The Stalin Prize

I have little to add to Jonathan Steele's commentary on the launch of everycasualty and the issues it raises. Here are a few quick notes:

The dedication and courage of Sandra Orlovic and Bekim Blakaj, Deputy Director and Director of the Humanitarian Law Centre in, respectively, Belgrade and Pristina, and their colleagues is magnificent. There is great nobility in projects such as The Kosovo Memory Book 1998. Both Orlovic and Blakaj emphasized the importance, in the face of considerable opposition, of recording and describing in some detail the lives of all who died in the violence, military and civilian on both sides. By way of reminder that this in itself is not enough, Blakaj noted that 12 years after the end of the war there had been only 12 successful prosecutions for war crimes. No justice, however, was possible without an honest account of what actually happened.

Wissam Tarif of INSAN expanded on this last point. Those documenting the identity of individuals murdered or abducted in Syria and elsewhere were sometimes accused of opening tombs and opening wounds. But that was precisely the opposite of what they were doing.  Tombs and wounds could never be closed without a full accounting for what actually happened. In his own country, Lebanon, people were not fighting at present but there was no peace, only a ceasefire. This was because the Lebanese had to failed to acknowledge facts, to recognize the humanity of all those who were killed and to face their families.

According to the 2011 World Development Report, around 1.5bn people today live under the shadow of organized violence. Much of this violence is criminal. One of the questions at the launch was: should  innocent victims of crime and criminals who were themselves killed also be counted by projects such as everycasualty? One of the challenges in the 21st century, it was argued, is that while war between nations and even 'formal' civil wars are actually less frequent than before, large-scale, inchoate criminalized violence is on a greater scale than ever. This presents a challenge to existing institutional arrangements: agencies such as the Red Cross, for example, cannot act in Mexico even though the scale of the violence (recent small but typical example here) resembles war because the government does not recognize a state of war. [1]

Dan Smith of International Alert said that by making it possible to know who had died in a conflict and how, the charter had the potential to reduce the traction of wild claims (up or down), which were the meat and drink of propaganda. The charter could help us respect the 'fact of war', a continuing reality which is too often hidden behind cliches and euphemisms.

everycasualty, said Smith, was a civilising idea. Like all great ideas it was obvious once stated, but it also subtly challenged the norm. Also, there was something slightly obsessive, unrealistic about it. In this, it shared much with the ideals of the Red Cross at its foundation -- a 'wildly unrealistic' idea at the time of its inception, which acted on nothing but moral authority.

I think this is right. The everycasualty charter challenges the disturbingly plausible observation, misattributed, perhaps, to Joseph Stalin, that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic. It aims to make visible and irrefutable the tragedy of the violent death of each individual, including the deaths of those who are themselves killers.

Wissam Tarif told those present at the launch that the previous evening he had talked by telephone to one the volunteers on his team in Syria. The volunteer had said that in the midst of conflict people are completely focussed on what is happening right now. But others not caught up in the conflict -- such as those gathered together peacefully in London -- had the opportunity to think about the future. This was a tremendous gift.

everycasualty is an idea big enough for a version of the 21st century in which there is hope.  It will not of course end tragedy.  Ideals are frequently subverted (it is reported, for example, that death squads in Syria are using Red Cross/Red Crescent ambulances to abduct protestors).  And even a full accounting need not guarantee reconciliation. But it is a start.

A couple of other points: in June the Oxford Research Group published a working paper on The Legal Obligation to Record Civilian Casualties of Armed Conflict. And, drawing on the model of Iraq Body Count, there is now a Pakistan Body Count.


Note [1] My language and legal understanding here are shaky.

P.S. 24 Sep: A blog post by Dan Smith, who was on the panel at the launch

'This is your father and this is your mother'

An AK-47 gives you so much power when you hold it in your hand. With this thing I can shoot an elephant down. With this thing I'm equal as an adult, I can make an adult scream and beg for mercy. And the way it was brought to us was we were told: "this is your father and this is your mother". And it kind of makes sense. When you have an AK-47 you will not go hungry, you eat anywhere you pass, any village that you go to - you just sit under the tree and people will bring you food. That's the power it had. When you don't have it you become like a child again, you become vulnerable.

-- Emmanuel Jal, interviewed on ABC. But Jal found a way out:

When I was smuggled into Kenya [to go to school] by Emma [McCune], I still have the anger and desire to kill even in cold blood. When she takes me out with Muslim friends, some would say my name is Mohammad or like this. I feel like taking that fork or the knife and jumping at their throat and doing something. But luckily you know Kenya became a transforming area to help me to forgive. But you know when I visit my family the wounds are scratches that have healed and I feel the pain again and I tend to forget I forgave and I want to pick an AK-47 again to go and fight. Then part of my brain tells me no, this is not about Muslims, it's not about Arabs, what is killing you is the oil. So, because I discovered the truth oil is what is killing us, and it's the religion has been manipulated to mobilise people because...so they get what they want. And so now I know the truth, should I continue hating or not? And so that's where I have to keep on struggling when I get really mad and have to suppress it.

Photo: (Congo/Rwanda) Marcus Bleasdale

Hidden

Peter Bradshaw thinks Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon is one of the best films of the decade. He may be right. Few films resonate as this one does.

It's suggested that this deceptively simple photo by August Sander provides a link:


The subject's uniform and helmet grab the modern viewer's attention. But the background -- the specific context (perhaps his home village?)-- is also a vital part of the image. And the young face can be interpreted in many ways. As for the fate of this individual, what do we know?

Writing in 1931 -- some years before this picture was taken, of course -- Walter Benjamin dryly observed of the early stages of Sander's great project:

Work like Sander's could assume an unlooked-for topicality.

Benjamin also quotes Goethe:

There is a delicate empiricism that so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.

P.S. 30 Dec: In the NYT, A.O. Scott is sniffy about this film:

Forget about Weimar inflation and the Treaty of Versailles and whatever else you may have learned in school: Nazism was caused by child abuse. Or maybe by the intrinsic sinfulness of human beings.

But the film allows for, indeed encourages a more complex view: not a case of either (historical determinism) or (human weakness), but both.

War and law

A few days I contributed a comment to OurKingdom regarding Sir John Scarlett's comments to the Chilcot inquiry. As I said at the time (10 Dec), I had little to offer at that moment except sarcasm.

Several things have come to light since then, not least Tony Blair's statement that he would have found another pretext for invasion if not WMD. Jonathan Steele says:

Apart from WMD there was no other conceivable [legal] foundation for an invasion. Using force to produce regime change on humanitarian grounds is not permissible under international law, and the attorney general told Blair as much in July 2002. [1]

There's a chorus to condemn Blair now. It remains the case, however, that having no foundation in law to remove a regime on humanitarian grounds is not a satisfactory state of affairs. Governments that commit appalling large scale crimes ought to be vulnerable to removal by force approved under international law...at or very close to the time that those crimes are committed. [2]


[1] P.S. see also Hans Blix and Ken Macdonald

[2] In his Nobel acceptance speech, Barack Obama observed that the conditions that led doctrines such as a 'responsibility to protect' in the 1990s and early 2000s have not gone away:

wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.

The prospects for co-ordinated international humanitarian action have, however, deteriorated.

Six insights on Congo

Martin Shaw summarizes Gérard Prunier:

* the Rwandan genocide was a decisive moment in modern African history;

* most of the states that became involved did so because of limited, local interests;

* the partial nature of most states' interests, combined with their restricted mobilising capacities..., explain why this was not really "Africa's great war", but rather a messy, episodic conflict across but some areas of the vast DRC;

* the Hutu Power forces in Rwanda in 1994 were unique in organising a large-scale, nationwide campaign of genocide. But genocidal violence (massacres, rape, expulsions) has remained intermittent throughout the conflicts in the DRC in the subsequent decade and a half, and been employed by many of the parties;

* the Rwandan...government of Paul Kagame was unique in having a sustained interest in continuing the Congo wars, and determined to use the west's guilt at failing to stop the 1994 genocide to produce impunity for itself;

* many western governments and NGOs were (most of the time) duly blinded by their guilt to acknowledge the hardship Rwanda's campaign was inflicting on the DR Congo's population, or to raise their voices against it.

Complex conflicts across northeastern Africa, centred on Sudan "still cast a long shadow that reaches into the DRC."

Beyond blindness

Violence and blindness: the case of Uchuraccay is a remarkable piece by James R Mensch.

On the day I viewed, openDemocracy had as its 'thought for the day' this from Alan Ginsburg:

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world.

Memory and history

If any European country seems out of place in today's Europe, stranded in another historical moment, it is Belarus under the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko. Yet while Lukashenko prefers to ignore the Soviet killing fields in his country, wishing to build a highway over the death pits at Kuropaty, in some respects Lukashenko remembers European history better than his critics. By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.

Belarusian memories of this experience, cultivated by the current dictatorial regime, help to explain suspicions of initiatives coming from the West. Yet West Europeans would generally be surprised to learn that Belarus was both the epicenter of European mass killing and the base of operations of anti-Nazi partisans who actually contributed to the victory of the Allies. It is striking that such a country can be entirely displaced from European remembrance. The absence of Belarus from discussions of the past is the clearest sign of the difference between memory and history...

...If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

The Europe of today is remarkable precisely in its unity of prosperity with social justice and human rights. Probably more than any other part of the world, it is immune, at least for the time being, to such heartlessly instrumental pursuits of economic growth. Yet memory has made some odd departures from history, at a time when history is needed more than ever. The recent European past may resemble the near future of the rest of the world. This is one more reason for getting the reckonings right.

-- from Holocaust: The Ignored Reality by Timothy Snyder

"Words alone cannot begin to express our regret and sympathy"

It's true that we forget these killings easily -- often we don't notice them in the first place -- since they don't seem to impinge on our lives. Perhaps that's one of the benefits of fighting a war on the periphery of empire, halfway across the planet in the backlands of some impoverished country.

One problem, though: the forgetting doesn't work so well in those backlands. When your child, wife or husband, mother or father is killed, you don't forget.

-- Tom Englehardt

(The Weapons That Kill Civilians — Deaths of Children and Noncombatants in Iraq, 2003–2008 is online here.)

Politicide, part 841,239,017,973,986(b)

A report from Stephen Kamlish QC here. Short excerpt:

The use of phosphorus is only lawful under international rules of engagement when used as a smokescreen cover in open areas for combatants who are caught in the open and are under fire. However, the evidence on the ground makes clear that the Israeli Army systematically and unlawfully fired phosphorus shells directly over and into populated urban areas. We visited the site of a family devastated by the illegal use of phosphorous. The man we spoke to told us how his wife and three children were asleep in a bedroom of their house. A phosphorous shell came through the roof of the house exploding in the room where the family was sleeping. On impact the mother and children were engulfed in toxic flames smoke and fumes. They died an unimaginable death in that room. We stood in the room and saw the traces of white phosphorus on the walls in the otherwise completely blackened room. A woman came into the room and held up a piece of child’s clothing covered in phosphorus burns. Another man then showed us a picture of the body of a 10-month old child who had been in the room during the attack. The heat had been so intense that it had burned the baby’s legs off.

(Hat tip OT)

A friend of Freedom

The most chilling part of this short interview with Arkady Babchenko, author of One Soldier's War in Chechnya, comes towards the end.

In my rough transcript from about three minutes in, we start with a passage from the book:

In one cottage cellar they found a mutilated body: Yakovlev. The rebels had slit him open and used his intestines to strangle him while he was still alive. On the neatly whitewashed wall above him written in his blood were the words Allahu Akhbar -- God is great.

Then Babchenko, via an interpreter, tells Bridget Kendall:

So when Russia went into Chechnya for the second time I don't think the Russian army were perceived by the Chechen people as liberators, but at least they were indifferent to it. They didn't care who was going to establish order. They just craved order. So in the second war were didn't fight the Chechens, we fought gangs that roamed wide - and they were huge gangs, very strong gangs - we fought these criminals.

But the very purpose of the war was not to put an end to this banditry, this gangsterism that was reigning in Chechnya. It was only to bring Putin to power. That was the sole end.

Kendall says:

Clearly this whole experience of the war has scarred you. How much do you think it has scarred Russia? Because the general view in Russia today is that the Chechen war has been put behind them.

And Babchenko replies:

You wouldn't believe it but I'm a cheerful young man with a keen sense of humour. I think the Chechen war had the same effect on Russian society as you would have in a medieval society when a public execution took place. So there are no bans any longer, no taboos, no moral scruples. There is a total cynicism reigning supreme.

Los desastres de la guerra

What if your buddy got his meal-ready-to-eat standard spoon and asked you to take a photo of him pretending to scoop the brains out of a dead Iraqi?

Read The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness from Chris (War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning) Hedges and Laila Al-Arian.

Fear itself

Did you ever feel any guilt that you killed your father, your brother and those [four] civilians?

What I felt was great fear. I remember being very very scared when I was killing those people.

-- A young boy from eastern Congo in an interview with Mike Thompson broadcast this morning on BBC Radio 4. The whole interview is here.

That beheading

Sam Zarifi of Human Rights Watch calls the clip (available on YouTube) of a 12 year old boy cutting the throat of a grown man for the Taliban "truly shocking, without cultural context or historical precedent". One can see what he means, or rather feels. But he misses a point. Everyone, including the Taliban, is operating in a global media environment (not merely Greater West Asia, the Ummah, South Yorkshire or whatever). In that global media context, where all are influenced by all, the actions have plenty precedents in West Africa (Sierra Leone etc) and elsewhere, and in an arms race of atrocity may be inevitable.

Hamid and Flanagan on the GWOT

"[The] aspiration [for a more cosmopolitan identity] is entirely correct and I don’t think it’s necessarily doomed. The problem is, if we’re talking about a global cosmopolitan order, the collective punishment of people needs to be ended. In the United States, if there were people who were potential terrorists in the foothills of Appalachia, a police force would be sent in, it would do investigative work, and the people involved would be apprehended and put in jail. It would not be tolerated that cluster bombs would be used to wipe out several hundred people in the hope that some of them are terrorists. That kind of group punishment of people is the antithesis of global citizenship".

--Mohsin Hamid , author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, interviewed in Foreign Policy.

"You cannot justify murder," says Flanagan when [asked] whether his attempts to understand the motives of terrorists will cause him further vilification, "but the danger for western societies at the moment is that we seek to protect ourselves by creating and feeding difference, and by making people feel alienated, and that it's not possible to share with other human beings the possibility of being fully human. The best defence we can offer against evil and the possibility of terrible, murderous acts is by letting people back in. Then the appeal of a death cult starts to evaporate. But in a world where people feel ever more frightened, alienated and tossed out to the periphery, death cults offer a way back."

-- Richard Flanagan, author of The Unknown Terrorist, interviewed by Stephen Moss in The Guardian.

Googling Darfur

Thanks to Bacon Butty (Atrocity Exhibition) for drawing attention to emerging political uses of Google Earth re Darfur and UNEP.