identity of their community to evade individual responsibility. 

Apology or the Lesser Value of Blood?

This is the central dilemma of a civil war in which Alawites also paid a heavy price. The Syrian war was a civil tragedy marked by the rise of actors operating outside traditional structures: ISIS, Jabhat al Nusra, other jihadist groups, criminal gangs, sectarian killings, and identity-based arrests, alongside military and security networks dominated by Alawites. It was an expanding system of violence, fear, and complicity that cannot be reduced to a single community.

But let us imagine, hypothetically, that Alawites had apologized. What if, immediately after the fall of the regime, they had expressed a sense of responsibility? Many in fact abandoned the portraits of their sons and ceased to celebrate their deaths as martyrdom once they found themselves on the losing side. They were then pushed out of the public sphere, subjected to abuse across social media and in the media, and every narrative they offered was rejected.

Suppose they had moved from apologia, the defense and justification of one’s position, to homologia, the acknowledgment of what had happened, and then to metanoia, an inner transformation that reshapes the way one thinks and lives. What some have demanded remained purely symbolic, because an apology, even if offered, cannot acquire genuine moral meaning when it is made under conditions of fear and defeat. After the regime’s collapse, it was expected that the new authorities would build inclusive institutions capable of enabling such a transformation. But the massacres on the Syrian coast and in Suwayda undermined those conditions, because the other continued to be treated as blood of lesser value, someone who could be killed because of their identity without their death being fully incorporated into the country’s national memory.

The massacres did not eliminate the possibility of an apology, but they retrospectively altered the meaning of everything that came before them. What might have been understood at the moment of the regime’s fall as an act of self-reflection and a departure from an exclusionary discourse toward a broader one could later be interpreted instead as the conduct of a defeated group struggling to survive under a victorious power that resorted to violence with ease.

What could once have been a moral acknowledgment became, after the massacres, an act of coerced submission before a side that refused to recognize the value of the blood of those it demanded apologize for. The authorities’ inadequate investigations into the coastal massacres deepened this shift in meaning. Later events do not change what happened in the past, but they reshape its place within collective memory.

For this reason, the massacres did not push many Alawites toward a new transformation. Instead, they drove them back to the convictions of the civil war. They reinforced the belief that they are a threatened community unable to abandon its defenses so long as acknowledgment of the regime’s crimes is not matched by recognition of their own right to live and to mourn.

At the same time, the victorious discourse retrospectively reconstructed the past, making the regime’s warnings about the dangers of the opposition taking power appear credible to many. Old fears and sectarian narratives regained their persuasive force because subsequent events seemed to confirm them.

The repeated killings of Alawites, the gloating over the Druze, the growing public celebration of violence, and the authorities’ failure to prosecute those responsible have all made discussions of apology and recognition seem increasingly detached from the conditions required for either to have meaning.

In Syria, the entire sequence has been reversed. Communities excluded from political life and national participation are asked to apologize for what has ended, while there is still no clear recognition of what they are suffering today. The authorities have not acknowledged the crimes committed during their own rule or the involvement of forces affiliated with them, nor have they created the political space necessary for Syrians to recognize one another as equals, participate together, and define responsibility.

Before an apology can become a condition for belonging to the nation, there must first be politics and institutions that recognize Syrians as equals. The culture of killing must cease to function as material for sectarian accusation and instead be understood as a specific crime involving identifiable perpetrators, victims, and responsibilities, all preserved and addressed by institutions.

The problem is not that Syria lacks institutions, but that the institutions now taking shape do not perform the function of mediating between Syrians. They do not translate the diversity of society into politics, nor do they enable equal participation. Instead, they organize communities from above and grant them only symbolic representation, while questions of crime, responsibility, and collective memory remain outside their reach.

For this reason, it is not enough to ask Syrians to recognize one another or apologize to one another, nor is it enough to write analytical essays about the value of apologies and recognition, so long as the institutions themselves are incapable of naming crimes, creating a genuine political environment, identifying those criminally responsible and, more importantly, the political and social actors whose participation is necessary for the emergence of a meaningful political discourse and for safeguarding the rights of victims.

In Syria, the primary object of criticism should be the authorities, which continue to produce institutional forms devoid of real substance. Before an apology can become a condition for belonging to the nation, there must first exist a political space that recognizes Syrians as equals, prevents the victorious narrative from escaping the consequences of the civil war or monopolizing the claim to revolutionary innocence, if such innocence ever truly existed, and prevents perpetrators from hiding behind the collective identity of their communities.

Only then can an apology become a free act.