Category: War crimes etc

Yankeedoodle gives his own very detailed and clear analysis of the Taguba report in his Today in Iraq blog today. Check it out. It’s toward the bottom of that post.
YD’s a genius.
His conclusion:

Coupled with the Hersch piece, MG Taguba’s AR 15-6 report and a few other news items I’ve posted recently, it seems to me that there was indeed a blanket policy of coercive interrogation applied to the Iraqi detainees in US custody at Abu Ghraib. The media is missing the story here. The scandal isn’t the lower-ranking MP soldiers we’ve seen in the infamous pictures or their piss-poor leadership– and I’m not defending either of them.
The issue is a blanket policy of coercive interrogation. Somebody made the decision to apply that policy through Military Intelligence channels. Presumably, the decision-maker made a conscious cost-benefit analysis, weighing the potential intelligence value of detainees against the damage that would result if word of the abuse that results from such a policy were made public, especially in light of the administration’s War on Terror.

Continue reading “Yankeedoodle on Taguba”

This morning, Bill the spouse and I were speculating about what the point of all the officially sanctioned brutality in Abu Ghraib prison was.
Once we accept that this was no “furtive”, rogue operation, we have to understand that someone in the military chain of command–most likely the Military Intel command– was actually, under very difficult operational circumstances, devoting quite a lot of manpower and other resources to running these sessions of organized brutality. This, in a situation where manpower is stretched incredibly thin.
Plus, by the accounts of some of the front-line perpetrators, they were given the cameras by superiors and instructed to take the photos and videos.
So what was it all in aid of?

Continue reading “Brutality in the gulag: what for?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of brutality recently. (Haven’t
we all?) Two recent instances have been the videotaped beheading
of U.S. citizen Nick Berg in Iraq, and the reported display by some
of the people of Gaza of the mortal remains of six Israeli soldiers
blown to smithereens on Tuesday when their APC was the target of an explosive
device in the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitoun.

News of those incidents comes against the backdrop of continuing revelations
about the depth and extent of the depravities that have been carried out–many
of which are probably still being carried out–within the far-flung reaches
of the United States’ own globe-wide gulag of abuse.

The mainstream media here in the US gives, quite predictably, huge
amounts of coverage to the fate of Berg and the six Israeli soldiers.
I don’t want to underestimate the horror of what happened to those
people. But I do note that Berg, apparently a lone adventurer, voluntarily
traveled into a known war-zone in a distant country, “in search of work”.
Videotaping him while in captivity was already an abuse, as of course–above everything else– was killing him. So, too,
was the videotaping of his decapitation and the subsequent distribution
of both segments of the tape. But Berg was fully clothed throughout
the taping. Of the decapitation, it was reportedly rapid, though it can’t have been painless. His father was
reported
(in the NYT) as saying, “That manner was preferable to a long and torturous
death. But I didn’t want it to become public.”

Of the Israeli soldiers, I note that they were most likely conscripts
in the Israel Defense Forces’ lengthy and as-yet unsuccessful counter-insurgency
operations in Gaza. I ache for their families, and for the families
of all the Israeli conscripts in that war. But it does seem probable
that their deaths were also, like Berg’s, pretty rapid. And though
abuse of human body parts is a ghastly thing to contemplate, I don’t think–either
in that case or that of the US contractors killed in Fallujah in March–that
people should get disproportionately steamed up about that kind of abuse
as compared with the abuses that have been visited (and continue to be
visited) on the bodies and minds of people who are still alive, sentient,
and suffering continuing pain and humiliation.

(I accept that other people may differ with me on this view of abuse
of the mortal remains of people who are already dead versus prolonged abuse
of still-living people.)

But this brings me back to the still central issue of the behavior
of the people running the United States’ global network of mass detention/punishment
centers, and will in short order bring me back to the
need–now, more than ever!–to restate all the norms and practices embodied
in the Geneva Conventions…

Continue reading “On brutality in war”

I have been cerebrating quite hard on writing the book on Violence and its Legacies. At least, that’s how it feels to me.
Last Wednesday, as part of that work, I posted up here Martha Minow’s list of 8 meta-tasks that societies might think they need to accomplish (and to prioritize) in the aftermath of atrocious violence. I invited readers who had lived in post-atrocity societies to comment on the list. Nobody did, which was a bit depressing. Maybe I cast the invitation too tightly. Does anyone out there have any comments?
Anyway, I’ve been writing about Mozambique. Oh, where on earth to start?? I have so much incredibly rich material from my two (admittedly short) visits to the country and from all my reading!
But then I thought, Helena, you’ve got these three very diverse situations you’re studying. (Mozambique 1992, Rwanda and RSA 1994: for details of the whole project go here.) You need to find a way to explore that diversity in an analytically fruitful way rather than let it just pull the whole enquiry quite apart. (“So just what do apples and oranges have in common, Mr. Darwin?” “Funny you should ask that question, friend…”)
So here’s what I’ve come up with so far– and really, I came to this from a writerly perspective which is one special kind of an analytical/intellectual perspective, namely: how in heck to put words, sentences, chapters etc together in a linear way that actually makes sense and reveals something worth revealing??

Continue reading “Escaping from atrocious violence”

Today, I got back seriously into doing what I should have been doing for ALL of the past year: writing my book about post-atrocity policies with special reference to three countries in Africa. Here is a link to the project of which this book will be the principal product.
All this Middle East stuff has been WAYS too distracting.
I have all this great material from the work I’ve done on the Africa book. Today I organized and fussed around with all the material I have for the Mozambique chapter, so tomorrow I can start writing it.
The more I have thought about this book, the more I have decided that the list that Harvard Law Prof. Martha Minow produced in 2000, of “meta-tasks” that societies struggling to escape from atrocious violence need to prioritize among, should form a major organizing principle for it. Not that I totally agree with Martha’s list. I would have drawn up a slightly different list (and probably shall, in the “Conclusion” to the book.)
But hers is an excellent starting point, a good object for the book’s interrogation. In the hope that some of you folks out there who read JWN might have your own experiences of having lived in post-atrocity societies, maybe some of you have some ideas on the value of her list?
Here it is:

After mass violence, a nation or society needs to address at least eight goals:
1. Overcome communal and official denial of the atrocity; gain public acknowledgment.
2. Obtain the facts in an account as full as possible in order to meet victims’ need to know, to build a record for history, and to ensure minimal accountability and visibility of perpetrators.

Continue reading “Meta-tasks after atrocious violence”

With about 95% of the votes counted in Sunday’s election in Serbia, the BBC is reporting that, “the SRS [Serbian Radical] party and the Socialist Party of Serbia, both headed by men facing war crimes charges at the UN tribunal in The Hague, were on track to get 103 seats – of a total of 250.”
The two defendants in question are the SRS’s Vojislav Seselj and the Socialist Party’s Slobodan Milosevic.
Earlier today (Monday) the SRS, which won 81 of those seats, offered to form a coalition with the party which came second in the polls, the Democratic Party of Serbia (53 seats), which is more reformist than the two very hardline parties. But like Milosevic and Seselj, Democratic Party leader Vojislav Kostunica is extremely critical of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY)…
It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Some excellent background on the complex interactions between ICTY and internal political developments in Serbia can be found in a good article by Tim Judah, “The fog of justice”, in the latest issue (January 15, 2004) of The New York Review of Books.

Continue reading “ICTY: Reconciliation, or its opposite?”

I’m in Seoul airport on my way back to the States from Beijing. I just remembered that shortly before I left home 8-some days ago, the Boston Review finally got my article on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda up onto their website.
So here’s the link for it!
I would love it if you would post any comments you have here– as well as sending them to the BR.
The piece draws heavily on the interviewing and observing I did at the court, in Arusha, last April.

Today’s WaPo has a good piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that gives more information on the war-crimes court that the Iraqi Governing Council is setting up.
At some stage–and, I hope, soon!– the people of Iraq clearly need to find and adopt a workable way to deal with the multiple, very grievous harms inflicted on them during the 35 years of Saddamist rule. Trials of former perpetrators of genocide and crimes against humanity may be a part of that process. But I sincerely hope they are not the whole of it. (It is worth recalling, for example, the deep healing value of the amnesties that were at the heart of South Africa’s recent transition from authoritarian minority rule to full democracy…)
And in the mean-time, while we await an authentically and accountably Iraqi approach to dealing with the painful legacies of the saddamist past, we have the US occupation forces giving its creature, the IGC, the right to hold trials of accused Saddam-era rights abusers. Neither the US occupation force nor the IGC is, I should add, democratically accountable in any way to the Iraqi people.
This is pure John Locke!
I just went out and bust out my tattered copy of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, and yes, there it is, Locke’s whole disquisition on how “the power to punish”, or as he calls it, “executive power”, lies at the heart of political power.

Continue reading “War crimes trials in Iraq, contd.”

This is a quick note about a book I’d been eagerly looking forward to reading
in connection with my
“Violence and its Legacies” project, John Hagan’s Justice in the Balkans: Prosecuting War Crimes in
the Hague Tribunal. Hagan is a professor of sociology and law at
both Northwestern University in Chicago and the University of Toronto.

Personally, I have found that the most useful disciplinary lenses for looking
at the new brand of international war-crimes courts are those of political
‘science’, legal theory, anthropology, conflict resolution, discourse ethics,
and history. I was interested to see what a sociologist might come
up with.

There was a little bit of slightly mystifying jargon. Something about
“loosely coupled systems”, and a couple other things. Mainly, Hagan
seemed to have been doing lots of interviewing of people working in ICTY
(which he slightly arrogantly refers to as ICT, as though there were not
another ICT also in existence: ICTR.) Correction. He actually
seems to have focused nearly on his research on people in the Office of the
Prosecutor (OTP) at ICTY, in line with a long tradition in US history
of seeing prosecutors as heroic agents of history… Think Teddy
Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, etc etc…

Continue reading “ICTY: book by John Hagan”

JWN readers probably saw the Dec 5
announcement
from “Iraqi and American officials” that the Iraqi Governing Council
would be establishing a tribunal to try cases of Crimes Against Humanity
“within the coming few days.”

IGC member Mahmoud Othman was quoted by the Associated Press as saying
that the new tribunal would hear hundreds of cases involving members of the
former regime. “There will be more trials than only the 55 deck of cards,”
he said, referring to the U.S. list of most-wanted Iraqis. “Anybody against
whom a complaint is filed with evidence against them could be tried.”

The numbers of trials could end up being mind-boggling. The AP report
notes that just one group in Baghdad, the Iraqi Human Rights Society, took
in 7,000 complaints before the paperwork overwhelmed its staff.

My own strong belief, based on the studies I’ve made of the different ways
that different societies and the international community have sought to deal
with the many troubling legacies of atrocious violence, is (1) that the issue
of who makes the decisions in any such process as this is very important;
and (2) that mercy, restraint, and reconciliation are by far the approaches
most likely to lead to the longterm good of the society that has been traumatized.

I actually have a new, long article on the post-atrocity process in Rwanda
that is in the very latest (Dec-Jan) issue of
Boston Review.
My own paper copies of the mag have already arrived, but I’m a little
irritated that they don’t have this issue up on their website yet. It
should happen soon. If you read this new piece, which is based on some
observation I did last spring at the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda, plus the much earlier,
more theoretical piece
on post-genocide justice issues that I published in BR 18 months
ago, you will more or less see a compilation of my views.

My bottom line on the ICTR is that it is truly amazing that after spending
a vast amount of money– some $800 million by now, and counting–the court
has still reached judgment on only 15 individuals. (The most recent
judgments were on the three individuals tried in the “Media” case. A
friend in the court sent me a copy of it: 361 pages, not counting footnotes…
Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza ended up getting 35 years, and Hassan Ngeze and ferdinand
Nahimana got life sentences… Those, for conviction on charges of
Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity [Persecution, and Extermination]…
)

Most of the money spent by the ICTR has gone into the bank accounts of international
lawyers and other non-Rwandan employees and contractors.

Meanwhile, at the domestic level, Rwanda did also start out in the immediate
post-genocide period with a strong commitment– which seems eerily similar
to that expressed by IGC member Mahmoud Othman above–to organizing trials
for all those alleged perpetrators of earlier atrocities against whom a complaint
is filed. (Though Othman did at least say, “a complaint with evidence.”)

Continue reading “War crimes trials–in Iraq and elsewhere”