Fadel Abdulghany
On March 18, 2011, security forces in Daraa opened fire on demonstrators demanding the release of detained schoolchildren, killing Hussam Ayash and Mahmoud al-Jawabra, among the first victims of what would become one of the most destructive conflicts of the 21st century. Over the next 14 years, at least 231,000 civilians were killed, more than 177,000 were forcibly disappeared, and some 13.8 million were displaced.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights proposed designating March 18 as a National Day of Martyrs and Missing Persons, accompanied by the distribution of white jasmine flowers and a collective minute of silence. Commemoration is a recognized tool for symbolic redress under international law. The UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation include public commemoration and honoring victims among the elements of redress.
The Guigne-Orientlicher Principles also enshrine the right to truth, extending its scope from individual families to society as a whole. Thus, commemoration institutionalizes collective memory, anchoring it in permanent public structures rather than leaving it to the fragility of spontaneous initiatives.
The analytical argument here rests on three interconnected functions that organized commemoration can perform in post-conflict contexts: reconciliation, by drawing divided communities into a shared commemorative practice; recognition, through the formal acknowledgment of victims within state institutions; and civic education, by transmitting the causes and consequences of the conflict to future generations.
Shared memorial practices have taken different forms in countries with similar experiences. For example, truth commissions in South Africa, Ghana, and Peru recommended the creation of memorials as part of reparations frameworks. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission defined symbolic reparations as measures that facilitate the collective process of remembering past suffering, including memorials, monuments, and the renaming of public spaces.
This means that material reparations, including financial compensation and restitution of property, address the immediate harm, while moral reparations, including public acknowledgment and commemorative practices, address the deeper wound of erasing victims’ suffering from public memory. The two are complementary and neither can replace the other.
The choice of jasmine as the proposed symbol is based on a cultural and emotional connection. Damascus has historically been associated with jasmine, with its white buds filling the courtyards, balconies, and alleyways of the Old City, and permeating daily social rituals and literary expression. The argument here is that a national symbol of remembrance derives its moral weight from its deep roots in collective memory, and that jasmine fulfills this criterion particularly strongly in the Syrian context.
A comparison with the British poppy tradition is useful, not in terms of the symbol itself, but in terms of the ritual and institutional structure that reinforces it. What transformed the poppy from a battlefield flower into an enduring national emblem was the accompanying ritual: at eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, normal activity ceases for a minute of national silence. This practice, established by royal decree after the First World War, has continued for more than a century, supported by the authority of collective moral recognition rather than legislative coercion.
The proposed rituals for Syria follow a similar logic. A national minute of silence will be observed at noon on March 18 in markets, schools, universities, and places of worship, underscoring that the toll of the conflict transcends sectarian divisions. However, the central act remains the distribution of jasmine to the families of martyrs and the missing. This arrangement represents a deliberate inversion of the traditional commemorative gesture: instead of wearing the symbol as a personal expression, the act is directed outward, toward those who have borne the loss.
Community leaders, civil society organizations, and government officials will present the jasmine directly to the bereaved families, transforming the commemoration from an individual act into an expression of collective solidarity. Jasmine will also be placed at memorial sites, mass graves, and the gates of former detention centers, reintegrating these sites of atrocities into a moral narrative that acknowledges the victims and their suffering.
The commemoration of victims on one side, or the condemnation of specific perpetrators, becomes a contested narrative tool rather than a universal moral obligation. Therefore, the principle that must be clearly proclaimed is that the Jasmine Memorial should honor all victims of the conflict, regardless of the perpetrator’s identity.
The second risk relates to institutional sequencing. Commemorating the event too early, before progress has been made in truth-seeking and accountability, and before mass graves have been adequately investigated, may be perceived by families not as an acknowledgment, but as a premature closure of the case, suggesting that the state has fulfilled its duty when the core of that duty has only just begun. The proposed response is to design the commemoration framework as an evolving practice that explicitly acknowledges its incompleteness: in its initial stages, the ritual should affirm an ongoing commitment to truth and accountability, with its content deepening as the work of transitional justice institutions progresses.
Finally, the legitimacy of any national symbol depends on how it is adopted. However deep the cultural roots of jasmine may be, stable national legitimacy requires a consultative process that integrates the perspectives of communities across different regions, religions, and social backgrounds. Placing a flower in the hand of a grieving family is the first visible sign that the new political order recognizes what has happened and accepts the obligations that come with that recognition.
