pales
Americans and Europeans have been shocked by the over selling of death
and destruction of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, filling our screens with
bombed buildings and dead bodies lying in the street. But the United States and
its allies have waged war in country after country for decades, carving swathes
of destruction through cities, towns and villages on a far greater scale than
has so far disfigured Ukraine.
As I’ve already reported the U.S. and OTAN allies have dropped over
337,000 bombs and missiles, or 46 per day, on nine countries since 2001 alone.
Senior U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officers told Newsweek that
the first 24 days of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine was less destructive than the first
day of U.S. bombing in Iraq in 2003.
The U.S.-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria bombarded those
countries with over 120,000 bombs and missiles, the heaviest bombing anywhere
in decades. U.S. military officers told Amnesty International that the U.S. assault on Raqqa in Syria
was also the heaviest artillery bombardment since the Vietnam War.
Mosul in Iraq was the largest city that the United States and its allies reduced to rubble in that campaign, with a pre-assault population of 1.5 million.
About 138,000 houses were damaged or destroyed by bombing and artillery, and an Iraqi
Kurdish intelligence report counted at least 40,000 civilians killed.
Raqqa, which had a population of 300,000, was gutted even more. A UN assessment mission reported that 70-80% of buildings were destroyed or damaged.
Syrian and Kurdish forces in Raqqa reported counting 4,118 civilian bodies. Many more deaths remain uncounted
in the rubble of Mosul and Raqqa. Without comprehensive mortality surveys, we
may never know what fraction of the actual death toll these numbers represent.
The Pentagon promised to review its policies on civilian casualties in
the wake of these massacres, and commissioned the Rand Corporation to conduct a study titled, “Understanding Civilian Harm in Raqqa and Its Implications
For Future Conflicts,” which has now been made public.
Even as the world recoils from the shocking violence in Ukraine, the
premise of the Rand Corp study is that U.S. forces will continue to wage wars
that involve devastating bombardments of cities and populated areas, and that
they must therefore try to understand how they can do so without killing quite
so many civilians.
The study runs over 100 pages, but it never comes to grips with the
central problem, which is the inevitably devastating and deadly impacts of
firing explosive weapons into inhabited urban areas like Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa
in Syria, Mariupol in Ukraine, Sanaa in Yemen or Gaza in Palestine.
The development of “precision weapons” has demonstrably failed to
prevent these massacres. The United States unveiled its new “smart bombs”
during the First Gulf War in 1990-1991. But they in fact comprised only 7% of the 88,000 tons of bombs it dropped on Iraq, reducing “a rather
highly urbanized and mechanized society” to “a pre-industrial age nation”
according to a UN survey.
Instead of publishing actual data on the accuracy of these weapons, the
Pentagon has maintained a sophisticated propaganda campaign to convey the
impression that they are 100% accurate and can strike a target like a house or
apartment building without harming civilians in the surrounding area.
However, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Rob Hewson, the
editor of an arms trade journal that reviews the performance of air-launched
weapons, estimated that 20 to 25% of U.S. “precision” weapons missed their targets.
Even when they do hit their target, these weapons do not perform like
space weapons in a video game. The most commonly used bombs in the U.S. arsenal
are 500 lb bombs, with an explosive charge of 89 kilos of Tritonal. According to UN safety data, the blast alone from that explosive charge is 100% lethal up to a
radius of 10 meters, and will break every window within 100 meters.
That is just the blast effect. Deaths and horrific injuries are also
caused by collapsing buildings and flying shrapnel and debris – concrete,
metal, glass, wood etc.
A strike is considered accurate if it lands within a “circular error
probable,” usually 10 meters around the object being targeted. So in an urban
area, if you take into account the “circular error probable,” the blast radius,
flying debris and collapsing buildings, even a strike assessed as “accurate” is
very likely to kill and injure civilians.
U.S. officials draw a moral distinction between this “unintentional”
killing and the “deliberate” killing of civilians by terrorists. But the late
historian Howard Zinn challenged this distinction in a letter to the New York Times in 2007. He wrote: “These words
are misleading because they assume an action is either ‘deliberate’ or
‘unintentional.’ There is something in between, for which the word is
‘inevitable.’ If you engage in an action, like aerial bombing, in which you
cannot possibly distinguish between combatants and civilians (as a former Air
Force bombardier, I will attest to that), the deaths of civilians are
inevitable, even if not ‘intentional.’
Does that difference exonerate you morally? The terrorism of the suicide
bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent.
To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over
the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.”
People are rightfully horrified when they see civilians killed by
Russian bombardment in Ukraine, but they are generally not quite so horrified,
and more likely to accept official justifications, when they hear that
civilians are killed by U.S. forces or American weapons in Iraq, Syria, Yemen
or Gaza. The Western corporate media play a key role in this, by showing us
corpses in Ukraine and the wails of their loved ones, but shielding us from
equally disturbing images of people killed by U.S. or allied forces.
While NATO leaders are demanding that Russia be held accountable for war
crimes, they have raised no such clamor to prosecute U.S. officials. Yet during
the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, both the International Committee of the
Red Cross (ICRC) and the
UN Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) documented persistent and systematic violations of the Geneva
Conventions by U.S. forces, including of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention that
protects civilians from the impacts of war and military occupation.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and human rights groups documented systematic abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq and
Afghanistan, including cases in which U.S. troops tortured prisoners to death.
Although torture was approved by U.S. officials all the way up to
the White House, no
officer above the rank of major was ever held accountable for a torture death
in Afghanistan or Iraq. The harshest punishment handed down for torturing a
prisoner to death was a five-month jail sentence, although that is a capital
offense under the U.S. War Crimes Act.
In a 2007 human rights report that described widespread killing of civilians by U.S. occupation
forces, UNAMI wrote, “Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as
much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely
populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of
civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area.”
The report demanded “that all credible allegations of unlawful killings
be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action
taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate
force.”
Instead of investigating, the U.S. has actively covered up its war
crimes. A
tragic example is the 2019 massacre in the
Syrian town of Baghuz, where a special U.S. military operations unit dropped
massive bombs on a group of mainly women and children, killing about 70. The
military not only failed to acknowledge the botched attack but even bulldozed
the blast site to cover it up. Only after a New York
Times exposé years later did the military even admit that the strike took place.
So it is ironic to hear President Biden call for President Putin to face
a war crimes trial, when the United States covers up its own crimes, fails to
hold its own senior officials accountable for war crimes and still rejects the
jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In 2020, Donald Trump
went so far as to impose U.S. sanctions on the most senior ICC prosecutors for
investigating U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan.
The Rand study repeatedly claims that U.S. forces have “a deeply
ingrained commitment to the law of war.” But the destruction of Mosul, Raqqa
and other cities and the history of U.S. disdain for the UN Charter, the Geneva
Conventions and international courts tell a very different story.
We agree with the Rand report’s conclusion that, “DoD’s weak
institutional learning for civilian harm issues meant that past lessons went
unheeded, increasing the risks to civilians in Raqqa.” However, we take issue
with the study’s failure to recognize that many of the glaring contradictions
it documents are consequences of the fundamentally criminal nature of this
entire operation, under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the existing laws of
war.
We reject the whole premise of this study, that U.S. forces should
continue to conduct urban bombardments that inevitably kill thousands of
civilians, and must therefore learn from this experience so that they will kill
and maim fewer civilians the next time they destroy a city like Raqqa or Mosul.
The ugly truth behind these U.S. massacres is that the impunity senior
U.S. military and civilian officials have enjoyed for past war crimes
encouraged them to believe they could get away with bombing cities in Iraq and
Syria to rubble, inevitably killing tens of thousands of civilians.
They have so far been proven right, but U.S. contempt for international law and the failure of the global community to hold the United States to account are destroying the very “rules-based order” of international law that U.S. and Western leaders claim to cherish.
As the World calls urgently for a ceasefire, for peace and for accountability for war crimes in Ukraine on both sides, we should say “Never Again!” to the bombardment of cities and civilian areas, whether they are in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Iran or anywhere else, and whether the aggressor is Russia, the UK, France, the United States, Israel or Saudi Arabia.
And we should never forget that the supreme war crime is war itself, the crime of aggression, because, as the judges declared at Nuremberg, it “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” It is easy to point fingers at others, but we will not stop war until we force our own leaders to live up to the principle spelled out by Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson: “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
Crimes of war, which I’ll collectively call mass violence, come in three categories: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The lines of separation aren’t entirely clear, but here is one clarification: “Crimes against humanity refer to specific crimes committed in the context of a large-scale attack targeting civilians, regardless of their nationality. . . . Crimes against humanity have often been committed as part of State policies, but they can also be perpetrated by non-State armed groups or paramilitary forces. Unlike war crimes, crime against humanity can also be committed in peacetime, and contrary to genocide, they are not necessarily committed against a specific national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Victims of mass violence have legal outlets through the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Criminal Court (ICC), special tribunals, and regional human-rights courts such as the European Court of Human Rights.
Thus, the ICJ considered Ukraine’s complaint in response to the Russian claim of genocide by Ukraine forces in the Donbas region. By a 13-2 vote—the Russian and Chinese judges being in the minority—the court ruled that Russia “shall immediately suspend military operations that it commenced on 24 February 2022 in the territory of Ukraine.” Russia never attended the ICJ hearing, claiming the court lacked jurisdiction inasmuch as its invasion was in self-defense. The ICJ’s opinion is binding under the UN Charter, but Russia was undeterred.
The charge that Putin and Russian military forces are guilty of war crimes might go before the ICC. The Swiss lawyer Carla Del Ponte, who was chief prosecutor in the Rwanda and Bosnian Serb international tribunals, has called Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” and urged that the ICC issue a warrant for his arrest.
Note that, as I said previously, the US, Russia, and Ukraine have never signed or ratified the 1998 Rome Statute that established the ICC. But Ukraine has accepted ICC investigations of crimes committed on its territory; and any state that has signed it can refer Russian violations to the ICC. Forty countries have done so.
Moreover, any country can use its domestic law to prosecute individuals for war crimes even if those crimes are committed outside its territory.
The Rome Statute specifies 10 crimes against humanity:
1. Murder
2. Extermination
3. Enslavement
4. Deportation or forcible transfer of population
5. Imprisonment
6. Torture
7. Sexual violence
8. Persecution against an identifiable group
9. Enforced disappearance of persons
10. The crime of apartheid
Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health may also qualify.
Russia’s military–its political and military leaders, and its troops–has probably committed a couple of those crimes, in particular forced deportation to Russia, imprisonment of Ukraine government personnel, use of civilians as shields, persecution of a population, attacks on civilian facilities (hospitals, schools, theaters, shelters), use of prohibited weapons (cluster munitions and white phosphorus), and endangerment of a nuclear complex. If it were true, the massacre of civilians in Bucha this month could raise the question of genocide. Russia could also be found guilty of committing a war of aggression, a charge that cannot apply to a state that has not accepted the ICC and may therefore require formation of a special tribunal.
All those war crimes, plus apartheid and every single one of the 10 listed above. And yet…
Snce 2017 the mostly Muslim Rohingya people have been persecuted by the Burmese military junta and driven from their homes and lands. Roughly 1.5 million Rohingya are now displaced, about half in refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh and the other half inside Myanmar. The military junta has variously been charged by UN agencies (including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2018) and governments with ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The crimes include mass rape of women, large-scale killings, and arson, carried out not only by army units but also by Buddhist nationalists. In January 2020, the ICJ agreed that Myanmar had breached the Genocide Convention. It ordered the government and military to prevent genocidal violence against its Rohingya minority and preserve evidence of past attacks. The court’s decision is binding, but violence against the Rohingya continues, finally (after much internal debate) leading to the US designation of the repression as a genocide.
In China, the forced internment, displacement, and cultural assimilation of Uyghurs and other Muslims is well documented (for instance, at the Uyghur Tribunal). To my mind, Chinese policies constitute genocide, not merely crimes against humanity, as I read the Genocide Convention of 1948, specifically: “(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
As mentioned above, Russia’s charge of genocide in Ukraine got turned around by Ukraine, enabling the ICJ to investigate and rule on Russian genocide. As a state that has ratified the Genocide Convention, Russia has put itself in the untenable position of being a genocide state. The ICJ’s ruling in March is a temporary one; the investigation continues to make the charge of genocide credible.
The USA are bringing pressure on Russia by promoting international condemnation. In the UN, Russia was able to escape such a resolution in the Security Council by vetoing it, but it could not prevent a similar resolution from passing almost unanimously in the General Assembly.
International law, though lacking enforcement mechanisms, can prove as effective as condemnations.
However, Ii repeat, it is not easy to condemn the atrocities of others when the United States has been guilty of mass violence in many places, from the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to its interventions in Vietnam, South and Central America, and the Middle East over the last 60 or so years.
Leaders of great powers, however, rarely appear before the bar of justice to answer for their crimes, or even have to apologize for them, whether or not their use of force succeeds. Nor does calling out the crimes against humanity of others lessen USA&OTAN’s own guilt. US credibility is undermined by continuing failure to join the ICC, and in the past by defying ICJ rulings just as the Russians are doing now. The Biden administration only now is reportedly debating how, and whether, to support the ICC’s work.
All war crimes deserve exposure and, whenever possible, punishment. All national leaders who decide on or acquiesce in criminal behavior must be called to account.
No appeal to the “national interest” or “national security” should cover for war crimes. The highest purpose of international law is to protect human life and dignity against the power of the state.
pales
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário