Protecting civilians from explosive violence: time for states to raise their voices

Last week the United Nations Secretary-General submitted his annual report to the Security Council on the protection of civilians in armed conflict. The language of the report represents something of a break-though of a sort that's pleasing to see from the editorial perspective of this blog. Hopefully now states will also begin to make their voices heard in supporting the Protection of Civilians report's content both in the Security Council chamber and in elsewhere.

The Secretary-General's report observed that the "choice of weapons is critical in minimizing and reducing the impacts of hostilities on civilians". While this might sound obvious, it's worth noting that heavy weapons such as artillery and rockets were nevertheless used in populated areas in conflicts in recent months such as Gaza and in Sri Lanka, something the report also commented on in its paragraph 36:

"As demonstrated by this year’s hostilities in Sri Lanka and Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the use in densely populated environments of explosive weapons that have so-called “area effect” inevitably has an indiscriminate and severe humanitarian impact. First, in terms of the risk to civilians caught in the blast radius or killed or injured by damaged and collapsed buildings. Secondly, in terms of damage to infrastructure vital to the wellbeing of the civilian population, such as water and sanitation systems."

These are certainly issues that individually some Security Council members are taking very seriously. Only today, for instance, the New York Times reported that the new American military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, would sharply restrict the use of airstrikes there in an effort to reduce the civilian deaths he had concluded were undermining the American-led mission. In today's warfare, in which the lines between military objectives and civilian concentrations are usually blurred, those on the cutting edge of military thought are increasingly aware that the use of explosive violence in such areas can be counter-productive, as well as morally and legally unacceptable.

The Secretary-General further noted in last week's report that the Security Council "has a critical role in promoting systematic compliance with the law" including condemning violations "without exceptions", threatening and if necessary applying targeted measures against the leadership of parties violating their obligations to "respect" civilians and keeping track of violations and mandating commissions of inquiry "where concerns exist regarding serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law".

The British NGO Landmine Action issued a media release responding to the Secretary General's report, which

"welcomes the clear expression of concern from the UN Secretary-General regarding the humanitarian problems caused by explosive weapons. Landmine Action urges States, international organisations and civil society to further document the civilian harm caused by explosive weapons, work to prevent the use of explosive weapons in populated areas and support all efforts to minimise the post-conflict harm that explosive weapons cause."

One of the key points underlined by multilateral processes representing 'disarmament as humanitarian action' such as the Ottawa process to prohibit anti-personnel mines and the Oslo process resulting in the Convention on Cluster Munitions is that the collection and analysis of empirical evidence is crucial in changing policy makers' minds and re-framing issues in ways that make them more tractable. Nevertheless, weapons-specific processes like these require a huge amount of effort that is difficult to sustain throughout treaty implementation, let alone repeat for other weapons.

And, a risk of weapon-specific multilateral processes in general is that governments opposed to stigmatising the use of explosive violence in populated areas will succeed in breaking up and subdividing issues around use of explosive weapons (as Richard Moyes at Landmine Action has pointed out) that muddy the waters, or denude relevant multilateral processes of real value.

There is a need for the international community to begin looking beyond just the weapon specific to highlight explosive weapons as a broad category of concern at time of use and post-conflict. This is something a few of us have already begun trying to do (Landmine Action's media release mentioned, for instance, Disarmament Insight's work at facilitating such discussion).

In light of the Protection of Civilians report, the Security Council could be one place for states and international organisations to take the new discourse forward. But it also needs to be a broader debate. The international community should do more to ensure civilians are protected, and that will necessarily entail some fresh thinking.

John Borrie

Image downloaded from Wikipedia: "A Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) weapon is prepared for testing at the Eglin Air Force Armament Center on March 11, 2003. The MOAB is a precision-guided munition weighing 21,500 pounds and will be dropped from a C-130 Hercules aircraft for the test. It will be the largest non-nuclear conventional weapon in existence."

Body counting

The Atlantic Monthly online is running an interesting story in its April issue looking at the on-going - and increasingly nasty - debate over the grim question of how many Iraqis have died as a result of the March 2003 invasion.

Estimates of these deaths vary widely, from around 80,000 to as high as a million, according to the article. Estimates out there include a 2006 study in the Lancet, a British medical journal , research by the World Health organisation published in the New England Journal of Medicine and (not mentioned in the article) on-going documentation work by an independent research group based in the UK, Iraq Body Count.

Debate about methodologies and numbers is all useful in the name of thorough research (although it seems to have become personally rather bitter over Iraq). But whichever estimate proves to be nearest the mark, we should always remember the shattered human lives and the misery and insecurity behind the statistics - otherwise such concerns take on a tinge of ghoulishness. Even the lowest Iraq estimates demonstrate the civilian casualties are considerable, as they are in a number of other conflicts around the world not paid so much attention.

In addition, Megan McCardle, the Atlantic Monthly article's author, puts an interesting spin on the debate by introducing the notion of "anchoring effects" - well known thanks to cognitive scientists like Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky, whose work on mental biases we've discussed before on this blog. Their empirical research, and that of others, has shown that human beings tend to fixate on numbers we've heard, even if they're arbitrary or wrong. These effects persist, even when the number has been discredited.

"We anchor most strongly on the first number we hear, particularly when it is shocking and precise—like, say, 601,027 violent deaths in Iraq. And even when such a number is presented only as a central estimate in a wide range of statistical possibilities (as the Lancet study’s figure was), we tend to ignore the range, focusing instead on the lovely, hard number in the middle. Human beings are terrible at dealing with uncertainty, and besides, headlines seldom highlight margins of error.

When information supports positions we already hold, we of course tend to accept it less critically; when the opposite is true, we can be quite good at shutting the information out. “Motivated reasoning” is a mighty force, as anyone who has argued politics in a bar at 2 a.m. can attest. Scientists have observed the process, using a functional MRI machine to peer into the brain while it processes political statements, and their report is unsurprising. When we are assessing neutral statements, activity is concentrated in the areas that control higher reasoning. But when we process statements with political valence, suddenly our emotional cortices light up as well. Indeed, some research indicates that the emotion precedes, and governs, the higher cognition—that logic is, literally, an afterthought.

But cognitive bias is not limited to partisans; we all anchor on the numbers we hear. The Lancet article’s central estimate exerts a gravitational pull on even its harshest critics, who seem to be mentally benchmarking their estimates by how much they differ from that 601,027. Others who are not motivated to disprove that number tend to orbit even closer."

Collecting data on conflict is difficult and, by necessity, rather imprecise, which is why in the domain of statistics methodology is so important. Relative margins of error can have huge impacts on data, as could the consequences of embedding spurious "facts" in the minds of the public and of policy-makers. Something we all have to bear in mind.


John Borrie

Picture by mattsmith569 retrieved from Flickr.com.

Satellites of Love?

"Satellite's gone up to the sky
Things like that drive me out of my mind
I watched it for a little while
I like to watch things on TV
Satellite of love ..."

In our third volume of research, Andreas Persbo and Michael Crowley from the London-based Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC) looked at the roles Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) play in the monitoring and verification of international arms control and disarmament agreements. They observed that:

"one area of NGO activity that has not been adequately studied has been the crucial role played by the NGO community in monitoring, and in some cases verifying, international agreements. Indeed, non-governmental monitoring, sometimes referred to as "citizens' reporting", "inspection by the people" or "civil society monitoring", has become an important element in the international community's evaluation of how effectively states implement their treaty obligations on a wide range of issues."

Once upon a time, technologies like satellite imaging were restricted to a few governments, and during the Cold War were initially harnessed for surveillance of the adversary's territory and activities. Eventually, satellites emerged as important elements of arms control verification. And, over time, the cost of space satellite imaging technology has come down and been increasingly commercialized for a huge range of uses - to the point where an ordinary schmo like me can look up Google Earth (which almost seamlessly blends satellite and aerial imagery) on the internet for free to see if I can see my home (I can).

Unsurprisingly, some civil society actors have woken up to the fact that such technologies could be helpful in trying to hold governments accountable for their actions, for instance for human rights violations or failure to protect civilians in conflict. In June of this year, for instance, Amnesty International launched a website in partnership with the University of California at Berkeley to keep watch over imperiled villages in the Darfur region of Sudan, and to post images online in order to enlist help to prevent violence. These images show, for instance, before and after photographs of scores of apparently destroyed settlements.

Earlier this month, the journal Science reported that its publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), had released similar satellite images of Myanmar, showing that dozens of villages in the eastern part of the country had been uprooted or razed to the ground. Science displayed images of a village near Kewy Kee in east Myanmar photographed by a commercial satellite on 5 May 2004, which had disappeared in an image taken on 23 February 2007.

It remains to be seen how effective such images will be in motivating the international community to step in to prevent such violence. But commercial satellite imagery is certainly very powerful in documenting abuses. And, it can provide plausible alternative interpretations to those put forward by government officials. Occasionally, it might even embarrass the intelligence community. One organization doing good work in this regard is the Federation of American Scientists, which has used openly available satellite imagery - some of it from Google - to pinpoint the launch, for instance, of new Chinese nuclear ballistic missile submarines.

A few weeks ago I was invited to a conference in Italy to talk about developments on the horizon in the life sciences with potential for hostile misuse. To illustrate the difference in scale between nuclear and biological facilities and challenges for verification, I showed my audience some satellite images of the Bushehr and Natanz nuclear facilities in Iran, alongside pictures of the Palo Alto district in Silicon Valley, California. An Iranian official in the audience afterward demanded to know where I had obtained these "sensitive" pictures. I told him I'd obtained them from Google Earth. I kid you not: "Who is this Google Earth?" he demanded to know.

It's serendipitous that Lou Reed's song, Satellite of Love (quoted above) came from an album entitled 'Transformer'. Not everyone's heard of Lou Reed yet, or is going to be a fan once they've listened to what he has to offer. Sounds like the same may be true of my pal, Google Earth - but hear from him and his ilk they will.


John Borrie


References

"Myanmar's Secret History Exposed in Satellite Images", Science (vol. 318), 5 October 2007.

"Satellites to Watch for Darfur Violence", Associated Press, 6 June 2007.

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum+Google Earth website on 'Crisis in Darfur'.

Andreas Persbo & Michael Crowley, "The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in the monitoring and verification of international arms control and disarmament agreements".

Photo of the beginning of the burning of Um Zelfa village courtesy of Brian Steidle, Alert/Sudan.

Getting a Grip on Arms Transfers

Recently, and within the space of a couple of weeks, I travelled to Japan and to Canada to participate in conferences devoted to finding ways to prevent small arms and light weapons from being transferred into regions, countries and hands where they could be used to commit human rights violations, war crimes or genocide; or to topple a country or region into armed conflict. Although the deliberations took place at opposite ends of the world, the conclusions were remarkably similar - States need to take much more seriously their existing obligations under international law to transfer arms responsibly.

Every State, of course, has the right to defend itself. The UN Charter recognises this. For most States, this necessitates acquiring arms, either through production or import. The arms trade is a legitimate activity that allows States to meet their security needs. But when a State turns its weapons against its own people, or in aggression against its neighbours, the suppliers of those weapons must share the blame if such actions were part of a pattern of past abuses or were otherwise foreseeable.

But why, you might ask, is it necessary to do anything at all about this if States already have obligations under international law that require them not to transfer arms to recipients that are likely to misuse them? It is true that States have many obligations under international human rights- and humanitarian law, as well as under arms embargoes agreed by the UN Security Council, to transfer arms in a responsible manner. In an ideal world, this would be enough. But in reality, existing obligations are often flouted (see the April 17 New York Times article on arms transfers to Darfur for one example), are open to interpretation, and are so scattered throughout the aquis of international law that they are often overlooked.

Two initiatives aim to address this by collecting relevant obligations into one place and arranging them in such a way that they provide clear and comprehensive guidance to States when making decisions on arms transfers. The first, known as the Transfer Controls Initiative (TCI), focuses specifically on small arms and light weapons. The TCI aims to elaborate on States' undertakings in the UN Programme of Action on the illict trade in small arms and light weapons in order to develop a set of common guidelines that all States could refer to when deciding whether or not to authorise transfers of small arms and light weapons. This initiative has made good progress in recent years and could potentially make a valuable contribution to regulating the small arms trade in the short- to medium-term.

The second initiative is at once more ambitious and more difficult. It aims to negotiate a new legally-binding treaty to regulate the transfer of all conventional weapons, from armalites to aircraft-carriers. This so-called Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) initiative is still in its preliminary stages, although it has the support of a large majority of UN Member States. Actual negotiations are unlikely to start before 2009, but if they do begin, and are successful, an ATT has the potential, in the medium- to long-term, to provde by far the strongest framework yet for regulating arms transfers.

Properly regulating the legitimate arms trade is the best way to minimise the risk that weapons will be misused to intimidate, displace or kill civilians; or to spark regional conflicts. From Japan to Canada and many places in between, both north and south, this message is gaining traction.


Patrick Mc Carthy


References

Tokyo Workshop on Small Arms and Light Weapons, 12-13 March 2007. For more information, click here.

Helsinki Process Roundtable on Small Arms and Light Weapons, 25-27 March 2007. http://www.helsinkiprocess.fi

"Sudan Defying Security Council on Darfur, U.N. Says," New York Times, 17 April 2007, available here.

Photo:
Mural detail from a Shinto shrine in Kyoto (photo: Patrick Mc Carthy)

Trying to account for mass participation in the Rwandan genocide

In a period of about 100 days, from 6 April to mid-July 1994, experts have estimated that civilian militias and members of the national army dominated by the Hutu ethnic group killed some 500’000 to 800’000 Tutsi (another group) and moderate Hutu in the African country of Rwanda. While these figures are striking indicators of the most rapidly occurring genocide of the 20th century, also deeply disturbing was the high level of participation in the killing, estimated at between 200’000 and 500’000 people.

While the Rwandan genocide will forever remain morally unfathomable, how can we begin to account for such a large-scale level of participation in the killing, in the hope that unambiguous danger signs might be identified to prevent it happening again?

In a book published in 2006 (see reference below), Ravi Bhavnani posed the question: did killing Tutsi become the norm in the Hutu ethnic group? Bhavnani argued that the level of participation in the Rwandan genocide can be explained by the “emergence of a violence-promoting norm among the Hutu community”.

In his chapter, Bhavnani noted that studies pointing to explanations such as structural factors or to Rwanda’s culture – described as one “of fear” or “of deep conformity” – fail to explain the emergence of such large-scale violent behaviour. Likewise, the significance of the death of Rwandan President Habyarimana in a plane crash near Kigali airport on 6 April as the major catalyst for the genocide is problematic.

Starting from the idea that norms are emergent properties of social systems, Bhavnani used complexity theory and simulation by agent-based modeling (ABM) to try to develop an explanation for the emergence of a violence-promoting norm among Hutu people.

The existence of a norm depends upon complex patterns of interactions between the individuals forming a society. At the time of the genocide, Rwanda, Bhavnani argued, was a “densely populated, heterogeneous society” with frequent connections and intermarriage between the two major ethnic groups – Hutu and Tutsi – leading to a complex pattern of interactions. Bhavnani added:

“When a population mixes randomly, extremists eventually have the opportunity to interact with moderates, and observe and punish their behaviour.”

In other words, in Rwanda it was about killing or being killed.

By focusing on microlevel dynamics, Bhavnani hoped this ABM could show how local interactions could bring about massive Hutu participation in the killing. Of course, however intriguing, Bhavani’s work on its own is unlikely to settle the debate over what really caused the genocide. But it serves to underline the worth of studying collective violence by using bottom-up approaches and of appreciating the complex nature of many human social interactions or, as Bhavnani put it, that:

“The causes of conflict constitute partial explanations at best, and are inextricably linked to the process by which conflict unfolds.”

Aurélia Merçay


Reference

See chapter 6: Agent-Based Models in the Study of Ethnic Norms and violence, by R. Bhavnani in Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm, N.E. Harrison & J.N. Rosenau, 2006, SUNY series in Global Politic, State University of New York Press.