Tag: War Crimes
Republika Srpska unifies in defense of genocide, “again and again”
The Serb political parties of the 49% of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) called Republika Srpska (RS) have unified in rejecting the international community’s High Representative’s decision to prohibit denial of genocide and defense of war criminals under the country’s criminal code. This tells you all you need to know about about the RS, which is the product of the 1990s genocidal enterprise conducted principally against the country’s Bosniak population. It is entirely appropriate that the RS would stand up to be counted in defense of genocide and war criminals.
The question is what will the Americans and Europeans do about it? The RS is an essential component of the Dayton peace accords, which divided BiH into two regional entities, the RS and a Bosniak/Croat Federation. The latter controls 51% of the territory. Their active collaboration is required to make the central government (Bosnians call it the “state” government) to function. The Serb political parties are vowing not to participate in the central government.
Boycott is a frequent political tactic throughout the Balkans. Those who use it believe that nothing legitimate can be decided without their participation. This is of course untrue in a liberal democracy, where the majority rules, with respect for minority rights. But still the tactic is used: witness the Republican withdrawal of their pro-Trump members of the Congressional Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrectionary riot. The Republican leader in the House is hoping this will delegitimize the investigation. The Democrats will simply proceed with the committee, including Republicans who did not supported the riot and are willing to serve.
That is what the “state” government should do: proceed without the participation of those who decline to participate. This can be difficult in the BiH context, so it would require some ingenuity on the part of those who wish to do it and the internationals who support them, including the High Representative who issued the initial decision. Nonparticipation should have consequences. Nonparticipation by those who wish to defend genocide and war criminals should have serious consequences.
Why should it be illegal to deny genocide and defend war criminals? In short, because in the Bosnian context it constitutes incitement. Incitement to genocide is illegal under international law (the 1948 Genocide Convention) and also in the US, including by foreigners present here. An arrest or two would go a long way to making the point. The situation is presumably comparable in the countries of the European Union. For those who may wonder: Bosnia and Herzegovina is a state party of the Genocide Convention, as a consequence of its succession from Yugoslavia.
Odds are, nothing like what I am suggesting will happen. Instead, there will be some sort of fudged “solution” that concedes ever more ground to genocide deniers and inciters. I have been around too long not to know what that means. “Never again” can turn easily into “again and again.”
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Accountability now
During Syria’s conflict, the Assad regime has continued committing many war crimes. Although de-escalation zones were established to mitigate conflict violence, the number of displaced Syrians increased. On February 5, Arab Center Washington DC hosted a panel discussion and a book review on the topic of Accountability in Syria: Achieving Transitional Justice in a Postconflict Society. The discussion involved three speakers: Radwan Ziadeh, a senior fellow for the Arab Center Washington DC, Mai El-Sadany, the legal and judicial director at the Tahrir Institute, and Mohammad Alaa Ghanem, a Syrian academic and pro-democracy campaigner.
War crimes
Ziadeh noted that because justice and accountability are left out in the Geneva and Astana talks, he wrote the book Accountability in Syria to call for attention to war atrocities and raise the issue of accountability. He listed five crimes that the Assad regime has committed in the last eight years.
- Use of air force: Opposition areas have been exposed to heavy, systematic, widespread, and indiscriminate bombing. While only 1% of victims killed by barrel bombs are opposition but 99% of victims are civilians. Other governments have failed to prevent the Syrian government from utilizing barrel bombs.
- Use of prohibited weapons: The Assad regime has utilized prohibited chemical weapons 37 times.
- Siege: Half a million of Syrians live besieged by Assad’s “surrender or starve” strategy.
- Torture and sectarian crimes: The regime carried out systematic torture at its secret prisons.
- Forced displacement: Displacement aims to remove people who have been disloyal. Forced displacement induces both the demographic change and the flight of Syrian refugees.
Forced displacement
Ghanem says that ceasefires, such as the Idlib and Daraa de-escalation zones, are a prelude to liquidation. Political analysts in Washington misunderstood ceasefires, which they thought would constitute a win-win solution that could empower local communities. Instead, ceasefires emboldened and benefited Assad’s regime, which used them to induce demographic change. He presented three purposes of ceasefires:
- Ceasefires have helped the Assad regime to conquer more territories by setting up a 1-2 year de-escalation period to relinquish oppositions’ heavy weapons and evacuate fighters.
- Ceasefires serve to relieve shortage of Assad’s manpower by freeing up regime resources to focus on other priority areas.
- Ceasefires provide an illusion of political process by designating areas for reconstruction while permitting the regime to commit systematic sectarian cleansing.
Remedies
El-Sadany argues that it’s time for justice now. Three tools are available for accountability:
- Documentation: Civil society, journalists, and lawyers should act together to preserve history and contribute to truth. For example, the New York Times utilizes open source investigation.
- UN Mechanisms: The United Nations has disappointed Syrians because of UN Security Council vetoes and the failure to make a referral to International Criminal Court (ICC). However, the UN Human Rights Council’s commissions of inquiry serves accountability by fact-finding and investigating crimes and perpetrators. In addition, the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) was created to prepare files and assist the investigation and prosecution of crimes.
- Prosecution outside Syria: Syria is not a party to the Rome Statute and the UNSC has failed to refer its crimes to the ICC. But prosecution in other states is still possible.
El-Sadany proposes that the international community needs to amend, strengthen, and improve accountability mechanisms. Advocates should lobby their governments for more funding for accountability efforts and improved human rights laws. Lawyers should translate materials, especially on universal jurisdiction, into Arabic to reach Syrian victims and civil society.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
See it and weep
I “enjoyed” last night a showing at National Geographic of The Cave, a film about an underground hospital in Eastern Ghouta, outside Damascus, during the Assad regime’s five-year siege. Here is the precis from National Geographic:
Oscar nominee Feras Fayyad (“Last Men in Aleppo”) delivers an unflinching story of the Syrian war with his powerful new documentary, The Cave. For besieged civilians, hope and safety lie underground inside the subterranean hospital known as the Cave, where pediatrician and managing physician Dr. Amani Ballour and her colleagues Samaher and Dr. Alaa have claimed their right to work as equals alongside their male counterparts, doing their jobs in a way that would be unthinkable in the oppressively patriarchal culture that exists above. Following the women as they contend with daily bombardments, chronic supply shortages and the ever-present threat of chemical attacks, The Cave paints a stirring portrait of courage, resilience and female solidarity.
The documentary is excruciating. In cinema verite’ style it conveys a highly personalized account not just of the cruelty of the bombing but also of the tribulations of the hospital personnel and their patients.
This is not just war. It is war as crime. Every day brings bombardment of civilian targets, including this hospital (as well as many others). The Russian and Syrian aircraft, missile launchers, and chemical bombs pummel the area’s remaining inhabitants incessantly. Women and children are frequent victims.
The doctors and other personnel work with primitive means and what we can only assume is great skill. They are devoted beyond reason to staying and doing what they can to help. They break occasionally to watch classical music and dance performances on a cell phone, but that, food preparation, and a birthday celebration are the only apparent distractions. Otherwise they examine, advise, inject, operate, and bandage as if their own lives depend on their medical efforts, not those of anonymous neighbors.
The toll this takes is all too evident. These are ordinary people making superhuman efforts. Each has her or his own story, told in enough detail for us to understand that the pain is more than individual. Some have families who await them in safer places. All are choosing to stay and sacrifice to protect people they don’t know from the ravages of a regime they despise.
The gender dimension of the story is clear: the 30-year-old director of the underground hospital is a woman, a pediatrician. She seems a sensitive manager, but one with gigantic responsibilities entirely uncharacteristic of a woman in the patriarchal society in which she grew up. The director uses one of the patients, whom we might describe as a male chauvinist pig, to voice condescending disdain for her and her role. Most of the time though she is portrayed as doing her job in a way that the men surrounding her accept and enjoy. War dispenses with gender distinctions that make no sense given the challenges.
In the end, Eastern Ghouta falls after a chlorine attack. Hospital personnel evacuate. I was delighted to learn in the discussion afterwards that the hospital director survived, married, and now runs a charity devoted to female health care workers and female leaders in conflict zones. Even the tragedy of Syria produces good as well as evil. Feras Fayyad, whose previous film on the White Helmet rescue workers in Syria was nominated for an Oscar, merits at least that much honor again for this superb documentary.
See it and weep.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Stevenson’s army, November 16
-WSJ has an article urging a US industrial policy which I find persuasive.
– The Nuclear Threat Initiative has a background paper on Russia’s new weaponry.
– TNSR has a roundtable on reforming the war powers processes.
– Bloomberg reviews the changing Trump trade policies.
– Meanwhile, Trump pardoned war criminals, contrary to DOD recommendations.
– South Korea rejects intelligence sharing with Japan.
And this from WSJ:
U.S. MILITARY reduces press access to combat troops
in Afghanistan. War correspondents accompanied Marines into the country
in 2001, and for years the Pentagon facilitated front-line visits.
After Special Forces and Rangers took the combat lead in 2014, embeds
became rarer.
In the past year, the number of embeds with the 13,000 U.S. troops remaining in the country has declined sharply. The message from Kabul HQ: “We do attempt to make every opportunity available to cover other events—such as the important train, advise and assist mission the Coalition of 40 nations is conducting.”
This year, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul has largely ceased speaking to the international media in the Afghan capital. Commanders and diplomats fear U.S. news coverage could lead President Trump to tweet a strategic reversal or further upend peace talks. They glimpsed that possibility with Trump’s surprise withdrawal from Syria.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Accountability should not wait
On September 27, the Middle East Institute and the Pro-Justice jointly hosted a panel to launch the new book, Blacklist: Violations Committed by the Most Prominent Syrian Regime Figures and How to Bring Them to Justice. Blacklist identifies and provides detailed information on nearly 100 individuals accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria over the past eight years. The book sheds light on the crimes themselves and outlines potential political and judicial avenues available to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The panel consisted of Anne Barnard, a New York Times journalist who has extensively covered the conflict in Syria, Wael Sawah, the president and director of Pro-Justice and former executive director of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, and Charles Lister, a senior fellow and director of the Countering Terrorism and Extremism program at MEI. The event was moderated by Joyce Karam, who is the Washington correspondent for The National and adjunct professor at George Washington University.
The Syrian conflict is approaching its ninth year and increasingly becoming forgotten by the international community. Lister gave a broad overview of wartime consequences to remind the panel and audience of the ongoing atrocity. Syria is a disastrous humanitarian crisis with roughly 500,000 deaths since 2011. The conflict has an extensive history of war crimes, most of which are perpetuated by the central government of Syria. The Assad regime is responsible for 89% of civilian deaths, 99% of torture deaths, 89% of arbitrary arrests, and 85% of forced displacements. Barnard noted that even before the conflict, there were high rates of detention in the elaborate prison system established throughout the Assad dynasty, but as the conflict escalated from 2011 onward, the situation worsened. The UN has labeled the prisons in Syria as exterminate conditions with a system of sadistic torture and high levels of disease.
Sawah continued by saying that these facts and figures are important to note because without accountability and justice, there will never be a lasting peace in Syria. He stated that Blacklist is an important publication to act as an open guide to identify the perpetuators and assist legal professionals in creating a foundational narrative to work towards holding those responsible of crimes against humanity. Barnard agreed and said that the industrial prison system has fostered the ability of the regime to commit these crimes. 100,000 Syrians have not been located after their time detained. It is important to work towards identifying the fates of these people to take initial steps towards reaching justice through administering accountability.
Lister discussed how legal accountability does not seem likely for Assad and high-ranking members of the regime because the general perception is that the Syrian conflict has been won by the regime. He notes that it is far from over, but in the short-term sanctions on these individuals can restrict their international travel and ability to act as legitimate statesmen. Doing so will isolate the regime and not allow it to operate with impunity.
Sawah talked about the pivotal role Hezbollah, Russia, and Iran have played in enabling the Assad regime to survive throughout the civil war. The regime would have collapsed by 2013 without their support. They must be held accountable for their support of Assad and their own war crimes. Lister echoed this by mentioning the Russian precision strikes on civilian hospitals in opposition-held regions. He suggested that the US needs to begin an investigation of Russian war crimes to develop a portfolio of reports to name and shame their heinous actions against Syrian civilians.
The panel agreed that continued investigations such as Blacklist are needed to reach a stable peace in the future. Without making accountability for injustices, opposition groups will flourish, and civilians will continue to disdain the regime.
RSS - Posts
