Timothy Garton Ash: The Road to Damascus May Well Run Through Moscow

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.

I hope that one day ex-president Bashar al-Assad will stand before the international criminal court charged with crimes against humanity. None of the violence used by other forces in what has become Syria's civil war can diminish his primary responsibility.

Remember that this started as a wave of non-violent demonstrations, in the best manner of the original Arab spring. Assad had the option of responding with significant reforms, which he toyed with; of opening negotiations; or of allowing a peaceful transition, with an honourable, comfortable exit for himself and his family. Instead, he chose to retain power by brutal repression, as his father did before him, including the indiscriminate shelling of civilians. While his elegant, British-educated wife, Asma, trod marbled floors in her Christian Louboutin heels, his soldiers and shabiha militia thugs battered innocent women and children into the dust.

Syria's popular opposition maintained non-violent discipline for a time, in the face of extreme repression; then lost it. With defections from the army, and weapons coming in from outside, this became first an armed rising, then a civil war – with an embattled regime, fractured opposition, Alawites, Sunnis and their external supporters, all facing off in a complex, sometimes murky conflict. As well as the massacres of civilians, we now learn, sickeningly, that the army and militia have used children as human shields. Some rebels, too, have reportedly recruited underage soldiers. But as Assad himself said in a TV interview before this all started, the responsibility for what happens in Syria comes back to him...