Tragedies, tragedies
Posted by Helena Cobban
August 20, 2003 9:31 AM EST | Link
Filed in Iraq , Israel , Violence/nonviolence , War crimes etc
I was stunned by yesterday's bombing of the UN HQ in Baghdad. Why the UN? Why Sergio Vieira de Mello, and so many other members of his team?
I was relieved to learn this morning that our dear friend Ghassan Salameh, now working as the UN mission's top political advisor in Baghdad, managed to survive. He was described in a story in Lebanon's Daily Star this morning as pretty distraught over the death of his friend and boss de Mello, and said he'd spent the past four hours scrabbling through the rubble looking for survivors.
Another massive bombing on Jerusalem's No.2 bus yesterday, as well. When I see the footage of these events, wherever they take place, I remember what it's like to experience the immediate aftermath of such an attack. Body parts flung into unlikely places. Screams of anguish. Dust and rubble. A universe turned upside down. And then, the enduring sense of loss and of anguish.
International humanitarian law tries, quite rightly, to afford special protections to civilians (and to former combatants who are currently hors de combat.) That distinction is at the heart of the Geneva Conventions and all the rest of international humanitarian law. When you reflect on such horrifying actions as those that created yesterday's carnage in Baghdad or Jerusalem, you see why such protections are particularly valuable, and why the standard of working hard and actively to avoid harm to noncombatants has to be a vital value for our world.
People who are combatants have taken a special vow when they entered the military. Their special status allows them to kill (people who are other combatants), with impunity. But it also means they accept the risks of being killed or wounded in the line of duty. Civilians have taken no such vow.
These two events were, it seems to me, the result of deliberate actions, designed, planned, and executed by sentient human beings. And these actions aimed deliberately at bringing death and mayhem to noncombatants.
We can, and should, discuss the role of intentionality in all this. Is death as a result of the intention of the perpetrator any qualitatively different-- for the victim, for her survivors, for the rest of society--than death by as a result of the perpetrator's reckless or even wilfull inattention?
After all, many more deaths worldwide are caused through the reckless inattention of decisionmakers who in many cases would not even see themselves as perpetrators of wrongdoing than are caused through the perpetrators' focused intention.
But there is something about the intentional infliction of harm that I, and I suspect most other people, find particularly revolting. The intentional harm-causer will, after all, fine-tune his actions precisely so as to cause the maximum of harm. (I think of the driver of the cement-mixer in Baghdad carefully easing his explosive-packed vehicle into the right place to cause the maximum death and destruction.) The reckless harm-causer, by contrast, may adjust his actions to minimize harm if the possibility of harm is brought to his attention. The person whom I would describe as the wilfully inattentive harm-causer lies somewhere between those two...
But regardless of the role of intentionality, the proscription against causing harm to civilians has to be stressed again and again.
These two bombings have a clear potential to radically change the course of events in the Middle East, and throughout the world. They bring us several steps closer to the worldwide clash between militant Muslims and the rest of the world that is, I believe, one of the main goals of their perpetrators.
I deeply, deeply do not want this clash to develop further. If it does, the main casualties will be caused not amongst the rich, comfortable segment of global society, but amidst the poor and downtrodden, the communities where people's social and economic situations have already been chronically troubled for decades, and where inter-group hatreds that are pursued under the banner of values that are claimed to be "religious" can cause almost unimaginable harm.
Think of much of the Third World being transformed into Lebanon. While the arms dealers and other chaos merchants of the comfortable world rake in their tidy profit.
Can we avoid this outcome? Yes, I believe we can. We need urgently to open a dialogue of conscience and of values around the world. The current decade is supposed to be the UN's Decade of Nonviolence. Now that one of the UN's finest has been killed by the forces of chaos and confrontation, it would be great if Kofi Annan would lead this new call for conscience and values. It would involve restating some important values on which the UN was founded, like those of national independence (for Iraqis) and of human equality (Israel/Palestine), and of peaceful and speedy resolution of outstanding conflicts...
Along the way, though, we also need to restate the core values of international humanitarian law, and work hard to re-establish the global consensus-- in the Middle East, in Africa, and elswhere-- that regardless of the nature of the conflict or oppression, causing damage to civilians is always wrong.
I note that this a core value of much of traditional Islamic writing on the constraints to be observed in times of war. We urgently need to initiate a global dialogue with Muslim political activists of all stripes on this issue.
Helena,
It is not clear to me if you are writing about deaths to civilians caused unintentionally by soldiers, or deaths of civilians caused unintentionally by misguided actions of politicians, or both.
I understand that to the dead and those associated to them there is no difference. The same holds true for those civilians killed because they were intentionally targeted.
Your hope, that everyone just lay down their arms and get along, is what all civilized people hope for. But merely calling this the "Decade of Nonviolence" won't get that done.
One thing that would help get it done is for the civilized world to recognize some of the perpetrators of violence for what they are according to international law. You make a point to focus on international law in your piece. When combatants hide and attack from among a civilian population international law clearly puts the responsibility for bystander deaths on them regardless of who did the actual shooting.
So why does the international community consistently twist this around and blame those who are trying not to harm non-combatants, rather than the forces which international law states have the actual responsibility? When you give non-regular troops a political and propaganda victory rather than universally condemning them for the deaths caused in trying to root them out from a civilian population then you are giving them a lot of motive to continue doing exactly what they are doing.
I think your breath would be better spent calling on the international community to follow its own laws, and to make targeting non-combatants and hiding among a civilian population politically untenable.
There is an area in the theory of ethics that tries to understand our intuition about the permissibility or rightness of some actions.
For instance, most would say that killing the pizza boy to harvest his organs for five transplant patients is not right. But giving donated organs to the five patients (instead of giving them all to a sixth patient) is permissible.
Different theories have been proposed to explain why we view these situations differently. One is called "The Doctrine of Double Effect." It says, basically, that we can act in a way that causes harm to someone as long as harming the person is not the goal of our action -- but merely a (forseeable) side effect.
So, giving the life-saving organs to the five instead of the one is the right thing to do because not helping the one is not the goal. (If the one patient happens to survive, we don't need to shoot him in order to achieve our goal -- which was to help the five other patients.)
What makes Arab and Islamist terrorist so evil is that they don't seem to share the intuition that the theory of ethics tries to explain.
They don't believe that intentionally killing civilians is an ethically wrong act. They view their action as the same as an errant missile hitting innocent bystanders.
And that is pretty f-ed up.
I agree with you that until and unless the rest of the world takes a stand, the deliberate killing of civilians will continue. And it's only a matter of time before Europeans will be killed or maimed.
Our enemies' initial "Mogadishu Strategy" - based on the faulty notion that if you kill Americans they pack up and go home - was a disaster for them. Our response devastated their already-crippled organization. Now, with reduced capabilities and decayed leadership, they've turned to attacking soft targets. It's the best they can do.
It's ugly. But it's an indicator of their weakness, not of strength.
Demoralized by constant defeats, our enemies have become alarmed by the quickening pace of reconstruction. Consequently, we will see more attacks on infrastructure, on international aid workers and on Iraqis laboring to rebuild their country.
We'll also see al Qaeda and other terrorist groups become the senior partners among our enemies, as Ba'athist numbers and capabilities dwindle. There is more innocent blood to come.
Yet the bombing of the U.N. headquarters at the Canal Hotel was a self-defeating act. . . . The truck bomb didn't simply attack the U.N. - it struck at the U.N.'s idea of itself. The lesson the U.N. must take away is that no one can be neutral in the struggle with evil.
There are rumors about that the UN bombing was an attempt to thwart an investigation into the oil for palaces program.
If this is so it is more like Hitler's Night of the Long Knives (a falling out among thieves) than an attempt to deny humanitarian aid to Iraq.
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