Our reading for today was Khawla Dunia’s “And the Revolutions Go On,” the final chapter of Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution. It’s significant that this chapter ends the book since Syria’s conflict has become something like a litmus test of the Arab Spring and has also become the fulcrum of all of the regions dynamic tensions and contests for domination.
For our activity today, I want to do an active reading exercise with Dunia’s diary entry that will involve a bit of group work on the reading and some application of ideas from the Geneva Convention IV (page four has a good plain-English summary of the convention’s articles related to civilians).
Our plan is, after the reading quiz, to split into two sides of the classroom–a defense team and a prosecution team–to briefly argue a case of war crimes charges against leaders of the Syrian regime. You’ll split your legal teams into two task forces: one responsible for finding evidence in Dunia’s chapter and the other responsible for evidence found online.
I’ll throw a few links in here for you to use, but please feel free to Google to your heart’s content. Finding evidence to exonerate the regime might seem like a challenge, but if you look at SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency), RT (Russia Times), or Fars News you’ll find plenty of pro-regime reporting.
- “Document leak in Syria ‘enough to convict Assad of war crimes’”
- “War crimes in the Syrian conflict”
- “Syria war crimes investigators amass strongest evidence ‘since Nuremberg’ against Bashar al-Assad”
Timing:
5 minutes for quiz.
5 minutes to set up and introduce the activity.
30 minutes to study the war crimes articles and assemble some evidence.
30 minutes to present the case–fifteen minutes for each side. (Describe your evidence and explain how it proves or disproves guilt for a war crime.)
5 minutes for arbitration and ruling.