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.
