Human Rights and War Through Civilian Eyes. Thomas W. Smith
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should be treated as human beings and not as animals”; “God forbid! I think that we’re not on the level of such savages”; and “one of the battles we fought in this war was a battle to stay human.” In Lebanon, respondents said war brought out “animal instincts,” “which meant no respect for human rights” (ICRC 2000:14–15).
In the recent wars in Chechnya, human rights practices became “one of the only ways to recover the dignity Chechens had been so crudely deprived of.” Lawyers in Moscow or London publicized abuses and helped victims petition the courts. But ultimately these were the Chechens’ own claims. Documenting human rights abuses became “an organizing principle around which fears, anger, and disillusionment could coalesce and find new direction in a search for authenticity and truth” (Gilligan 2010:162). During the war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002), violence and displacement shattered many traditional social arrangements based on religion and patrimonial ties. A kind of creole, or localized rendering of universal right, took their place. This was especially true with regard to the just and fair treatment of “strangers,” that is, people who had been displaced from the chiefdom of their birth, such as traders, migrant workers, or refugees.23 In Pakistan, many victims of drone strikes have filed lawsuits against government officials for failing to protect their rights as citizens, including the right not be assassinated by a foreign government (Shah 2014). In Nepal, where civilians were squeezed between extortionist Maoists and heavy-handed government forces, public discontent has been channeled into a regenerative social movement led by a human rights clearinghouse known as the Informal Sector Service Center.
More surprising, human rights norms can transform the identity and interests of combatants. Rights become part of the normative culture in which belligerents think and act. As the reputation, or “audience,” costs of violating rights rise, it becomes clear that military attitudes and practices are not completely dyed in the wool of Realpolitik. As researchers have shown in the case of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines (1997), for example, human rights and other civil society actors can mobilize to reverse basic military practices (Price 1998). Security communities can undergo similar transformations. In recent years, middle powers such as Canada and Australia have emerged as arbiters of humanitarian norms; that identity has infused their foreign and military policies. Although it struggled to square ends and means during its high-flying intervention in Libya or on the ground in Afghanistan, even NATO has arguably reinvented itself as a champion of civilian protections.
Normative and pragmatic motivations can also converge on rights. For much of the Iraq War, e.g., the coalition struggled to achieve military goals and protect civilians. In Afghanistan, however, civilian security was at the core of the mission. “What are we here for?,” Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, the top Marine commander in Afghanistan at the time, shouted to his troops in the run-up to the Marja offensive in February 2010. “The people,” the marines yelled (de Montesquiou and Riechmann 2010). This was not just parade ground zeal, but studied doctrine that protecting Afghan civilians from Taliban tyranny as well as from American bombs was the way to win. The quest to protect civilians and ostracize insurgents arguably led straight down the path of human rights—not just security and subsistence rights, but the civil and political rights of Afghans to order their own affairs. Some Pentagon brass sounded like evangelists for the Rights of Man, framing the war on terror as “a historic debate about the rule of law and human rights,” as a U.S. marine reserve general put it (Serwer 2009).
This isn’t to say that militaries don’t push back. They do, sometimes ferociously. For institutions schooled in humanitarian law, the turn to human rights is not obvious. As we will see in the next chapter, states often cry foul, saying the turn to rights constitutes “lawfare,” or legal overreach. Indeed, violations of human rights can become the norm. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, a number of signatories to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights adopted repressive anti-terror policies or rebranded ongoing counterinsurgencies as more aggressive counter-terror operations (Darcy and Collinson 2009:6; International Commission of Jurists 2009). Still, while human rights may struggle for recognition, no serious discussion ignores them altogether. Even if states can legally derogate from certain of their human rights obligations in wartime, they can’t escape the residual effect of rights. There’s no covering up how people should be treated.
Human Rights and New Media
There’s no covering up the abuses either. The civilian is a cause tailor-made for the media age. During the Vietnam War, U.S. Army combat photographer Ronald Haeberle published his iconic photographs of the My Lai massacre 20 months after the killings. Released over the Pentagon’s objections, the pictures—of women pleading for their lives, and of the contorted bodies of villagers, some belonging to infants, jumbled together on a dirt levee—first appeared in grainy black and white on the front page of Haeberle’s home town newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Today, digital images of atrocities circle the planet in seconds. A surge of visuality and viral outrage has been dubbed the “Neda effect,” after Neda Agha-Soltan, a twenty-six-year-old student who was shot and killed by a pro-government sniper during a June 2009 street protest in Tehran. Several bystanders recorded her dying minute on cell phone cameras. One of the videos focuses on Neda’s face. Her eyes turn from wide-open alarm to vacant as she bleeds out onto the pavement. Within hours, the video was uploaded on YouTube. By the end of the day it had become a “trending topic” on Twitter, and Neda’s story was quickly picked up by other media. Time magazine called it “probably the mostly widely witnessed death in human history” (Mahr 2009). It was one of the sharpest indictments of the ayatollahs in thirty years of Islamic rule. Nicholas Kristof (2009) called the Tehran uprising “the quintessential 21st-century conflict. On one side are government thugs firing bullets. On the other side are young protestors firing ‘tweets.’ ” The incident led to the quip: “Two mullahs gaze out on a crowd of protesters in Tehran. The one says, ‘Arrest the correspondents.’ To which the despondent reply is: ‘But they’re all correspondents!’ ” (Roger Cohen 2009).
New media serve as pathways for new norms. Charli Carpenter (2012) suggests that “the single biggest shift in the sociology of war in the past quarter-century has been not in the way it is fought, but in the relationship between its grim realities and the perceptions of those on the home front … the increasing visibility of ordinary warfare.” This is partly the visual and narrative product of a new kind of “advocacy journalism” or “journalism of attachment” that isn’t shy about taking sides in conflicts (Hammond 2002). But countless nodes of data also provide unprecedented exposure and access (Kaempf 2013). Video (sometimes called the other “air war”) and jpegs are backed up by NGO reports, journalistic accounts, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents, leaked or hacked information, data compiled by body-counters scouring news outlets, and up-to-the-minute local content. During the Iraq War an anonymous Baghdad blogger known as Riverbend (2005) became an internet celebrity as she chronicled the occupation through the eyes of ordinary Iraqis. Anyone could download an “Iraqi death estimator” in order to track, like a national debt clock, the mounting civilian toll.
Images have become almost the sine qua non to distinguish particular atrocities from the general tragedy of war. The Haditha killings came to light only after a videotape of the bodies was circulated by the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, an Iraqi NGO. The notoriety of the case of Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist tortured to death by British soldiers in Basra, was almost guaranteed by the visual narrative that surfaced. The “before” images consisted of a one-minute movie taken on a soldier’s cell phone at the beginning of Mousa’s interrogation. The footage showed Mousa, hooded and handcuffed, being screamed at and forced into painful stress positions by the soldiers. The “after” images consisted of 46 autopsy photographs released at the inquest, including a close-up of the grotesquely bruised face of the dead Iraqi, two plastic tubes protruding from his mouth, apparently from an attempt to resuscitate him. Google “Baha Mousa” and that particular image appears, unbidden, on the results page, even before you click any of the links.
Public opinion can pivot on a seminal photograph. During the Yugoslav wars, sympathy for the Bosnian cause was galvanized almost overnight by Roy Gutman’s Newsday stories