They knew better

I have all of Luís Bustamante's books. First and foremost, because I love to leaf through the photographs themselves. Also because they are suffused with the gentle humanity which I so much admire in their author. And because they are so different. We are used to photographers having a personal stamping ground which they explore in new ways (or not), often with a trademark style. Luís' work is different; though there is always, in everything he does, a balanced blend of personal conscience and political awareness, content and approach are not subordinated to it. The latest, They knew better, is in a way the most overtly political image set of those so far published, but no less humane. It follows the progress of a group of secondary school pupils through the British anti war demonstrations of 2003-2005, but looks also at what is going on around them. I remember the student protests of the 1960s; this was the first time, since then, that the same passionate mass commitment seemed to resurface. It seems to have gone underground again; I was saddened to hear that The Guardian, supportive of the antiwar movement at the time, declined to review this book. Shot through with both commitment and humour, it's a delightful thing to have, to hold, and to return to over and over again just for the pictures. As with all of Luís' books, you'll find the full content available to browse (I recommend using the full screen option) here: http://www.blurb.com/books/4101573-they-knew-better

From the preface to They knew better: Ten years ago, on 15 February 2003 protests against a neo-conservative war on Iraq drew millions of people across the world, the largest mass protest in history. This was the peak of a series of events that started in 2002. By the end of 2002 and early 2003, large numbers of people mobilised against the West's preparation for war. Demonstrations took place in capital cities and at local level. For the first time in decades, people looked beyond consumer choices and started questioning the morality of their leaders' actions. On one day alone, up to 2 million people went into the streets of London and around 20 million mobilised across the world. The demonstrations took wide sections of the British public into the streets. This is the story of a group of school children [...] who took part in demonstrations against war and neoliberalism over the years. They attended the largest London demos as well as provincial ones, ending up with the Make Poverty History demonstration in Edinburgh in July 2005. While originally concerned with recording the group of youngsters as they went from one event to another, the camera inevitably got drawn to other participants, taking advantage of a unique opportunity to explore the rich demographics which make up British society. The debate still goes on but it's lost much of its relevance. We've moved on as T. Blair insisted we should. The world is a different place now, although not necessarily better. Despite the overwhelming use of force and cutting-edge technology, the war on terror hasn't been won but nobody seems to talk about it any more. A guilty silence surrounds the lies that preceded the attack on Iraq, its catastrophic effect and the flagrant abuses of international law and human rights. The perpetrators are still at large and some of them are treated as celebrities. An air of impunity surrounds those who went against the wishes of so many people. The waste of resources in this and other crazy schemes has pushed the West into a situation in which it just cannot go to war at will. The Western economy has been on the brink of collapse and many people have been disenfranchised. There was a sense of freedom and hope that lingered for a time even in the dark moments of preparation for war and then during the unleashing of the world's most devastating war machine on a country that was already on its knees. It became tangible that the world wasn't divided just between the audacious and the don't cares. For a short time humanity was possessed by an energy which had been lost by generations of conformism.

It's that time of year, again

Today, as I predictably record every year, is Hiroshima Day.

(Explanation, if required, for new readers here.)

(An additional poetic link, courtesy of Dr C last year.)

(And if you are masochistic enough to read a selection of previous expansions on the theme, click here instead.)

Joining the tragic dots

As readers of The Growlery have noticed, I have been absent for just a heartbeat under four weeks now. Nothing to worry about; just the result of my having, yet again, overstretched and ended up for a while with too few hours in day or days in the week to keep every plate in the air. Thanks to all those who sent solicitous enquiries ... and apologies for the lateness or absence of responses. Apologies, too, to all those friends whose emails have gone unanswered, achievements unnoticed, birthdays and anniversaries unacknowledged...

Ploughing through the backlog, one of the highlights which I discovered that I had missed was a paper in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, coauthored by my long suffering friend (and fellow Melanie Safka fan) Barbara Claire. Barbara is a member of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis' Medical Center, which consistently does excellent work on causes of and contributory factors in violence related injury. She also manages to be president (also publisher and webmaster) of a historical society, a prime mover in a museum, rescuer of dogs in need, Charles Dickens enthusiast ... Amongst these and many other calls on her time, she finds time to heroically and single handedly sustain our friendship across the decades despite my abysmal failings as a correspondent. (Thank you, Barbara: I don't deserve you, but I'm so very glad you're still there.)

Anyway ... to return to the point: this research paper, which I have just belatedly read.

The paper is both instructive and depressing reading. One of the things which has occupied my excess time over the past month or so has been data collection and analysis for a group of charities dealing with a society thrown into a state of effective civil war. Injuries confronting overstretched (often overwhelmed) medical facilities in such a situation invariably include a very high proportion of what militaryspeak likes to call "collateral damage" casualties. Despite experience with that fact, and back of my mind knowledge that bystanders do get involved in criminal exchanges (the high profile cases of Jessica Crichlow and Thusha Kamaleswaran in London come to mind ), I have never really gotten around to joining up the dots between one context and the other. Reading this paper in its entirety gave me a great deal to think about; but it was a single background paragraph that suddenly made the emotional link.

“Stray bullet shootings contribute to a sense of insecurity and fear in affected communities. Children may be sent to stay with friends or relatives in lower risk neighborhoods after school and may be required to remain indoors after dark (and during the day, unless with an adult). They are taught to avoid crowds and people talking loudly, run when they see weapons, drop to the ground when they hear gunfire while outside, and take cover away from windows if indoors – in the bathtub, if possible. Adults become hypervigilant. They, too, stay indoors, during the day and at night. They may run errands in the morning or on weekends, when gunfire is less common.”

That could have been written about many communities recognised as being in fully blown civil war, including my focus of the last month. It could have been written about Beirut in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Bosnia after the break up of Jugoslavia, or Syria now. It could have been written about Belfast during the worst days of "The Troubles".

But it isn't. It's describing communities within a western liberal democracy assumed to be at peace, where the study nevertheless found that “stray bullet deaths accounted for 45% of all firearm homicides among children aged 10 years or younger”. It's left me very thoughtful.

---

• Garen J Wintemute, Barbara E Claire, et al., "Epidemiology and clinical aspects of stray bullet shootings in the United States" in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, July 2012. 73(1): p. 215-223. [copy of the paper available here]

Big screen le Carré

Seeing a lot of cinema this week. Today, my second large screen viewing of the Tomas Alfredson Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy.

A superb film, in every way. Superbly adapted from the book. Superbly photographed and filmed. Superbly made, superbly involving.

And superbly uncompromising in illustrating the truth, rather than the popular fiction, of its world – on which Asimov delivered what is still the best epithet I know:

“His work consisted largely of what the War Department called "intelligence," the sophisticates, "espionage" and the romanticists, "spy stuff". And, unfortunately, despite the frothy shrillness of the televisors, "intelligence," "espionage," and "spy stuff" are at best a sordid business of routine betrayal and bad faith.”

Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire. 1962, London: Hamilton & Co.

From the land of the free

From the legislature of the US state of Utah:

AGRICULTURAL OPERATION INTERFERENCE 2012 GENERAL SESSION STATE OF UTAH [... ... ...] This bill establishes the crime of agricultural operation interference ... ... ... [and] provides that a person is guilty of agricultural operation interference if the person, without the consent of the owner of the operation, records an image of, or sound from, an agricultural operation while on the property where the agricultural operation is located; and establishes penalties. [... ... ...]

---

• Bill HB187. http://le.utah.gov/~2012/bills/hbillint/hb0187.pdf

Joining up the dismal dots

In view of the recent raised temperature in diplomatic relations between the west (particularly Britain) and Iran, I'm suddenly less certain of my belief that there is no appetite for yet another disastrous war. Not just any old war, either, but one which will geographically connect up the existing errors of arrogant misjudgment in Iraq and Afghanistan into one continuous mess.

In view of which, I've just been back to re-read Paul Rogers' ORG briefing last month, The long-term consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran, well worth reading in full, which concludes in part that...

“... an Israeli attack on Iran would be the start of a protracted conflict that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it. This would be in addition to the extensive instability and unpredictable security consequences for the region and the wider world. ... ... ... the consequences of a military attack on Iran are so serious that ... ... ... war is not an option in responding to the difficult issue of Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

---

• Paul Rogers, The long-term consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran. ORG International Security Briefings, 2011(2011-11).

More acid drops

It seems to be a drug fuelled (textually, that is; not literally unless you count caffeine) week at the Growlery.

The day before yesterday, I wrote in passing of Aldous Huxley's experiments with perception alteration through use of mescaline and other substances. Today, entirely without connection to my last two posts, of which she was unaware, my friend Agnieszka has (in an entirely separate cultural research context) just sent me an email full of information on similar experiments by the artist and philosopher Witkacy. Using everything from coffee to peyote (the principle psychoactive compound in which is mescaline), Witkacy documented his explorations partly in visual art marked with coded notation.

Sword into ploughshares

I'm receiving a number of responses to Thursday's "Sic gloria transit Qaddafi" post. Most of them, as with my "shades of grey" post back in April, have been disagreeing with me in both directions ... and often by the same people, all of whose opinions I deeply respect and to a greater or lesser extent share.

Geoff Powell, for example, writes:

“Once again we rejoice over our equally barbaric behaviour.
Once again we have created mayhem for money.
Now, if the patterns of the past are followed, all the stupid greedy people will fight over the spoils. Aided by us of course - our "private" army in Iraq.
I feel deeply ashamed and aplogise to those we shred.
It does sicken me the way our "leaders" - squeaky shiny clean school boys - are but puppets of the money makers and brain wash the "plebs" who will bleat away in front of the "telly" soaps and shite and will bleat to the drum of stupidity. No wonder I feel somewhat alone in this madness.”

I agree with much of that. The trouble is, there are other considerations.

I'll start by looking back to last April. Can I, hand on heart, having seen the death and destruction which has occurred in the intervening six months, say that it would have been better to let Qaddafi and his regime inflict even greater genocidal carnage on his civilian population, not only during that time but on into the future? Answer: no, can't.

I don't doubt that the motives for intervention were (to put it generously) mixed. But that doesn't alter the fact that if the intervention hadn't happened, the ongoing toll across a range from torture to loss of life would have been even greater ... and continuing still. Neither Britain's David Cameron nor France's Nicolas Sarkozi are figures to whom I can give my political support; but in a situation where there were no right choices, and every possible course of action would be murky and dishonourable, I am forced to confess that I think they made the choice which was least despicable.

What choices they make next is a different matter, for which they must be held to separate account.

This was not analogous to Iraq, which I condemn without reservation. In Libya, popular uprising had already started. It was, perhaps, more analogous to Kosovo: an intervention to protect a population from massacre which I also supported on principle, though the means (air strikes against urban infrastructures in Belgrade rather than against the forces conducting the massacres) I could not.

I am sickened by what has happened since April; but I would be even more sickened if we had turned our backs and let even worse occur.

On, now, to the present, and the manner of Qaddafi's death, on which Geoff says:

“From Robert Fisk in "The Independent" –

" It's an ill wind, etc. Today my thoughts are not with the Gaddafi family but with Bassam and Saniya al-Ghossain, whose daughter Raafat was killed in Libya on 15 April 1986.

She was the victim of President Reagan's insane air raids on Tripoli – in revenge for the killing of an American serviceman in Berlin, by a bomb planted by one of Gaddafi's lunatics. I was present at her funeral in Libya and have got to know her parents very well over the years since then. They are among my best friends in Beirut. I had lunch with them yesterday. And do you know what Saniya said about Gaddafi's violent demise? "I am against these things. I am against all murder and killing."

I feel the same way; the mentally ill ( have I ever met a sane person in my life older than a few days/weeks ? ) should be cared for not brutally treated”

In principle, again, I absolutely agree. I cannot, sitting here in a comfortable first world liberal democracy armchair, condone what seems to have happened.

But ... in practice ... nor can I put my hand on my heart and say that, if I were a Libyan citizen rebel, pumped up by adrenalin, brutalised by combat, astonished to still be alive after a firefight, perhaps the sole survivor of a family killed or worse by Qaddafi's regime, I might not in the heat of the moment have behaved just as badly.

It would have been better if Qaddafi had been arrested, and at least brought to trial if not placed in a place of care for the mentally ill. But, at the same time, it was nobody but he and his supporters who created the situation which led to his end on Thursday. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap”, as Jermiah 23 has it ... or, switching to Matthew 26, “all who take the sword will perish by the sword”. I'm not given to biblical quotations, normally, but those two do describe reality. Alas, they don't stop at description of murderous dictators; they describe what follows the downfall of those murderous dictators, too. Libya has now to turn away from the sword, and sow peace, if it is to move on into a better world than Qaddafi's. The madness which Qaddafi created, and which killed him on a road in Sirte,has to end with his death if Libya is not to become another Zimbabwe. What has happened up to now is, in my opinion though not in Geoff's, down to Qaddafi; what happens next, for good or for ill, is down to those (in Libya and outside it) who have deposed him.

Sic gloria transit Qaddafi

So; it's over.

Ugly, sordid, shameful, unedifying; but over.

Except, of course, that it's not. The people of Libya still have to pick up the pieces and try to assemble some semblance of a life from the unimaginable wreckage.

A line back to my enemy

Chance connections...

Just over a year ago, I enthused over N D Wilson's fantasy novel 100 Cupboards. I then read the sequel, Dandelion fire, and was disappointed; it was well told, but somehow more ordinary than the first novel. Why do fantasy novels so often default to epic battles? I left it until now to read the third and final book, The chestnut king – which was better, though still less than the first. But, to get back to point: in this novel, a frequent image was the child protagonist following a grey fibre (invisible to others) which connected a wound in his cheek to the villainous witch who had caused it.

Now (this minute) I listen to Jesca Hoop (thank you, David) singing Enemy:

Beautiful
alone with my enemy
and share a bitter cup
of poisoning
my countenance
to see his face in mine
and follow every line
back to my enemy

The tenth anniversary of 9/11, as Jim Putnam posted on the day, has just passed. Seven years ago, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, I received an email from an Arab friend (which Jim, always perceptive and thoughtful, disseminated) reminding me that 9/11 itself was part of a violent cycle of tit for tat ... that there is always a “line back to my enemy”.

A shame that while we keep lines of that kind always alive (the child hero of The chestnut king, by the way, used his grey sickness line back to his enemy first to spy upon her and then to kill her ... she used hers in much the same way), we put much less time and effort into establishing lines of communication back to the same enemies.

---

• N D Wilson,
  • 100 cupboards. 2007, New York: Random House. 9780375838828 (pbk.).
  • Dandelion fire. 2009, New York: Random House. 9780375838842.(pbk)
  • The Chestnut King. 2010, New York: Random House. 9780375838866 (pbk)
• Jesca Hoop, Kismet, "Enemy". 2007, New York: Red Int/Red Ink.

9/11 Thoughts

Guest posted by Jim Putnam

All of radio, news magazines and papers, and TV seem to be focusing on the ten year anniversary of 9/11. I’ve listened and read several, and no one has put their thoughts any way near what I have been thinking. So, here I go. It’s obviously true that 9/11 changed us all in many ways. I’m no different. I remember being at work in Raleigh when someone came in and said we needed to get to a TV. I watched and listened for a few minutes, and left the room before the second plane struck, very saddened. I knew that we would never be the same, individually or as a nation. I wasn’t, and am still not, smart enough to know how we would or still will change, but it seemed inevitable that we would. 9/11 stands foremost as a missed, a lost opportunity. I don’t think any of us could see the true opportunity available to stand atop a mountain and shine as a beacon of hope. Anger crowded reason aside, and we reacted, striking at those who hurt us. We struck at anyone who even looked like the image we built of a Muslim enemy. Because a few hundred, perhaps a thousand, Muslim extremists, perpetrated the terrible acts on 9/11, every one of a billion and a half Muslim people became our enemy. And no matter how much we say that they are not, our actions scream louder. We have become that which we feared the most.We have spent billions of dollars on our internal defenses, telling ourselves that we must be strong, and more billions on external war. I understand that we’ve spent well over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A billion here, billion there, and pretty soon we have spent real money, to paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen. We’ve practically bankrupted ourselves with wars and fear. Hindsight is so much better than foresight. It’s not a good idea to play the “What if ..” game, and I don’t intend to do so now. What is, is, and no amount of what if can change it. But, perhaps it is good to consider what we could have done, along with those that we did. I’m not a political scientist, but it seems to me that there were certainly actions not taken that would have made an enormous, world changing difference. Perhaps we could have said to the world that we have been grievously hurt, but that we know we are strong enough as a nation that we don’t feel the need to respond to death with anger but with a firm resolve that we are better than that. Can we build on our strengths rather than try to build walls of isolation based on fear? It’s reasonably clear that there are those who wish us terrible harm. Yes, we must continue to protect ourselves, but isn’t it also clear that security needn’t be the enemy of freedom? To me it is. Very clear. We’ve always been a confident people, and yet we’ve allowed ourselves to relinquish our freedoms for what those who profit from “protecting” us. We’ve allowed our government to tell us that we need to be surrounded by walls, electronic and real. A million or so dollars spent to detect a bomb detection device could be better spent building bridges and infrastructure that make us stronger than any detection gizmo. I don’t have any idea what to do now about Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Somalia, Libya, the Mideast, etc. I read that Afghanistan and Iraq would likely be failed countries two years after we would leave, and therefore we cannot leave. Supposedly, as failed countries they would be a training, or to us a more heinously loaded word, breeding ground for terrorists after we leave. Isn’t there a better way to preclude that than by occupying, fighting, and losing our troops? I believe there must be, and surely someone smarter than me has an idea how. I suppose the base question has to be, “What can be done now, after all these bodies, dollars, and mental, emotional, and physical strength of our country has already been committed?” What can we do NOW? I can’t answer that because I am not at all sure that there is anything that we can do. Nothing, nada, zilch, zero. But so long as words like these can still be written, in despair as well as hope, there may be time to do something, and there may be time for someone who is more capable than I to show us a plan.

Jim Putnam

Tentative optimism and crossed fingers

So ... bar the shouting, the game appears to be up for Colonel Qadaffi and his régime as I start my day.

Now to see what comes next.

I remember, nervously, how joyously my younger selves welcomed the success of rebel forces in (for example) Zimbabwe and Eritrea, and the corresponding fall of odious systems. Neither Zimbabwe nor Eritrea is today a good advertisement for such transitions.

The transitional governing committee in Benghazi looks promising; but its power depends upon an ad hoc coalition of many, very disparate, factions with wildly different agendas. If that alliance now flies apart in the centrifuge of victory, the model for the future may not be Zimbabwe or Eritrea (nor even the more hopeful ones which do exist) but fragmented and desperate Somalia.

My fingers are firmly crossed. As the Arab Awakening proceeds, it's not just Libya that badly needs a good outcome.

A sink that drains goodness

To my annual "Hiroshima Day" post on the 6th, Dr C made a comment which deserved to be a post in its own right. I wish that I had said “Nuclear weapons are a sink that drains goodness out of those who have them.”

He also quoted aptly from Auden's "Epitaph to a tyrant" (1940):

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Nice one, Doc.

Dr C also refers to an editorial in Science last year. To save blog readers the necessity for looking it up, the full text is available here (you will need to sign in to read it – if you don't already have a subscription to the site, just ask: it's free).

Today is Hiroshima Day

If you are new around here, you can find out why I think this worth mentioning in the equivalent post two years ago. There have been plenty of new examples since then, but the principles remain.

If you're not new around here, you will already have recognised my annual marker and moved on.

Connections

“What has to be faced is that there is little international political motivation to effect any fundamental changes in the workings of the world economy, even in the aftermath of an extreme financial crisis in 2008-9, and in the context of current problems in the United States and Western Europe that could escalate rapidly in the coming months. Much of the street protest in the Middle East and North Africa has stemmed indirectly from the anger of the marginalised, and this has now spread to Western Europe. The violent street actions in Greece have attracted much attention, but the sustained, if less reported protests in Spain, may turn out to be much more important. They may even be the start of an awakening in western countries that turns out to be as significant as that in the Arab world.”

---

• Paul Rogers, Awakening and famine in the global context. International Security Monthly Briefing 2011(2011-07).

Nasties under the bed

Just found, in Games and culture...

“This paper explores the characterizations of enemies in military-themed video games, with special attention given to the games Conflict: Desert Storm and America's Army. I demonstrate how the public enemy of America's Army is one not confined to any nationality, ethnicity, or political agenda. This marks a significant departure from games such as Conflict: Desert Storm. I argue that the production of this abstract enemy--what I call the unreal enemy''--is significantly shaped by a biopolitical system that intertwines the military and electronic entertainment industries. This arrangement delocalizes power, distributing it through a network of institutions and subjects. Throughout, I use ethnographic examples that explore how this abstract enemy has been constructed and juxtaposed against more concrete and personal figures, such as the America's Army Real Heroes, individuals upheld as the embodiment of personal achievement in the U.S. Army. I conclude by asserting that the unreal enemy of America's Army is, ultimately, an enemy that is not exclusive to a video game, but one that exists as an anonymous specter, ever present in the militarized American cultural imaginary.”

---

Late addition, 2011-07-19. The following is a comment to this post, by Dr.C, but seems worth promotion to full visibility here.

“I am not sure I completely agree with this. At the present time the generic "enemy" seems to be more of mid-Eastern extract. There are examples where people will refuse to fly in an airplane next to anyone who is swarthy. The irony is, of course, that we invaded "them" and not the opposite.”

---

• Robertson Allen, "The Unreal Enemy of America's Army". in Games and Culture, 2011. 6(1): p. 38-60. DOI 10.1177/1555412010377321
  

Temporary relief

About the reasons for closure of the Murdoch newspaper (sic) News of the World, I have no illusions: they are cynical, designed to limit damage and protect larger News International revenue streams from contamination by continuing revelations of wrongdoing by the rag.

About the meaningfulness of the closure I have no illusions either: I confidently expect a distastefully similar replacement to appear in very short order.

About the closure itself, however, I nevertheless feel at least temporary satisfaction. An open sewer through British public life has, however temporarily, been blocked. Good.

Quote, unquote

Today I sat in an audience and heard a speaker say, amongst many other things over a period of forty minutes, the following:

“Socialisation is a process which delivers benefits to all, even the least fortunate, which nobody in their right mind (least of all I) would give up. Unfortunately, part of the price for those benefits is to convert a significant proportion of a predominantly bright, intelligent, curious population of five year olds into dull, prefrontally lobotomised eighteen year olds. For some, too few, education serves to slow down, arrest, reverse or even prevent that conversion process. For a greater proportion, education is part of that process. For others, possibly the largest (and maybe the saddest) proportion, it has no obvious effect in either direction. We badly need to seek ways of increasing the size of the first group at the expense of the other two.”

The speaker was, ten years ago, a fourteen year old education system reject from a "sink estate", whom I met in an urban outreach scheme made possible by an enlightened and far sighted café owner. Today he is a graduate with a first class honours degree in hand, not much money in the bank, but five years of passionate dedication under his belt to helping a new generation of education system rejects to reconnect with their "bright, intelligent, curious" five year old selves.

Some people make me proud to be human; the speaker, and the café owner who was also in the audience, are two examples.

Still worrying about those shades of grey...

I've received a lot of mail about my declared "shades of grey" ambivalence over outside military intervention in the Libyan civil war.

Geoff Powell comments “not in my name” – an honourable cry, which I joined many others in voicing at the time of the Iraq invasion (though with the caveat that, like Salman Rushdie, I could support action to protect the Kurds and Marsh Arabs from genocide).

Pauline Laybourn pointed out to me the deaths inflicted by the initial cruise missile attack on Libyan government air defenses in preparation for air interdiction. Another moral conscience driven point which I take seriously. This aspect comes down to a variant on (yet again...) the Foot's Trolley dilemma: when forced to make a choice between actively killing a smaller number and thereby saving many, or allowing the much larger number to die by our inaction, which should we do? (I say "a variant on Foot's Trolley" because there is an added dimension here ... the few are aggressors against the many, and have thus made a moral choice of their own.)

Zainab Talu takes the opposite tack, upbraiding me for my "moral squeamishness" in not stating clearly (as Julie Heyward does in another comment) that I am in favour of the intervention.

Well ... I am in favour of the intervention to protect the civilian population from massacre. Elsewhere I was more vocal than here in my impatience over delays in that intervention when it looked like protection might come too late. I thoroughly approve of it on basis. That doesn't, however, mean that I have no worries about it. It's very difficult, in practice, to separate humanitarian actions from broader political agendas. Already, there are signs that the industrialised west is tempted to go beyond protection in search of future advantage.

In his March briefing for the Oxford Research Group, Paul Rogers says:

“Although there was substantial support for initial coalition actions against Gaddafi’s forces, especially when they threatened civilians in Benghazi, the Libyan War is now developing into a much wider operation. It also seems likely that the more it becomes a matter of attempted regime termination by NATO forces, the less support there will be across the Arab world. Furthermore, it has been paralleled by suppression of dissent in countries where autocratic regimes have strong support from those very countries now seeking regime termination in Libya, the most notable example being Bahrain. Above all, NATO has now embarked on its second major out-of-area operation since the end of the Cold War following Afghanistan. What began being seen as a narrow but essential humanitarian military intervention seems unlikely to end there, and this may have consequences right across the region and also for the future of NATO.”

I hope we will finally do the right thing without rushing on into the wrong one; but I do fear that we will, yet again, have failed to learn.

---

• Paul Rogers, Libya, Bahrain and NATO. International Security Monthly Briefing 2011(2011-03).
• Salman Rushdie, A Liberal Argument For Regime Change, in Washington Post. 2002 Washington DC. p. A35.

The problems of peace keeper crime

What to do when a solution becomes a problem? I see no alternative to UN peace keeping operations (or, rather, no alternative which would not increase the sum of misery in the world), but peacekeepers, like any group of military personnel (or bureaucrats, for that matter ... or any group of human beings), are not going to be 100% plaster saints. Peace keeper crimes are a real problem which cannot and must not be ignored, and one with an increasing public profile.

Pursuing a data analytic brief relating to peace keeping effectiveness measures, I've happened across two papers dealing with accountability approaches to the problem. Both are worth reading if you have an interest in this area; I reproduce the abstracts here, and leave it to you to follow the links if you wish.

1: Odello

United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations have been increasingly deployed in many crisis contexts. The practice has been established by the UN to ensure peace and protect victims of different types of armed conflict. Unfortunately, during the past ten years, several cases of serious human rights violations committed by peacekeepers against people who should be protected by them have emerged. The UN has gone through a widespread analysis of the issues involved, from the managerial, administrative and legal points of view. The 2005 Zeid Report has provided the basis for further action within the UN system. Since then, several policy and legal measures have been discussed by relevant UN bodies and organs, and some new developments have taken place. This article offers an account and an analysis of the different steps taken within the UN to face difficult cases of misbehaviour, including human rights violations, which may lead to forms of criminal conduct. It takes into consideration the suggestions provided by the Zeid Report and subsequent UN documents. It focuses on legal developments and discusses the main problems in understanding the legal complexity of this phenomenon. The article includes updated documents and proposals that have been discussed and adopted until the most recent reports in 2009.

2: O'Brien

Personnel involved in United Nations (UN) peace operations have been found to commit misconduct, some of which amounts to criminal conduct. The UN has been working to establish a disciplinary system which will prevent and punish any misconduct by peace operation personnel. However, the UN cannot prosecute criminal perpetrators. Criminal jurisdiction can only be enacted by states and the International Criminal Court (ICC). This article seeks to analyse how Article 28 of the Rome Statute of the ICC can be used to prosecute commanders and superiors of a UN peace operation for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The application of Article 28, however, is not straightforward, due to the complexity of the command, authority and control structure of a peace operation. Examination of both military command and civilian superior responsibility is undertaken, including recognition of the cross-over of the roles of military and civilian commanders and superiors in peace operations. While this article argues that prosecution under command and superior responsibility is essential, the complications that may arise with the application of such responsibility are recognized and directions for the prosecutor offered.

---

1. Marco Odello, "Tackling Criminal Acts in Peacekeeping Operations: The Accountability of Peacekeepers" in Journal of Conflict Security Law, 2010. 15(2): p. 347.
2. O'Brien, M., "The Ascension of Blue Beret Accountability: International Criminal Court Command and Superior Responsibility in Peace Operations" in Journal of Conflict Security Law, 2010. 15(3): p. 533.