Innocents in the cross-fire or responsible partisans?“This is tangential to my real topic today which is: Can the British people be held morally responsible for these acts, and going even further, can the German people be held responsible for Hitler as the British seem to have reckoned? It is said that 85% of the Sinhalese support the civil war in Lanka and are making material sacrifices to aid it; are they partisans? And what about Tamils who support the LTTE, say politically, or who morally and politically adjure secession?”
___________________________________
by Kumar David
(March 16, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) This article is not about whether the military, by calculated recklessness in aerial bombardment, or the LTTE by outright intent in placing bombs in public places, is killing and maiming a larger number of civilians. Rather, I would like to explore in this piece a different question - to what degree is the civilian population in a country at war a party to that war, maybe not to the same degree as the leaders, but still a responsible party? I am curious in general terms, not in relation to Lanka alone. This is not an irrelevant and abstract moral question: it is real. For example, Osama bin Laden is reported to have said that citizens who voluntarily elect governments that oppress and wage war against innocent alien peoples, nations, or faiths are "non-innocent"; they share responsibility.
Shared responsibility; Governments and people
If Washington occupies some oil rich country and pumps out the black gold, who is the beneficiary – palpably the American public. When Britannia ruled the waves, the stolen wealth of the empire flooded back home. After stout Cortez and brave Pizarro slaughtered the natives, they brought back to Spain, its monarchs, merchants and people, galleons loaded with Inca gold and Aztec treasure. Where in all this mayhem does one draw the line of moral responsibility between predatory state and beneficiary citizen? Then, would rebels against colonial slavery have been justified in taking the battle to the streets of London and Madrid, if they could have? To hell with (non-innocent) civilian casualties, to hell with collateral damage to the British Museum and Madrid’s renowned Prado, they may well have said.
What about the two greatest acts of terrorism in modern history; nearly 200,000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; what of the fire bombing of Dresden by the RAF and the USAF on February 13-15, 1945, as Germany lay prostrate and when, by the worst estimates, 60,000 perished? The reason for the bestiality at Dresden, which contained no armies and no armaments industries, was Churchill's need to satiate his blood-lust to avenge the destruction of Coventry by the Luftwaffe in Noveber 1940." Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the British air war against German civilians thus.
"Allied strategic bombing was the most deadly form of economic warfare ever devised and showed another side of the indiscriminateness of industrial war. But in mid-1941 the British Chiefs of Staff soberly concluded that morale, not industry, was Germany's most vulnerable point and ordered Sir Arthur Harris of RAF Bomber Command to concentrate on ‘area bombing’ of cities. Churchill's scientific adviser Professor L.A. Lindemann of Oxford (later Lord Cherwell) concurred in April 1942 that one-third of all Germans could be rendered homeless in 15 months by strategic bombing of cities. The Royal Air Force accordingly assigned its new Lancaster four-engine bombers to a total war on German civilians. After attacks on Lübeck and the Ruhr, Harris sent a thousand planes against Cologne on May 30-31 in an attack that battered one-third of the city. In 1943, after an interlude of bombing German submarine pens, the Lancasters launched the Battle of the Ruhr totalling 18,506 sorties and the Battle of Hamburg numbering 17,021. The fire raids in Hamburg killed 40,000 people and left a million homeless. The Royal Air Force then hit Berlin (November 1943 to March 1944) with 20,224 sorties, avenging many times over all the damage done by the Luftwaffe to London."
And Dresden was worse than any of these. If the Allies had lost the war Churchill and his commanders, and their American counterparts, would, deservedly, have been tried and found guilty of genocide and loathsome crimes against humanity.
However, this is tangential to my real topic today which is: Can the British people be held morally responsible for these acts, and going even further, can the German people be held responsible for Hitler as the British seem to have reckoned? It is said that 85% of the Sinhalese support the civil war in Lanka and are making material sacrifices to aid it; are they partisans? And what about Tamils who support the LTTE, say politically, or who morally and politically adjure secession? Most Israeli civilians are gung-ho and belligerent about anything Palestinian; are they innocent bystanders? What of street jubilant Palestinians when a suicide attacker strikes a Jerusalem school? The answers to these questions are not self-evident and the answers vary from case to case.
The Geneva Conventions of 1949
The Geneva Conventions are a series of international treaties concluded in response to the horrors of the war which assert that parties to a conflict must distinguish between the civilian population and combatants. On its terms both the nuclear holocaust visited on Japan and the fire bombing of German civilians constitute war crimes of incalculable magnitude. I have prepared the following synopsis of the relevant sections of the Conventions using the ICRC website as reference.
‘Neither the civilian population nor individuals may be attacked; people who do not or can no longer take part in the hostilities are entitled to respect for their lives and physical and mental integrity. It is forbidden to kill or wound an adversary who surrenders or who can no longer take part in fighting. There is no unlimited right to choose methods and means of warfare; weapons or methods that are likely to cause unnecessary losses or excessive suffering are forbidden. The wounded and sick must be collected and cared for; medical personnel and medical establishments must not be attacked. Captured combatants and civilians are entitled to respect for their lives, their dignity, and political, religious and other convictions. They are entitled to exchange news with their families and to basic judicial guarantees.’
Can anyone imagine a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance than this – not our ethnic conflict alone but many theatres of war across the world?
Global barbarism
A recent book must give us pause. Hugo Slim a humanitarian activist now working in Switzerland has written Killing Civilians: Madness and Morality in War (Columbia University Press, 2007) about his experiences, mainly in Africa, attempting to persuade combatants in tribal wars that civilians of the "other" (shades of Obama) tribe must be cared for and protected. A story he tells, some time after the book was published, is worth recounting. I have abridged it considerably.
"Last year, I was watching football next to a former senior leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The game was extremely physical. The LRA man was getting heated about the conduct on the pitch and eventually leapt from his chair, shouting at the referee: "Hey, that’s unfair, that’s terrible, send him off!" Here was the official spokesman for one of the most vicious armed groups in the world (whose troops murder and mutilate unarmed civilians) complaining about a tackle, but he was genuinely outraged."
"After the match, he turned to me and said: "Why do you want to talk to me about civilians?" "Because your organization has killed so many and I want to understand why." He grew angry. "You and all the other white people have only just turned up. We have been fighting this war for years. You talk about civilians. But what is a civilian? Go around this area for a bit, if you can then tell me what a civilian is, I will talk to you." We humanitarians often react to wars as this LRA man reacted to a football match. We talk about civilians without understanding what the idea really means to people at war. We chant in support of "innocent civilians" and call upon a host of referees to sort out the offenders. They seldom do and we are left to fume."
"I think we might be more effective if we do not just chant as loyal fans of civilians and become more subtle in our understanding of what people inside a war really think about civilians and why they kill them. People have strong reasons for killing civilians and always have. Often they totally reject the civilian idea, thinking it foolish to differentiate among their enemy. They see every young, old, male or female as a threat to be destroyed or hurt. Others may agree that there are such things as civilians but that the cause for which they fight is so important that it trumps the ethic of civilian protection. Churchill and Hamas share this view."
"Many killers regard civilian identity as just too slippery and ambiguous. They see most people in the war as more complicated than mere civilians. ‘Civilians’ are involved in the war in some way whether they like it or not [racist journalists?]. Then there is the simple fury of revenge in which massacre pays back pain. Besides R2P, we should understand R2K – Reasons to Kill. Getting inside the anti-civilian mindset we might find ways to destroy their reasoning and so get to A2P, Argue to Protect."
[Source: http://www.odihpn.org/report.asp?id =2901 ]
The point of Mr Slim’s book is chilling but simple; he argues that preaching, fuming, and the threat of international law won’t stop the killers. At home this is obvious, whichever side you take on Lanka’s civil war. He thinks that in addition to all this other methods must be found to appeal to the killers; appeals to old-fashioned virtues like compassion, honour and mercy. It is no secret that arrests, military strikes, money laundering, indulging carnal lust and other base inducements, political asylum and such like practical measures and inducements are used to restrain monsters.
Anyone who has watched our Lankan combatants over the decades will, I believe, agree that neither side will be restrained by conscience, or by legal and diplomatic appeals without bite. But I also doubt if appeals to compassion and honour will fare any better. What about self-interest? Yes, more than a few have responded to self-interest, in Africa especially; but others won’t – bin Laden, for example, would rather die.
span> - Sri Lanka Guardian
Post a Comment