Justice, eventually

摘要

AN ARABIC PROVERB holds that "what is past is dead." Eight years after the Arab spring most Arab regimes treat these words as policy. Though Egypt prosecuted a few ministers from Hosni Mubarak's era, the ex-dictator is enjoying a placid retirement. The abuses of the current regime, which massacred hundreds of its own citizens in 2013, are not discussed. Rebels in Libya and Yemen killed their strongmen only to commit new atrocities. Bashar al-Assad wants the world to forget how he stoked a civil war and laid waste to Syria.